Roth’s Everyman

Philip Roth, Everyman . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 182 pp. Paperback, $13.00.

When Death comes to fetch him in the medieval morality play, Everyman is abandoned by Friends, Kin, Beauty, and Goods. At least Good Works, purified through penance, accompanies him and gives access to heaven. Philip Roth’s Everyman, the unnamed central character in Roth’s twenty-seventh novel, lacks even this comfort. Estranged from his two sons, envious of his vigorous older brother, three-time divorcee, alternately plagued by regrets and defensive about his choices, this pathetically aging womanizer claims to know that God is a fiction and that death liberates from being. His only comfort is the persistent love of his saintly daughter, Nancy.

A retired ad executive with a large New York firm, Everyman has retired to the Jersey shore to fulfill a lifelong desire to paint, but the painting soon loses its savor. He spends his latter days in and out of the hospital, monitoring his disintegrating body, dominated by thoughts of shunts and angioplasties and defibrillators. It is not a pleasant book to read, but it is superbly effective. Written with a starkly clinical simplicity reminiscent of Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich , Everyman is a chilling portrait of the “massacre” of aging.