well written, interesting perspective

Although the perspective is definitely Western, Philip Roth hits the nail on the head with this book about aging and facing death. It evoked so much discomfort that I rushed through it. Hmmm............ ( )

Paints a Jew who has chosen secularism as living his life in fear of death and sacrificing life to stave off death (primarily through sexual adventurism). The (gimmickily) unnamed hero confronts specific features of his parents’ religious practice, particularly at his father’s fully orthodox burial (mourners refill the grave), but the narrator gives us no real hint of his response. As physically stronger relatives are filling the grave, for instance, he has a vision of his father’s mouth filling with dirt, but shares no thought of his mother’s body, buried adjacent some years earlier, and what its state of decay might be now.

Over all, disappointing. So androcentric as to gag.

Roth on “Fresh Air” 2006 (replayed 2007 on release of paperback) says he’s also entirely secular, believes in no afterlife, but ‘glad’ that his loved ones are buried in identified plots because visiting the graves reminds him to remember them.

While not a great novel--its only slightly longer than a novella--it's a good read by an artist very comfortable with his craft. The tone rarely hits a false note, and the main character is more endearing that some of Roth's other protagonists. ( )

A short, depressing, allegedly semi-autobiographical novel of heart disease, adultery, and bodily decrepitude tumbling headlong into death. The book opens with the funeral of the nameless protagonist, our "Everyman", and carefully surveys each of his various illnesses and maladies, particularly a series of late-life heart ailments and their treatment. A certain sympathy is evoked in the first half of the book, which is somewhat mitigated as we learn, through anguished remembrance, of the various casual infidelities and acts of selfishness Everyman has put his loved ones through.

As might be expected in a novel with an aged protagonist, much of the book is a look backwards with fond regard at childhood, growing up in a Jewish family in Newark, working in the family's jewelry store (we idealize youth as a Golden Age, and we measure our disappointments against that time of infinite promise). The comforts, joy, and foreshadowings of childhood are in contrast to later success and a muddled love life with no less than three ex-wives and a series of clumsily handled affairs.

As Everyman ages, he falls prey to various ailments culminating in heart disease and annual operations which leave him increasingly debilitated. The decay of the body and its accompanying sense of humiliation, the inevitable loss of virility and the relentless slide towards death are Roth's themes As the endflap explains, Everyman derives its name from the medieval allegorical drama "whose theme is the summoning of the living to death". The sick and aged fall into their own private hells, and can expect little comfort from their peers, who have their own mortalities with which to contend. Honestly, much of this book evokes the feeling of being stuck in a room with aged relatives, as they endlessly chronicle their various health problems and graphically describe various procedures. Still, anyone who has helplessly witnessed the pain of the sickly aged, the torment of the chronically ill, will understand the bleakness of this book.