Everyman
Philip Roth, 2006
Random House
182 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307277718
Summary
PEN/Faulkner Award
Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality.
The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes.
A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be.
The terrain of this powerful novel—Roth's twenty-seventh book and the fifth to be published in the twenty-first century—is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.
Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century allegorical play, a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 19, 1933
• Where—Newark, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Bucknell University; M.A., University of
Chicago
• Awards—the most awarded US writer—see below
• Currently—lives in Connecticut
After many years of teaching comparative literature—mostly at the University of Pennsylvania—Philip Roth retired from teaching as Distinguished Professor of Literature at Hunter College in 1992. Until 1989, he was general editor of the Penguin book series Writers from the Other Europe, which he inaugurated in 1974 and which introduced the work of Bruno Schultz and Milan Kundera to an American audience.
His lengthy interviews with foreign authors—among them Primo Levi, Ivan Klima, and Aharon Appelfeld—have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review. Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933 and has lived in Rome, London, Chicago, and New York. He now resides in Connecticut. (From the publisher.)
More
Philip Roth's long and celebrated career has been something of a thorn in the side of the writer. As it is for so many, fame has been the proverbial double-edged sword, bringing his trenchant tragic-comedies to a wide audience, but also making him a prisoner of expectations and perceptions. Still, since 1959, Roth has forged along, crafting gorgeous variations of the Great American Novel and producing, in addition, an autobiography (The Facts) and a non-fictional account of his father's death (Patrimony: A True Story).
Roth's novels have been oft characterized as "Jewish literature," a stifling distinction that irks Roth to no end. Having grown up in a Jewish household in a lower-middle-class sub-section of Newark, New Jersey, he is incessantly being asked where his seemingly autobiographical characters end and the author begins, another irritant for Roth. He approaches interviewers with an unsettling combination of stoicism, defensiveness, and black wit, qualities that are reflected in his work. For such a high-profile writer, Roth remains enigmatic, seeming to have laid his life out plainly in his writing, but refusing to specify who the real Philip Roth is.
Roth's debut Goodbye, Columbus instantly established him as a significant writer. This National Book Award winner was a curious compendium of a novella that explored class conflict and romantic relationships and five short stories. Here, fully formed in Roth's first outing, was his signature wit, his unflinching insightfulness, and his uncanny ability to satirize his character's situations while also presenting them with humanity. The only missing element of his early work was the outrageousness he would not begin to cultivate until his third full-length novel Portnoy's Complaint—an unquestionably daring and funny post-sexual revolution comedy that tipped Roth over the line from critically acclaimed writer to literary celebrity.
Even as Roth's personal relationships and his relationship to writing were severely shaken following the success of Portnoy's Complaint, he continued publishing outrageous novels in the vein of his commercial breakthrough. There was Our Gang, a parodic attack on the Nixon administration, and The Breast, a truly bizarre take on Kafka's Metamorphosis, and My Life as a Man, the pivotal novel that introduced Roth's literary alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman.
Zuckerman would soon be the subject of his very own series, which followed the writer's journey from aspiring young artist with lofty goals to a bestselling author, constantly bombarded by idiotic questions, to a man whose most important relationships have all but crumbled in the wake of his success. The Zuckerman Trilogy (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Counterlife) directly parallels Roth's career and unfolds with aching poignancy and unforgiving humor.
Zuckerman would later reemerge in another trilogy, although this time he would largely be relegated to the role of narrator. Roth's American Trilogy (I Married a Communist, the PEN/Faulkner Award winning The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America), shifts the focus to key moments in the history of late-20th–century American history.
In Everyman (2006), Roth reaches further back into history. Taking its name from a line of 15th-century English allegorical plays, Everyman is classic Roth—funny, tragic, and above all else, human. It is also yet another in a seemingly unbreakable line of critical favorites, praised by Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and The Library Journal.
