Books › Everyman
Everyman
192 pages
An unflinching, unsentimental meditation on the fragile human body and the inescapable reality of our own mortality.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like sitting in a quiet, dimly lit room with an old man who has finally stopped lying to himself. It is a stark, unsparing experience, driven by a steady, inexorable pace that mirrors the relentless march of time. The prose is stripped of excess, ruthlessly precise, and entirely devoid of comforting sentimentality. You are immersed in a somber, melancholic atmosphere where the primary antagonist is the failing human body itself. It explores the messy wreckage of past marriages and estranged children, but ultimately zeroes in on the profound isolation of aging. This is a book for readers who crave sharp, elegiac literary fiction that looks death straight in the eye without blinking.
- Mood
- somber
- melancholic
- intimate
- stark
- Tone
- unsparing
- elegiac
- unsentimental
- reflective
- wry
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the betrayal of the body · inevitability of death · familial estrangement · regret and looking back · the isolation of aging
- The writing
- Clean, precise, and ruthlessly observant, stripping away sentimentality to expose the raw realities of human frailty.
- The arc
- Moves from the vigorous, messy entanglements of midlife into a stark, solitary confrontation with physical decline and mortality.
- Who it's for
- Readers who appreciate unflinching, character-driven literary fiction that confronts the uncomfortable truths of aging and regret.
Content notes
- terminal illness
- medical trauma
- death and dying
- grief
- infidelity
About the book
"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 hom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be."--Jacket.
Description from Open Library.
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