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Everyman (2006)

by Philip Roth

Other authors: See the other authors section.

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3,7191183,344 (3.64)137
The hero of Everyman is obsessed with mortality. As he reminds himself at one point, "I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion when you're seventy-five." But he cannot help himself. He is the ex-husband in three marriages gone wrong. He is the father of two sons who detest him, despite a daughter who adores him. And as his health worsens, he is the envious brother of a much fitter man.… (more)
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» See also 137 mentions

English (97)  Dutch (5)  French (4)  Italian (3)  Spanish (3)  German (2)  Norwegian (1)  Swedish (1)  Portuguese (1)  All languages (117)
Showing 1-5 of 97 (next | show all)
A good companion piece to Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. "Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre". ( )
  jemisonreads | Jan 22, 2024 |
Without question a masterpiece.
  Mark_Feltskog | Dec 23, 2023 |
This is something I will have with me for always, because I've always had it - Roth just articulated it and made it clear; as clear as one of the diamonds in our unnamed protagonist's father's shop. A better meditation on death and dying does not exist. ( )
  Germenis | Mar 3, 2023 |
Everyman is a shockingly enticing read. I say shocking because one would hope everyman doesn't have such exploitations and not every female would be so enticed to read about such "endeavors." It seems to be another case of masculine hubris. Yet the main character is so honestly portrayed, so fragile the reader wishes to shake him to earlier self-realization. Everyman is only everyman in the initial and concluding pages during his funeral. ( )
  eliseGregory | Jan 1, 2023 |
"No hocus locus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There were only our bodies born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us."

This short novel begins with the funeral of "Everyman," our unnamed main character, and then proceeds to relate his life story as fleshed out and structured around a skeleton of his various encounters with death or mortality. (Hmm, reminds me of Maggie Farrell's I am I am I am). As a young boy he witnessed a drowned soldier/sailor who had washed up on shore, and shortly after when he was hospitalized for a hernia operation, his roommate, another young boy, died mysteriously in the night---"memorable enough that he was in the hospital that young, but even more memorable that he had registered a death." Thereafter, through-out he life he was haunted by health problems, and concurrently thoughts of death. In contrast, his older brother remained the picture of health into old age, while his own body was constantly betraying him.

I had stopped reading Roth when I became bored with his (male) characters constant obsessions with sex and female bodies. This "meditation on mortality," as it has been described, has less of that than in many of his earlier books, although Everyman does go through three marriages, each to a successively younger woman, and in his late sixties is still hitting on a 20-something jogger younger than his daughter. But on the whole, I "enjoyed," if that's the correct word, this story about how one man dealt with facing death.

Recommended
4 stars

First line: "Around the grave in the rundown cemetery were a few of his former advertising colleagues from New York who recalled his energy and originality and told his daughter, Nancy, what a pleasure it had been to work with him."

Last line: "He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he had feared from the start. ( )
  arubabookwoman | Dec 17, 2022 |
Showing 1-5 of 97 (next | show all)
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» Add other authors (7 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Philip Rothprimary authorall editionscalculated
Britto, Paulo HenriquesTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Fibla, JordiTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Guidall, GeorgeNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Kamoun, JoséeTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Kooman, KoTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Mantovani, VincenzoTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Nilsson, Hans-JacobTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow ...
—John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"
Dedication
To J.C.
First words
Around the grave in the rundown cemetery were a few of his former advertising colleagues from New York, who recalled his energy and originality and told his daughter, Nancy, what a pleasure it had been to work with him.
Quotations
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance…and yet you never fail to get them wrong…You get them wrong when you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell someone else about the meeting and you get them wrong all over again…[T]he whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception
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Wikipedia in English (1)

The hero of Everyman is obsessed with mortality. As he reminds himself at one point, "I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion when you're seventy-five." But he cannot help himself. He is the ex-husband in three marriages gone wrong. He is the father of two sons who detest him, despite a daughter who adores him. And as his health worsens, he is the envious brother of a much fitter man.

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