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| Everyman | 
 enlarge | Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: £6.99
Buy Used: £2.19
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Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 8251
Media: Paperback
Edition: New title
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.4
ISBN: 0099501465
EAN: 9780099501466
ASIN: 0099501465
Publication Date: April 5, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
A meditation on life, senescence and death August 25, 2008
Paul Roth's Everyman is a meditation on life, senescence and death. One long unremitting litany of pain and regret, the story begins at the funeral of a successful commercial artist and recounts his life as he grapples with an early health scare and then is constantly reminded of his mortality while simultaneously messing up three marriages, isolating his offspring, and hurting his gentle brother out of spite and jealousy over his good health. Eventually, he finds that he has become the kind of person that he did not want to be. Yes, it lingers on the relentless decay of the human body and on the psychological frame shifts required to cope with ill-health and aging, but this is Philip Roth and the precision and sharpness of his writing turns this short novel into a moving analysis of how the mistakes we make in life can demonstrate the danger of living for the moment. A dark and fatalistic book it is probably best avoided if you are an aging man in poor health.
 Accomplished and steeped in truth August 14, 2008
I read this right after reading the latest Martin Amis novel, and it was like a fresh of breath air after emerging from a dusty and dimly-lit library. Compared with Amis, Philip Roth is beautifully to-the-point and straightforward in the way he explains things and illuminates his characters.
I also read this shortly after attending a couple of very significant funerals, I therefore found Roth's ruminations on death both comforting and bleak - a lovely combination in literature, I think.
Recommended. (It's also fairly short, which is a plus if you read slowly and/or don't have much time but want to read something decent, as is generally the case with me.)
Superb March 28, 2008
This was an enormously enjoyable read. From the opening paragraph, you know you are in the hands of a master. He title refers to death, the fate that must meet everyman and is borrowed from a 15th century play of the same name. The book is a meditation on mortality and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that the mortal coil is heir to - to totally butcher Hamlet's soliloquys. Roth shows himself as a literary stylist at the height of his powers as he tackles "the Big Adios". The narrative in this short, page turner of a book carries you headlong to the grave -where it must inevitably end.
Middle class tragedy February 18, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
When he's bad, he's very very bad ("Sabbath's Theatre") and when he's good he's wonderful. This is from the good end of the Roth oeuvre, telling the story of a middle-aged man's descent into illness, self-realisation and death, devoid of all comfort about just rewards or afterlives.
A small gem - not easy to read if you are yourself a middle aged bloke with the occasional dodgy health problem, but still great.
The man with no name December 8, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I chose this novel to read with my students in a monthly book club we have in the language school where I work. I still do not know their opinions because we have not held our meeting yet, but I do know mine.This book clearly makes an impression; you cannot finish it and not be sure of its impact on you.
I think the title "Everyman" is perfect. Of course, the main character's life is unique, but it succeeds in exemplifying aspects all our destinies have in common. The zest for life, but for a perfect life untouched by sadness and illness. The lack of control over our actions on occasion. The looking at oneself and saying "How did I get here? How did I become this person?. This is not what I set out to do in the first place".
We were all once the perfect child with a world of possibilities ahead of us, and on our own or because of our circumstances achieved some dreams and lost some others.
I don't think the main character is a bad man. He's an endearing human being like any other who maybe chose the wrong way, or maybe just lived his reality as he had to.
It's a masterful touch to never give him a name, even though he is the central character. This makes empathy so much easier.
A lovely book, full of life even if it talks about Death.
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