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Everyman: A Novelby Philip Roth
AwardsWinner, 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award For Fiction
Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)"The upside, of course, is that Roth is the best fiction writer America has ever produced. And Everyman is fiction as calligraphy, a ribbon of memory spun from a single stroke across a couple hundred pages, encircling, and entombing, a life." Scott Raab, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review) "Everyman is Roth's attempt to modernize The Death of Ivan Ilych. Although it lacks the terrible grandeur of Tolstoy's story, Roth's version might be set at a still lower temperature....Perhaps the only weakness in Everyman is that there isn't really, in the end, any argument to keep up — which is another way of saying that Philip Roth has reached the limit of what he can be funny about." Benjamin Markovits, The Times Literary Supplement (read the entire TLS review) "Everyman is in places quite beautiful, illuminated by that fine precision and relative spareness of language that has characterized Roth's work in his late phase. Like some of that work, notably The Human Stain and American Pastoral, it starts well and ends even better, but it leaves the muddle of a middle somewhere behind it, like a sloughed skin....Despite some undeniably moving passages, the novella fails to gather its power: the sum of its parts is not finally as affecting as the parts themselves." James Wood, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review) "Let's use a noun I've never used before: masterpiece. Whereas Roth's prize-laden recent fictions are a tad manipulative, in Everyman there is never any sense of a novelist trying to write a novel. Every sentence is urgent, essential, almost nonfictional....Everyman is therefore that rarest of literary achievements: a novel that disappears as it progresses, leaving in one's hands only the matters of life and death it describes." Joseph O'Neill, The Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic Monthly review) Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The bestselling 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. The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all. Review:"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 (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review:"Philip Roth's 27th novel is a marvel of brevity, admirable for its elegant style and composition (no surprise), but remarkable above all for its audacity and ambition. It seizes unflinchingly on one of the least agreeable subjects in the domain of the novel — the natural deterioration of the body. But beyond that, 'Everyman' can be seen as a bid to engage conclusively with the core anxieties that... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Review:"Roth continues exercising his career-defining, clear-eyed, intelligent vision of how the psychology of families works....Perhaps...more readers will find this lean, poignant novel more relevant to themselves." Booklist Review:"This risky novel is significantly marred by redundancy and discursiveness...but energized by vivid writing, palpable emotional intensity and several wrenching scenes....A rich exploration of the epiphany that awaits us all — that 'life's most disturbing intensity is death.'" Kirkus Reviews Review:"Everyman is vintage Roth: full of passion, anger and vivid details of lives well lived and profoundly screwed up....Everyman doesn't exactly brim with happy, fun fun. However, fans of serious fiction...know to hunt down other forms of satisfaction." Rocky Mountain News Review:"In the course of Everyman Mr. Roth captures the more depressing aspects of aging....But these harrowing evocations of age and infirmity do not a novel make. This book often reads like a laundry list of complaints about the human condition." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Review:"[Everyman] verges on being a mocking summation of what people who don't appreciate Philip Roth's work mistakenly think it's all about....There are some great turns of phrase...but the vanity and cruelty of this man render him and his self-pitying tale inert. (Grade: C+)" Entertainment Weekly Review:"It's far from Roth's best work, but it contains flashes of the writing that earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1997.... Review:"The new novel clocks in at a slim 182 pages, yet it is packed densely with observations and recriminations....It is the empathy that Roth creates for this seemingly unsympathetic character that drives the novel to its extraordinary heights." Providence Journal Review:"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." Library Journal Review:"One of the literary lessons of The Great Gatsby is that in the right hands, a short novel can have deep impact. Everyman...is no instant classic, but it dives similarly deep and makes an indelible impression." Cleveland Plain Dealer Review:"Everyman continues his recent streak of notable books. And although Roth is far from always perfect, the book is further proof he will be remembered and re-read." Minneapolis Star Tribune Review:"Everyman is a swift, brutal novel about a heartbreakingly ordinary subject, and it is also testament to Roth that the book leaves you a little breathless and not at all bereft." The Boston Globe About the AuthorIn the 1990s Philip Roth won America’s four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain’s W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six years “for the entire work of the recipient.” In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians Award for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003—2004.” In 2007 Roth received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman. What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!
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