Philip Roth - Everyman

Details
Paperback - As new

Rating
3.6/5 Goodreads

Synopsis
Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes.
A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be. Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century allegorical play, a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.

"Roth's writing looks uncompromisingly straightforward but us subtle and clever...A human story for our times" - AS Byatt, New Statesman
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The genius of the short, bleak, remarkable novel stems from the way that Roth turns his desolate assessment of death into something bracing: an angry acceptance that mortality is the price we pay for the sheer wonder of this thing called life" - Douglas Kennedy, The Times
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"This elegant little book shimmers with the mysteries and regrets of a whole life...poignant, droll, and eloquent" - Lionel Shriver, Daily Telegraph