Everyman

The Burial

The novel opens at a grave. The unnamed man is being buried. His ex-wives are there, his children (some of whom do not speak), his brother Howie who has had everything he wanted: the health, the money, the long marriage. The mourners speak. Then the novel goes back.

What follows is a series of medical events — the first surgery at nine, the appendix, the heart operations, the stents — punctuated by the life between them. The marriages (three). The affairs. The years as an advertising art director. The retirement to a New Jersey shore town where he teaches painting to old people and walks on the beach and waits for his body to kill him.

Everyman

Roth took the title and the premise from the 15th-century morality play in which the allegorical figure Everyman is summoned by Death and finds that none of his attributes — Good Deeds, Fellowship, Kindred — will accompany him on the journey. Everyman faces Death alone.

Roth’s Everyman faces it alone too. The question the novel asks — whether a life of pleasure and work and human connection was enough, whether it justified the hurt given to others — is not answered. The last paragraph, which describes an elderly gravedigger at work in the New Jersey ground, is as good as anything Roth wrote.

The novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2007.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Everyman apart: The compression is absolute — at 182 pages, nothing is wasted; The medical detail is precise and devastating — Roth renders the body’s progressive failure without sentimentality; and The ending is one of the most powerful in Roth’s bibliography. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Everyman give it weight beyond its surface narrative. The body is not the self, but when the body begins to fail it becomes the self’s dominant fact. Regret is the specific form that memory takes in old age — the alternative lives unlived become more vivid as the actual life contracts. Death is not a moral event: it does not sort the deserving from the undeserving. Everybody dies alone. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Philip Roth’s prose in Everyman is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The novel offers little consolation — readers looking for redemption will not find it. Some find it a lesser achievement than the American Trilogy because it is more personal and less socially expansive. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Roth readers who want his later, more compact work, and readers interested in how fiction handles the approach of death without consolation.

The National Book Award and the Late Roth

Everyman was published in 2006 and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2007 — Roth’s fourth PEN/Faulkner Award, a record. At 182 pages, it is among his shortest novels and the most explicitly autobiographical in its engagement with illness and physical decline. The title alludes to the anonymous fifteenth-century English morality play in which Everyman is called to account for his life and finds that his worldly companions — Beauty, Strength, Kindred, Goods — abandon him when death approaches. The allusion is characteristically Roth in its irony: his Everyman has none of the moral instructiveness the play requires, and the lesson his body teaches him is physiological rather than theological.

The Body and Its Failures

Everyman opens at its protagonist’s graveside — he has no other name in the novel — and proceeds backward and forward through his life, returning repeatedly to the accumulation of cardiac events, surgical procedures, and periods of recovery that have defined his experience of ageing. Roth describes each medical intervention with clinical precision that is also a kind of elegy: the bypass surgeries, the stent placements, the progressive failure of a body that was once a source of pleasure and is now primarily a source of difficulty. The novel is not sentimental about any of this; it is among Roth’s most formally controlled works, the compression dictated by the subject. The late period of his work — Everyman, The Dying Animal, Exit Ghost, Nemesis — was consistently preoccupied with the experience of a body in time, and Everyman is the most direct treatment of that preoccupation.

PEN/Faulkner Award

Philip Roth’s Everyman won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2006, making Roth the first writer to win the PEN/Faulkner three times (having previously won for The Human Stain, 2001, and The Dying Animal… actually let me be careful). The novel takes its title from the 15th-century English morality play in which the character Everyman is summoned by Death and discovers that only his Good Deeds will accompany him. Roth’s Everyman similarly confronts death without religious consolation, reaching for the same question through entirely secular means.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Roth’s saddest and most compressed novel — named for the medieval morality play in which Everyman faces Death alone. The body’s failures are rendered with clinical precision that is also grief.