Everyman by Philip Roth
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Book Reviews of Everyman
Book Review: Melancholy truths
Summary: 5 Stars
At one hundred eighty-two pages, Philip Roth's twenty-seventh book may appear diminutive and can, in fact, be read quickly---if one devours books rather than reflects on their content. Such an attitude would be difficult to sustain in the face of the sobering subject, in this case, the downhill slide towards death that is the inevitable end of the book's title. (Thankfully, Roth hasn't fallen prey to the politically correct mandate against gender specific nouns that might have resulted in dreadful constructions like "Everyman/ Woman," "Every Person" or "Every Being.") The fact that "Everyman" is also the title of a fifteenth century morality tract doesn't hurt either. It adds an additional dollop of timelessness.
Moving backwards from the opening cemetery scene where the unnamed protagonist is attended by those with whom he once shared significant portions of his life, the story recounts the various ways in which he managed to fail each of these people. It is an awareness that overtakes him only as he ages, begins to suffer from deteriorating health, finds himself alone, and loses interest even in the lifelong dream of artistic expression. He was not an evil man, or even a cruel one, simply a creature who chose to swim parallel to the shore, compromising with the rip tides of life. If he was guilty of anything, it was of failing to consider his immediate circumstances and whether he should aggressively attempt to impose his own will on them. Should he have tried to explain his mistakes to the two sons from his first marriage who remain lost to him? Why did he allow middle-aged passion to sweep him to where he destroyed his most supportive relationship? His benign ineptness is further magnified by the shadow of an older, apparently flawless brother who swoops in to assist with amazing frequency. That this brother is a creature blessed with unflagging health, kindness and financial success, only serves to embitter the central character.
While many of the painful realizations Roth's character reaches relate to his particular misconduct, the point must be taken that waiting until the end of life to evaluate one's performance---or even whether one has developed suitable standards by which to live---hardly leaves time for adjustment or improvement. Perhaps that is the saddest lesson of all, the realization that wrongs can no longer be undone, that there is no time left to become someone we ourselves consider admirable.
There is a distinct terror in remembering the empowerment of being young, strong and involved with the pleasures of life, while simultaneously recognizing that such feelings have become the speck on a remote horizon. Roth skillfully encapsulates this in phrases such as, "Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre" and "...his longing for the last great outburst of everything" and "Was himself now nothing...but a motionless cipher awaiting the blessing of an eradication that was absolute." He is a master at recreating the imagery and subtle flavoring of a specific segment of society (hardworking, Jewish middle-class tradesman) at a specific time (1930s and on) and in a specific locale (New Jersey). He does it as well in this slim volume as he did on the broad canvas of "American Pastoral."
Obviously, this is not a book for children, although that depends on what age one believes marks the end of childhood. If high school sits at the gates of adulthood, then those years might be the ideal age at which to consider some of the many things that can go wrong. Of course, at sixteen or seventeen we are convinced that mortality only happens to others or in video games, so the effect is bound to be far less than profound. If nothing else, juniors and seniors would appreciate its lean profile. That it becomes a weighty tome by way of its succinctness will likely elude them. That is unfortunate. The rest of us are becoming aware all too quickly of the inescapable melancholy truths listed in "Everyman."
Book Review: Brilliant 21st-century Secular Morality Tale
Summary: 5 Stars
"Everyman" by Phillip Roth is a 21st-century secular morality tale. It deals with one fairly average and unexceptional man's journey toward death. It begins and ends with the unnamed protagonist's funeral. In between, through sentimental recollections, bitter regrets, and flailing against the unfairness of life, we bear witness to this man's life. Overall, Everyman's existence is not a pretty picture. But Roth's telling is so magnificent, so utterly gorgeous and brilliant, that the reader is in awe throughout. The book is sparse. Every word counts. The reading is surprisingly fast and satisfying despite the gravity of the subject matter.
