Editors Reads Verdict
Roth's saddest and most compressed novel — named for the medieval morality play in which Everyman faces Death alone. The body's failures are rendered with clinical precision that is also grief.
What We Loved
- The compression is absolute — at 182 pages, nothing is wasted
- The medical detail is precise and devastating — Roth renders the body's progressive failure without sentimentality
- The ending is one of the most powerful in Roth's bibliography
Minor Drawbacks
- The novel offers little consolation — readers looking for redemption will not find it
- Some find it a lesser achievement than the American Trilogy because it is more personal and less socially expansive
Key Takeaways
- → The body is not the self, but when the body begins to fail it becomes the self's dominant fact
- → Regret is the specific form that memory takes in old age — the alternative lives unlived become more vivid as the actual life contracts
- → Death is not a moral event: it does not sort the deserving from the undeserving. Everybody dies alone.
| Author | Philip Roth |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
| Pages | 182 |
| Published | May 2, 2006 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Roth readers who want his later, more compact work, and readers interested in how fiction handles the approach of death without consolation. |
The Burial
The novel opens at a grave. The unnamed man is being buried. His ex-wives are there, his children (some of whom do not speak), his brother Howie who has had everything he wanted: the health, the money, the long marriage. The mourners speak. Then the novel goes back.
What follows is a series of medical events — the first surgery at nine, the appendix, the heart operations, the stents — punctuated by the life between them. The marriages (three). The affairs. The years as an advertising art director. The retirement to a New Jersey shore town where he teaches painting to old people and walks on the beach and waits for his body to kill him.
Everyman
Roth took the title and the premise from the 15th-century morality play in which the allegorical figure Everyman is summoned by Death and finds that none of his attributes — Good Deeds, Fellowship, Kindred — will accompany him on the journey. Everyman faces Death alone.
Roth’s Everyman faces it alone too. The question the novel asks — whether a life of pleasure and work and human connection was enough, whether it justified the hurt given to others — is not answered. The last paragraph, which describes an elderly gravedigger at work in the New Jersey ground, is as good as anything Roth wrote.
The novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2007.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Everyman" about?
An unnamed man is buried. The novel is the story of his life told backward from that grave — marriages, affairs, children, his body's progressive failures, the operations that punctuate his later years. Roth's meditation on mortality is his most compressed and perhaps most personal later novel.
Who should read "Everyman"?
Roth readers who want his later, more compact work, and readers interested in how fiction handles the approach of death without consolation.
What are the key takeaways from "Everyman"?
The body is not the self, but when the body begins to fail it becomes the self's dominant fact Regret is the specific form that memory takes in old age — the alternative lives unlived become more vivid as the actual life contracts Death is not a moral event: it does not sort the deserving from the undeserving. Everybody dies alone.
Is "Everyman" worth reading?
Roth's saddest and most compressed novel — named for the medieval morality play in which Everyman faces Death alone. The body's failures are rendered with clinical precision that is also grief.
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