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Everyman
by Philip Roth
A much slimmer volume than "A Plot Against America," Roth's 27th book sketches an ordinary man's life in reverse, from his funeral to his childhood.
Houghton Mifflin, 192 pages
05/09/2006
$24.00
ISBN: 061873516X
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
The Independent Tim Martin
Every sentence and every paragraph works with the coiled precision of the watch mechanisms that the narrator's father repairs, and glitters with the lapidary perfection of the diamonds he sells.
Kirkus Reviews
A rich exploration of the epiphany that awaits us all -- that "life's most disturbing intensity is death." [15 Feb 2006, p.156]
Library Journal Henry L. Carrigan Jr.
This brilliant little morality play on the ways that our bodies dictate the paths our lives take is vintage Roth. [1 Apr 2006, p.86]
Publishers Weekly Sara Nelson
Despite its coy title, the book is both universal and very, very specific, and Roth watchers will not be able to stop themselves from comparing the hero to Roth himself. [20 Feb 2006, p.132]
Los Angeles Times James Marcus
Here we face the cruelest paradox of all: Before death irons out the spiky irregularities of personality, it turns them into a kind of poison. This is bitter news, bad news -- but it takes a master like Roth, operating at the top of his game, to deliver it so effectively.
The New York Times Book Review Nadine Gordimer
Philip Roth is a magnificent victor in attempting to disprove Georg Lukacs's dictum of the impossible aim of the writer to encompass all of life.
Washington Post Norman Rush
Up close, though, it is a parable that captures, as few works of fiction have, the pathos of Being, as it's manifested even in the favored precincts of affluent America.
Atlantic Monthly Joseph O’Neill
Let's use a noun I’ve never used before: masterpiece.
Daily Telegraph Lionel Shriver
What's even more amazing? This book may tackle decrepitude and death, but Everyman is so poignant, droll, and eloquent that it's not depressing in the slightest.
Daily Telegraph Christopher Tayler
If you're interested in death and dying, Roth told an interviewer last year, 'you get your money's worth' in Everyman. You also get a brilliantly compressed account of a life.
The Independent Paul Bailey
Everyman has a few tiny imperfections, but it is Roth's awesome achievement to have accounted for an ordinary existence with such narrative grandeur.
The Onion A.V. Club Keith Phipps
In the end, it's a bit thin in ways beyond its page count, but it's still another example of Roth's exquisitely considered late-period prose.
Chicago Tribune William Pritchard
Although Everyman in its brevity and relative lack of tonal variety denies itself the rich, sprawling tragicomedy of "Sabbath's Theater" or "American Pastoral," it takes an honorable place with those predecessors as an instance of Roth writing at the top of his bent and to maximum effect, in words provided Everyman, about "the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life."
The Nation William Deresiewicz
While the new book may not be one of Roth's better works, it is by no means a bad one. It suffers most from its use of a third-person narrator, a technique Roth has scarcely employed in decades.
The Economist
The protagonist is so fully fleshed that this tiny volume bursts at the seams.
Houston Chronicle Patrick Kurp
At 192 pages, Everyman (his 27th book) is a novella with the heft and sweep of a novel. It is single-mindedly focused and, like life itself, without suspense as to the outcome.
PopMatters Steve Shymanik
Clearly his style in this book is a deliberate artistic choice -- to match the prose with the form, theme and content of the fable-like story -- but this reader misses the wonderful richness, the ferocity, and the manic energy of his best novels.
London Review Of Books Nicholas Spice
Everyman may be a dying novel, in parts it may already be dead, but it is not a dud. Its very manner of boring us (to death?) is intensely, if unpleasantly, interesting.
New York Review Of Books Daniel Mendelsohn
As imperfect as it is impassioned.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Benjamin Markovits
Perhaps the only weakness in Everyman is that there isn't really, in the end, any argument to keep up – which is another way of saying that Philip Roth has reached the limit of what he can be funny about.
Chicago Sun-Times Lloyd Sachs
In staring down infirmity and death, and forcing us to stare with him, [Roth] may well have committed his most courageous act of fiction yet.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Dennis Bock
It is a short, allegorical novel, and as such lacks the richness and abundance of character that Roth enthusiasts have come to expect. But for all its narrow focus and grave certainty, it is a deeply affecting book.
Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
Everyman is a swift, brutal novel about a heartbreakingly ordinary subject, and it is also testament to Roth that the book leaves you a little breathless and not at all bereft.
The New Yorker Claudia Roth Pierpont
The hungry backward glance is what this book is all about. It explains the impossible goodness of so many of the characters. Roth's Everyman is not imperceptive or naïve but helplessly under the spell of mortality: no radical insights, no celestial harmonies, only an unrelenting awareness of unalterable mistakes, an amalgam of bad conscience, gratitude, memory, and longing.
Wall Street Journal George Sim Johnston
The book is superbly written and acutely observed; but by relentlessly exposing the end of life as a pointless cataclysm Mr. Roth, unlike Tolstoy, can't offer anything in the way of wisdom or even practical advice about how to make our final exit.
New York Observer Adam Begley
A slim, uncompromisingly honest novel, Everyman is as dark and death-haunted as anything Mr. Roth has written. More spare and more direct than John Updike’s recent laments about aging, Everyman does for death and dying what "Portnoy’s Complaint" (1969) did for masturbation. [1 May 2006]
Booklist Brad Hooper
Despite its shortness in length and relative narrowness in scope, this novel speaks eloquently about life's unfulfillments, about making adjustments if the unfolding of one's life doesn't follow the original plan. Roth continues exercising his career-defining, clear-eyed, intelligent vision of how the psychology of families works. [1 Mar 2006, p.46]
The Guardian John Banville
This is to quibble, but quibbling, in this context, is justified. It might be claimed that the overall flatness of style in Everyman is the mark of a master disdaining mere technique, but that will not quite do.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
In the course of Everyman Mr. Roth captures the more depressing aspects of aging: illness, frailty, dependency, isolation, loneliness, a loss of physical beauty and vigor, a growing awareness of limits and limitations, and an apprehension that death looms ever closer. But these harrowing evocations of age and infirmity do not a novel make.
Entertainment Weekly Ken Tucker
This short novel disappoints. It verges on being a mocking summation of what people who don't appreciate Philip Roth's work mistakenly think it's all about.
 The average user rating for this book is 7.8 (out of 10) based on 15 User Votes
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