In 2007's highly anticipated Exit Ghost, Roth returned Nathan Zuckerman to his native Manhattan for one final adventure, thus bringing to a rueful, satisfying conclusion one of the most acclaimed literary series of our day. While this may (or may not) be Zuckerman's swan song, it seems unlikely that we have seen the last Philip Roth. Long may he roar. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Literary Awards
Philip Roth is one of the most celebrated living American writers. Two of his works of fiction have won the National Book Award (Goodbye, Columbus; Sabbath's Theater); two others were finalists. Two have won National Book Critics Circle awards (Patrimony; Counterlife); again, another two were finalists. He has also won three PEN/Faulkner Awards (Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman) and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral. In 2001, The Human Stain was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2002, he was awarded the National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists still at work, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy. In May 2006, he was given the PEN/Nabokov Award, and in 2007 the first PEN/Saul Bellow Award — both for lifetime achievement.
The May 21, 2006 issue of the New York Times Book Review announced the results of a letter that was sent to what the publication described as "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Of the 22 books cited, six of Roth's novels were selected: American Pastoral, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. The accompanying essay, written by critic A.O. Scott, stated, "If we had asked for the single best writer of fiction of the past 25 years, [Roth] would have won." ("More" and "Awards" from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
If descriptive amplitude went out with the nineteenth century, Philip Roth, who strides the whole time and territory of the word, has resuscitated it—in description revved with the power of narrative itself.
New York Times Book Review
Our most accomplished novelist.... [With Everyman] personal tenderness has reached a new intensity.
New Yorker Magazine
“[Roth is] as essential to the experience of modern America–its literature, history, and moral reckoning–as any writer on the planet.
Boston Globe
Let's use a noun I've never used before: masterpiece.
Atlantic Monthly
Through consummate art, Roth elevates the links that bind his protagonist to us, the readers who judge his life. From a distance, Everyman looks like a shaggy dog story—a long, quotidian story whose meaning resides in its final pointlessness. Up close, though, it is a parable that captures, as few works of fiction have, the pathos of Being, as it's manifested even in the favored precincts of affluent America.
Norman Rush - Washington Post
What is it about Philip Roth? He has published 27 books, almost all of which deal with the same topics—Jewishness, Americanness, sex, aging, family—and yet each is simultaneously familiar and new. His latest novel is a slim but dense volume about a sickly boy who grows up obsessed with his and everybody else's health, and eventually dies in his 70s, just as he always said he would. (I'm not giving anything away here; the story begins with the hero's funeral.) It might remind you of the old joke about the hypochondriac who ordered his tombstone to read: "I told you I was sick."
And yet, despite its coy title, the book is both universal and very, very specific, and Roth watchers will not be able to stop themselves from comparing the hero to Roth himself. (In most of his books, whether written in the third person or the first, a main character is a tortured Jewish guy from Newark-like Roth.) The unnamed hero here is a thrice-married adman, a father and a philanderer, a 70-something who spends his last days lamenting his lost prowess (physical and sexual), envying his healthy and beloved older brother, and refusing to apologize for his many years of bad behavior, although he palpably regrets them. Surely some wiseacre critic will note that he is Portnoy all grown up, an amalgamation of all the womanizing, sex- and death-obsessed characters Roth has written about (and been?) throughout his career.
But to obsess about the parallels between author and character is to miss the point: like all of Roth's works, even the lesser ones, this is an artful yet surprisingly readable treatise on...well, on being human and struggling and aging at the beginning of the new century. It also borrows devices from his previous works—there's a sequence about a gravedigger that's reminiscent of the glove-making passages in American Pastoral, and many observations will remind careful readers of both Patrimony and The Dying Animal—and through it all, there's that Rothian voice: pained, angry, arrogant and deeply, wryly funny. Nothing escapes him, not even his own self-seriousness. "Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work," he has his adman-turned-art-teacher opine about an annoying student. Obviously, Roth himself is a professional.