Everyman begins life as a sickly young boy, obsessed with health and death. Much of the book is taken up with details of his medical history. Many of his recollections concern illnesses and deaths among his colleagues and friends. We soon find out that Roth's Everyman is a very self-centered man with an apparent, in-born, less-than-average capacity for empathy. He is completely estranged from his two sons, who are unable to forgive him for divorcing their mother, his first wife. But his daughter still adores him. Adultery and lack of control over his sexual appetite for young women are central to the current of his life. He marries three times; learns the jewelry trade from his father; does a stint in the Navy; goes into advertising; and finally becomes a successful New York advertising executive. But overall, his tale is full of betrayal, lies, regrets, hopelessness, loss, and suffering. At the age of about 70--after 20 years of multiple major operations--he ends up in an affluent retirement community. It is located near the same seaside resort where he spent summers as a young boy. At first he looks forward to it--something like a prolonged vacation. But he quickly finds himself surrounded by the ill and dying, alone, bored, angry at the degeneration of his body, and ultimately disappointed in everything.
In an interview, Roth admits that he purposefully gave the book the same title as the 16th-century morality play, and that he avidly reread and studied that medieval text during the writing of this book. In Roth's secular, 21st-century reinterpretation, his message is clear: in the balance of life, we are who we are; we have done what we have done; we can regret our bad deeds, but we should not apologize for them--to do so would be to deny the reality of our human condition; in the end, all that is important is family and friends--after death, there is nothingness.
In the medieval text, the all-consuming importance of a true confession and the sacrament of forgiveness occur midway and are pivotal to the message. Perhaps to strengthen his secular moral reinterpretation, Roth places Everyman's strongest moral defenses--this one concerning his two sons' abandonment of him--at the center of this modern text. Here Roth writes: "He had done what he did the way that he did it, as they did what they did the way they did it. Was their steadfast posture of unforgivingness any more forgivable, or any less harmful in its effect?" (p. 94)
In Roth's worldview, we are who we are; we do what we must; we can regret, but it is not necessary to ask forgiveness. The human condition contains both good and bad; we just have to accept ourselves as we are, and others as they are, and go about the business of living the best we can.
I read this book because I drive a 300-mile roundtrip every week to an affluent retirement community like the one described in this book to visit my aging parents (96 and 89). Although my own parents are still fully independent and happily together (after 73 years of marriage), I have met many other residents who often make me wonder what their experience in that place must be.
This was my first Roth. I was in awe over the power of his writing, and I will definitely read more. I recommend this book highly.
Book Review: A great book unsparingly realistic and heartbreaking
Summary: 5 Stars
Philip Roth's book is among the most decorated of recent works in American fiction, and it deserves to be. Its short length defines it as less a novel than a novella--which makes Roth's achievement all the more brilliant in capsulizing within limited space the entire life story, emotions, and regrets of a man facing old age and death.
Fundamentally, the book is an account and a meditation on death and the (often) preceding illness and physical decay which will afflict us all--it is a lament for the human condition. Thus, the title "Everyman," since all must die.
The book is admirably concise in laying out the protagonist's life in an unboring a-chronological way, and it stabs to the heart in its oh so right interpretations of the thoughts and worries that accompany his key crises of life as he (WE) age and face total annihilation through mortality (which, if like the protagonist you are not religious, is in fact annihilation).
I wonder whether people under 40 years of age--with the flush of youth and the subconscious assumption of immortality--can truly appreciate this book. But those over 40--and particularly over 50 (yes, I include myself in that group)--will find in it an uncanny understanding of our deepest feelings about death and regret for chances lost in life. Mr. Roth himself is well into old age by now--and I doubt that even a talent such as his could have written this book until now.
That said, the protagonist of "Everyman" is not, in fact, everyman. He is over-sexed (typical of Roth characters) and a man who finds himself desperately alone at the end of life largely because of a tragic mistake in life--succumbing to sexual affairs to salve a mid-life crisis, affairs which cost him a loving and decent wife who could have accompanied his old age.
So Everyman's fate is not every person's fate. BUT, enough of us make enough mistakes in life which cast shadows and haunt our old age, and I think that is Roth's real point. One way or another, through infidelity or other mistakes, we "screw things up" and pay for it in the end. Some people advance towards and experience death in a gentle way. But many, maybe most, of us encounter it with pain and regret and often loneliness. That is what Roth brilliantly portrays in this book.
