Everyman

Reading through many of the already posted reviews, it seems many people missed something in reading this book. It is in fact a book about living and ceasing to live. Yet there is something far deeper in these pages. The temptations of sexuality, battles of personal health and mortality, and maintaining relationships collide in this book as in life. The unnamed main character, like many of us, struggles to appreciate the beauty of the journey. The main character has endured failed marriages and enviable affairs resulting in a strained relationship with his own children. His relationship with with his daughter Nancy is pivotal to the plot. Only toward the end of his journey does he see a genuine need for atonement. Flashing between the past and present, Roth exhibits the character's health issues in childhood, adulthood, and in present old age. Told in non-chronological fashion that alternates between the past and present, the placement of the passages is skillful. It serves to demonstrate the growing sense of fear and regret that comes to a head at the book's conclusion. As a fan of Roth, I find myself either loving or strongly disliking his individual books. This book is certainly among his best and deserves the recognition that it has received.

First the caveats. This is not a play; it is a novel. This is not an allegory; it is a realistic narrative. This is not about everyman; it is about a specific individual. Everyman is not a secularized Jewish New Yorker with a brother worth $50,000,000, three wives, and the opportunity to have hot sex with a Danish model. The life of the unnamed protagonist does, however, link with common aspects of human experience in striking and sometimes profound ways. There are three major themes. The first is the exploration of the Scottish proverb that (put more decorously) an aroused male member has no conscience. When it follows its impulses the results are often ultimately unpleasant. The second, more important theme, is the illustration of Yeats's notion that as we age we increasingly feel as if our hearts--sick with desire--are "fastened to a dying animal." The book is a meditation on death, but more particularly a meditation upon the ways in which our bodies (some of our bodies; the protagonist's brother is healthy as well as rich) fail and betray us. The third is the importance of family and friends, but particularly family--a nexus of relationships that we see as important when we stop being selfish and begin to be wise. The story is beautifully written, beautifully plotted, beautifully realized. It is grim but neither hollow nor depressing, erotic but not lurid. Most of all it is rich in details and descriptions. Highly recommended.

I just finished this book and, being a middle aged Baby Boomer, I was absolutely astounded at the feelings it roused in me. I know that my response will not be the same as that of a young person reading it and my advice to the younger reader would be to save this book and read it again in 20 years. The "everyman" of the title is the unnamed protagonist whose funeral opens the novel. We are taken back over his life to see his youthful gusto slowly erode into middle age beset by health problems he neither anticipated nor believed he deserved. His errors in judgment are tempered by his guilt and also by the knowledge that he probably would not have done anything differently if he had the chance. A study on what it feels like to still be young enough to want to enjoy life and yet to remember what it was like to be much more energetic and alive (I particularly related to the passages where he reminisced about swimming in the ocean, something I used to enjoy), this small book is provocative and thought-provoking. It states so well the angst of the middle-aged person who knows his life is now more than half over, and yet who doesn't want to think about that. Every day his body tells him, though, and he can't deny the truths of a harsh reality. The protagonist battles his own demons and compares his life to that of his hard working parents and his caring, and highly successful brother. His behaviour has alienated him from his ex-wives and most of his children, and although he seems to seek solitude, he yearns for intimacy. I was deeply moved by this book. It is so well written; I admire a writer who can pack so much emotion into so few words, and Philip Roth has done that very well.

Let's get this out of the way: EVERYMAN is not Moby Dick, Things Fall Apart or Crime and Punishment. It does not compare with Roth's own recent streak of novels that engage the historical and the personal. It is on its own out there, on a very different scale with a different fight. It is brave, accessible and eloquently crafted, as is the Roth way. It is the ripened vision that only aging can render and for that it stands alone not only in the author's repertoire but across contemporary fiction. I haven't read everything, that's for sure, but I've read a considerable amount and I can't remember another novelist saying, this is how we die when we have made it to the end, when we've outlived the possibilities of dying in wars or at the hands of others, or otherwise tragically young. Maybe someone else has, Roth just makes it seem new and original. It's not that Roth's protagonist lives to very old age or outlived his generation. The book begins with his funeral, he having died during heart surgery in his early 70's. It then retreats back to his boyhood and moves forward, to look at an ordinary, flawed life through the lens of mortality. Many of the choices he makes, that propel him from one stage in life to the next, are either in defiance of or informed by the knowledge that not only can we die, we will. Some complain that because the book is short, Roth was skimming. Uh-uh. There's a message in that medium. One well-known critic called his protagonist a "hollow man." Again, I beg to disagree: he is ordinary and recognizable for a reason and the information he serves up is interesting, provocative.

This book turned out to be more than a good read for me; it was an experience. I need to start this review by saying I really like Philip Roth. Books like American Pastoral and The Human Stain and many of his older books were terrific reads for me. This is a very short book. Normally Philip Roth can go on and on, (you know how often you can turn the page in a Roth book and see that the next two pages are all one paragraph....) but he rarely does that here. This book is very spare. Some reviews say too much so, but I disagree. Summary, no spoilers: The story first starts off with the protagonists funeral, and then goes back in time with him narrating the story of his life. We hear about his fear of death, and his intense frustration with his increasing health problems. In essence, the human condition. And the narrator is a man with no religious convictions to soften the blow. I have read some criticism that the character is not fully developed, but I disagree. Our narrator, (unnamed), tells us bits and pieces of his life, from different times in his life. It is a thumbnail sketch of an existence. There is just enough detail so that it feels real, and we can identify with his childhood exuberance, and his middle-age wanderlust. Roth manages to touch on so many universal truths, and for me, there were many times I found myself nodding my head in understanding. Yes, the book is short, very short, but perhaps because of this, and because of Roth's skill as a writer, when I turned the last page I felt like I had read something much longer. It did not need one more word. Highly recommended. It's the work of a great artist again sharing his observations about life in a way that makes us empathize.