Publishers Weekly
Much like John Updike's Harry Angstrom, the protagonist of Roth's new novel confronts the loneliness of growing old, despair over the loss of his sexual vitality, and anguish over how he has shattered the lives of those who love him. Using a splendidly unique narrative technique, our hero recounts his boyhood vigor (he swam for miles every day off the Jersey Shore), energetic sexual life (three marriages and countless affairs), affection for his daughter, and visceral shock at his body's rapid decay. Once he reaches middle age, his body begins to break down, and soon his life is measured out in yearly cuts and scrapes of the surgeon's knife. After one operation, he moves from Manhattan to a retirement community near the Jersey Shore, where his sense of alienation grows ever stronger. As the palpable pain of loneliness creeps into his bones, Roth's Everyman muses over his role in bringing this loss on himself ("he had completed the decomposition of his original family; decomposing families was his specialty") and poignantly declares that "old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre." This brilliant little morality play on the ways that our bodies dictate the paths our lives take is vintage Roth; essential for every fiction collection. —Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA.
Library Journal
Roth follows his recent succession of critically acclaimed novels (e.g., American Pastoral, 1997; The Plot Against America, 2004) with a compact meditation on mortality, which partially echoes his 1991 memoir-novel Patrimony. Inspired by the medieval English allegorical drama whose title it shares, it's the story of an erring, death-haunted representative man (never named). It begins as his departed spirit observes his own funeral, then weaves backward and forward throughout his past life, envisioned as inevitable progression from virile youth through morally compromised adulthood and middle age, into "his sixties when his health began giving way and his body seemed threatened all the time," and beyond—into the beyond. This Everyman grows up in Elizabeth, N.J., the son of a benevolent and prosperous jeweler, further blessed by a doting mother and a tirelessly kind and supportive "perfect" older brother. He enjoys a successful career as an advertising agency's art director, but fails at marriage (losing three wives, as he pursues countless other women), and is almost as disastrous a parent, suffering permanent estrangement from the two sons of his first marriage, but achieving a sustaining relationship with daughter (from his second marriage) Nancy, whose patient filial devotion interestingly parallels that of the medieval Everyman's character Good Deeds, who accompanies the title character into the realm of Death. This risky novel is significantly marred by redundancy and discursiveness (especially by a surfeit of rhetorical questions), but energized by vivid writing, palpable emotional intensity and several wrenching scenes—for example, encounters in the painting class that he (an amateur artist) organizes for other seniors at his retirement village; a blistering exchange with second wife Phoebe, long aware of his womanizing; a wonderful conversation with a black gravedigger at the cemetery where his parents are buried, where he'll soon be buried. A rich exploration of the epiphany that awaits us all—that "life's most disturbing intensity is death."
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What is the relevance of the title to the story that is told in the novel?
2. What do you learn about the man being buried from the opening scene at the cemetery? What would the book be like if this scene came—as it might if the story were told chronologically—at the end rather than at the beginning?
3. Describe precisely his predicament with his sons, Lonny and Randy.
4. Describe precisely his relationship with his daughter, Nancy. What is the nature of their predicament?
5. Why does he refuse the consolations of religion despite his sharing in the universal terror of death?
6. What is his relationship with the dead?
a. With his dead parents
b. With Millicent Kramer
c. With those of his family who are long dead
7. Why does he take up painting, and why does he abandon it? Why does he begin teaching painting classes to his fellow retirees, and why does he stop teaching?
8. Exactly what transpires between the young jogger and the hero? Trace the shifting development of their encounter line by line.
9. While visiting his parents’ graves, the protagonist imagines his father telling him: “Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left” [p. 171]. Why does he imagine his father giving this order? Why doesn’t he imagine his mother giving it? Why does he imagine his mother saying “Good. You lived” [p. 171]. What does she mean? How do you explain the difference between what is voiced by the father and what is voiced by the mother?
10. Some readers have said that they wept when they finished reading the book. Did you weep? If so, why? If not, how do you understand the response of those who did?
11. Examine the final paragraph of the book sentence by sentence. Discuss the motifs that are gathered together in these final sentences and the importance of each to the novel.
12. How does the twenty-first-century novel Everyman significantly diverge in content, form, and intent from the fifteenth-century English morality play "Everyman"? In what important ways has Roth modernized and secularized that medieval text?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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