Product Description

A magnificent new novel from the Pulitzer-prize winning author, whose most recent novel, The Plot Against America, was hailed as 'the first fictional masterpiece of the twenty-first century'

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16048 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Carl Wilkinson, Observer

'capable of altering the way you see the world'

Andrew Holgate, The Sunday Times
Pick of the week - 'one ends the novel exhilarated, buoyed up by
its boldness and defiance'

Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
'so compelling, so important'

Customer Reviews

A meditation on life, senescence and death
Paul Roth's Everyman is a meditation on life, senescence and death. One long unremitting litany of pain and regret, the story begins at the funeral of a successful commercial artist and recounts his life as he grapples with an early health scare and then is constantly reminded of his mortality while simultaneously messing up three marriages, isolating his offspring, and hurting his gentle brother out of spite and jealousy over his good health. Eventually, he finds that he has become the kind of person that he did not want to be. Yes, it lingers on the relentless decay of the human body and on the psychological frame shifts required to cope with ill-health and aging, but this is Philip Roth and the precision and sharpness of his writing turns this short novel into a moving analysis of how the mistakes we make in life can demonstrate the danger of living for the moment. A dark and fatalistic book it is probably best avoided if you are an aging man in poor health.

Accomplished and steeped in truth
I read this right after reading the latest Martin Amis novel, and it was like a fresh of breath air after emerging from a dusty and dimly-lit library. Compared with Amis, Philip Roth is beautifully to-the-point and straightforward in the way he explains things and illuminates his characters.

I also read this shortly after attending a couple of very significant funerals, I therefore found Roth's ruminations on death both comforting and bleak - a lovely combination in literature, I think.

Recommended. (It's also fairly short, which is a plus if you read slowly and/or don't have much time but want to read something decent, as is generally the case with me.)

Superb
This was an enormously enjoyable read. From the opening paragraph, you know you are in the hands of a master. He title refers to death, the fate that must meet everyman and is borrowed from a 15th century play of the same name. The book is a meditation on mortality and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that the mortal coil is heir to - to totally butcher Hamlet's soliloquys. Roth shows himself as a literary stylist at the height of his powers as he tackles "the Big Adios". The narrative in this short, page turner of a book carries you headlong to the grave -where it must inevitably end.