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Everyman
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307277718
ISBN: 0307277712
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 192
Publication Date: April 10, 2007
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: April 10, 2007
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The bestselling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality.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.The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - "Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre"
This book opens, aptly, with the funeral of a nameless protagonist. It then follows on with a series of flashbacks on his life, raising probing questions concerning his (or really, everyman's) existence - on the tedium of day-to-day living, the pain of regret and loss, the debilitating nature of illness, and above all, "the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life". Most of the book focusses on his later years, when these existential struggles converge with painful and livid intensity. Such is ... Read More
Rating:  - On ageing and accountability
A realistic - at times candid - look at mortality from a thrice married man, who, at the tail-end of his increasingly frail life, assesses his failures.
Roth presents his protagonist in a sympathetic light, which at times arouses the reader's annoyance with his self-pity and attempts to explain away his philandering ways...
However, the writing is tight and sustains the reader's interest throughout.
Rating: - Everyman by Philip Roth
Contrary to reviews I read in a recent NYT book review this is not one of the greaat works of American literature. It is fairly banal.
Rating: - Contingency, Irony, and Authenticity
Roth recently argued in an interview that writers tend to loose their skills as they age; Everyman is a fantastic example of the exception that proves the rule. Indeed, this text approaches Roth's most courageous and ambitious of efforts. Here we have Roth dealing with death in the most authentic and fearless fashion possible. How many authors have the courage to admit to their greatest fear--in this case, that an artist's work will not stand up to the test of time and that he will therefore be relegated ... Read More
Rating: - Sparce, but powerful
It's a testament to Roth's mastery of storytelling that he can cover an entire lifetime in 182 sparse pages and leave readers feeling like they've just finished a much longer novel. The book begins with the man's funeral, then flashes back to his youth as the obedient son of a jeweler and watch-seller. After a stint in the Navy, the man finds success as an art director and then creative director at a large New York ad agency. He philanders his way through three marriages, fathering two estranged sons and ... Read More
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