His depth of sympathy and of understanding of human emotion is astounding. He "gets us" time and time again. His use of language is terse but drives home to the gut in nearly every passage of the book. His work deserves every award it won or may win.
But beware: this is a heart-rending cry of protest against mortality and its unhappy anterooms. And you, no less than I, are going to go there someday and thus cannot but be affected by the book. It is a great book..but not for the squeamish.
Book Review: A slim, grim masterpiece...
Summary: 5 Stars
*Everyman* is on the shortlist of the most depressing books I've ever read. It's also one of the most beautiful. Unflinchingly, brutally honest. Courageous. It took a lot of fortitude to write this book--it takes just as much to read it.
The novel opens at a funeral. From the first sentence you understand: the "hero" of the book is dead. The remainder of the novel is the story of his life. It's a life of no great consequence or distinction, a life such as so many others have lived and will live, the life of "everyman": he's born, he makes painful mistakes, he takes pleasure in what he can, he suffers the inevitable loss of it all--his health, his loved ones, the past and any future--and then he dies. Oblivion, forever.
We are born to live, but die instead, Roth grimly observes. There's nothing--to the clear-eyed realist who refuses to believe in babytalk and fairytales, ie. religion, to sugarcoat the truth: we are nothing but this body--and it doesn't last long. We start to lose this precious flesh even while living in it--age and disease eventually taking a stranglehold and robbing us even as we watch. There's nothing we can do about it. Nowhere to turn for justice. "There's no re-making reality," Roth writes. Though we often close our eyes in our despair and try.
*Everyman* is written with a spare elegance that lends it the music and power of myth. Think Hemingway's *The Old Man and the Sea* or Tolstoy's *The Death of Ivan Illych.* It's a book that might have been written by a modern-day Ecclesiastes--maybe it was. Roth says it plain, if in different words: "All is vanity and yet it's better to be a living dog than a dead lion." Fact is, we're not even given the choice. We all die either way, most of us dogs.
Roth doesn't offer any easy answers in *Everyman.* He doesn't offer any hard answers either. There is no answer--and that dread dead silence you hear is the answer no one wants to hear coming back from the great beyond. We fill it with babble, Bibles, and babies. Roth, to his credit, let's that silence speak for itself.
Whatever the eventual fate of Roth's other work, this small book will remain a classic and it will be a classic so long as human beings are born and die. And perchance they ever find a cure for death, the lucky immortals will still be reading *Everyman* the way we read *Uncle Tom's Cabin,* a remembrance of an abolished and unthinkable horror no one can believe could ever have been endured.
Book Review: A book you'll be thinking about long after you finish it!
Summary: 5 Stars
Heard the taped version of EVERYMAN by Philip Roth, a short but
powerful novel that begins with the protagonist's death . . . it then
shifts backward through his life, which included three marriages,
an advertising career and numerous health problems.
Naturally, it being a book by Roth, there's some sex thrown
in for good measure.
I kept thinking that much of what I was hearing was Roth
describing his life (or at least large chunks of it), but then again,
I could see bits and pieces of my life too . . . as it has been and,
alas, as it will probably be.
The writing, in many parts, nearly took my breath away . . . it is that
powerful . . . for example, there was this one passage describing
a yearning for the strength and joy of youth:
Nothing could extinguish the vitality of that boy whose slender little
torpedo of an unscathed body once rode the big Atlantic waves from
a hundred yards out in the wild ocean all the way in to shore. Oh, the
abandon of it, and the smell of the salt water and the scorching sun!
Daylight, he thought, penetrating everywhere, day after summer day
of that daylight blazing off a living sea, an optical treasure so vast
and valuable that he could have been peering through the jeweler's
loupe engraved with his father's initials at the perfect, priceless planet
itself--at his home, the billion-, the trillion-, the quadrillion-carat
planet Earth!
It is now several days since I finished EVERYMAN, but I still find
myself thinking about it--always a good sign that a book moved me.
This one certainly did.
George Guidall ably handled the narration . . . listening, it felt
almost as if Roth was speaking directly to me.