Everyman
The novel begins at the funeral of its unnamed protagonist and then works backwards through his life: his first encounter with death as a child on a summer beach, his career as a commercial artist, three marriages, two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him, and finally the physical decline of old age.
About
Everyman is a novel by the American writer Philip Roth, published by Houghton Mifflin in May 2006. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2007.
The book opens at the funeral of its protagonist and then traces a life backwards and forwards from his first confrontation with death on the beaches of his childhood summers. He becomes a successful commercial artist in New York, marries three times and makes a mess of each marriage, and acquires two sons from his first marriage who despise him and a daughter from his second who adores him. He is the brother of a decent man whose good health he comes to resent, and he ends up alone, watching his contemporaries deteriorate while his own body fails him. Roth keeps the narrator nameless and the story spare, so the account of one man's ordinary life is also an account of the things that happen to everybody, including the decline he cannot argue his way out of.
The novel was praised for its honesty about ageing and is one of the shortest of Roth's late books, written after the longer novels of the 1990s.
Book details
- Author
- Philip Roth
- First published
- 2006
- Series
- No series listed
- Subgenre
- Modern classics, Family novel
- Primary genre
- Literary Fiction
- Tags
- No tags for this book.
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Baby Bat
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