Everyman by Philip Roth
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Book Reviews of Everyman
Book Review: The Ravages of Time
Summary: 4 Stars
With 'Everyman', Roth holds up the mirror and takes a good lasting, painful look at not just the body of his protagonist as it begins to fail him, but keynote points in the life that precedes his ultimate death.I found it profoundly affecting and more than a bit unsettling, perhaps because so much of the physical demise of this character and his surrounding peers is similar to what I've watched my own parents going through. I found much of the slim novel terribly depressing, but extremely accurate.Book Review: Depressing but a small masterpiece
Summary: 4 Stars
Very depressing book especially for someone older to read. I don't agree that religion is a fraud. I personally find hope, strength,and courage by a strong belief in God (perhaps even an afterlife). Roth is a master craftsman and this book is great work of art. Makes me want to seek and know God all the more. Deeds of charity and acts of lovingkindness can help one to cope with the inevitable. How? Try it.Book Review: new jersey
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this book because it had references to the city where I was born. I wasn't disappointed.Book Review: Diluting the Canon
Summary: 3 Stars
Maybe the title of this review is too harsh. Many other reviewers have called Roth's 27th novel a masterpiece, a highly ambitious undertaking, and a book that is at once familiar and new (Publisher's Weekly and The Washington Post's Book World). But I cannot help but think this book, for all its ambition, is nothing more than a failed experiment, one that ultimately brings Roth no closer to his dreams of finally winning the one major prize that has still eluded him: The Nobel Prize.
The book, in many ways, is at least a structural success. We start at the funeral of our protagonist where three of the mourners express their sadness: the man's daughter, an ex-wife, and older brother. From there, Roth takes us back in time to various points in the deceased's life, including his childhood spent working with his brother in his father's jewelry and watch store, a term in the Navy, multiple failed marriages and affairs, and most importantly, his many visits to the hospital. Roth refers to his protagonist as an `average man,' in the hopes of somehow capturing a regular, maybe even normal, American existence. Yet Roth's novel ultimately focuses to the point of obsession on the frailty of the human body. The protagonist's life is framed by his many hospital visits, from a hernia operation to multiple procedures meant to clear out blocked arteries and other issues that arise throughout his body. At one point, the character has seven straight years with a major procedure. With the constant referencing and focus spent on detailing a person's mortality, one can't help but wonder if this is something Roth himself fears. I often find that at some point every writer has to produce something about human frailty and the weakness of the human body. Is this Roth's attempt? Like Woolf, is he haunted by some end fast approaching? Or is this merely a book about a man and the slow process of dying. The title seems to provide both an answer and a great problem that goes unreconciled: if this is the story of an everyman, why the long diatribes focusing only on health and vigor. Are we meant to judge and eventually pity this man who cheated and failed in most aspects of his life? If this were a novel driven solely by plot and characterization, none of these things would be at issue. Yet here, where we are almost put on the spot to judge the outcome of this man's life, set up masterfully by the funeral opening, we have to look at least on a more than superficial level at the judgments one inevitably comes to when you read a book by Roth, someone whose novels have always carried a certain political and moral charge to them. What we're left with after weighing the thin book is not much of anything, really.
If this book was meant to somehow make Roth's case for the Nobel that much stronger, I am sad to say that it has failed. The structure, the strongest, yet also the most flawed aspect of the novel, never allows us to care about the protagonist and what has happened to him, meaning that at no point do we ever reflect on some of the obvious fears we all share concerning our own mortality, something the novel seems to drive at from the very beginning. The ending seems too compact, a little too neat and tidy in that we are finally brought back to the operation that ends his life. There's something too artificial in it and it really detracts from many of the weighty issues Roth sounds off on.
I will finish by saying that this is simply a book to read if you have nothing more pressing or urgent calling to you from the long list of books sitting on your bookshelf.
Book Review: Momento Borey
Summary: 3 Stars
Forgive the puny title of this review - you see, I just have to do something whimsical to cheer myself up after reading this unrelentingly depressing book. Roth probably intends for his short work to be a brisk bucket of ice-water into the face of any cherished illusions about mortality one desperately clutch at, and the spare design of the book's cover permits no (visual) ebullience, either; a fair warning, indeed, of the very dismal (and, after a while, rather dull) subject-matter within.
So, what can Everyman offer, then, for the discearning reader? Well, the writing is pretty good, which is what one would expect from an author of Roth's pedigree. Moreover, one can take a certain, grim comfort in Roth's (and Everyman's) unsparingly brutal, unflinchingly honest look at illness, old-age and death. Roth seems to believe that, by doing so, a certain dignity is bequeathed to an otherwise ultimately puzzling, and increasingly ever more painful existence. In fact, in reading some of the positive reviews of this work, what stands out is how very appreciative many people are of Roth's stark honesty, giving voice, as it were, to those who have no recourse (anymore) but to face up to life's biggest challenge, the big (D)eath.
But let's face, too much of this sort of thing will, just as often, make a reader want to reach for the pills or gun even sooner than otherwise. After enduring Everyman, the only antidote to fight such bleakness is a complete immersion into the very thing that Everyman would, undoubtedly shun (and shudder over much more than his own demise), namely: psychic mediums, with their promises of a glorious afterlife for us all. For this reader, however, a rosey glow of angel wings is merely the opposite extreme of Roth's vampire-like ability to suck out any and all hope one may hold of existence beyond the grave. Accordingly, I am taking the middle path: I will hope for an afterlife of some sort, prepare, as best I can, for None (by-the-by, can Any of us Truly comprehend non-existence, including Roth? I think not), and, in the Mean time, divert myself via heaps of celebrity trivia, globs of junk food and mindless infotainment. Well, it's the American way, after all, until it all blinks out (hey, who are those people at the foot of my hospital bed? My god, it looks like the young Lucille Ball...and...Helen Reddy! Can that be right? Are They leading me onto this pretty rainbow bridge? Well, Gee. Who'da thunk it???...)