Summary
Everyman is a short novel, 182 pages, published by Houghton Mifflin in May 2006, and it begins at a graveside: the funeral of its unnamed protagonist in a Jewish cemetery in New Jersey, where his brother Howie and his daughter Nancy speak. The rest of the book goes back over the life that led there. He was born in 1933 and grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where his father ran a jewelry store and he and Howie worked in the shop as boys. He wanted to paint, went into advertising instead to support a family, and rose to art director.
His private life is a run of damage. His first marriage leaves him two sons who resent him. His second, to Phoebe, gives him Nancy, the one child who stays loyal, and he throws it away for Merete, a Danish model of twenty four, whom he also divorces. Running beside all this is the medical history: a hernia operation at nine, a burst appendix in 1967, a quintuple bypass in 1989, and more surgery after that. After the September 11 attacks he retires to Starfish Beach, a retirement village on the Jersey Shore, where he goes back to painting, starts a painting class for the amateur painters among the residents and watches the people around him fail. "Old age isn't a battle," he comes to think; "old age is a massacre." Near the end he visits his parents' graves and talks with the man digging a new one. Then he goes into the hospital for one more operation and does not wake from the anesthetic.
The book can be read in an evening, and it is bleak from its first page to its last. Its title comes from the fifteenth century morality play in which Death summons a man to account for his life, and Roth keeps that plainness. Publishers Weekly heard a voice "pained, angry, arrogant and deeply, wryly funny." Kirkus admired its "vivid writing, palpable emotional intensity and several wrenching scenes" but found it "significantly marred by redundancy and discursiveness (especially by a surfeit of rhetorical questions)." Readers who come to Roth for comic energy will find little of it here; readers facing illness and age, their own or a parent's, may find it hard to put down.
Historical Context & Significance
Everyman won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2007, Roth's third after Operation Shylock in 1994 and The Human Stain in 2001, which made him the first writer to win the prize three times, and he remains the only one. The judges were John Dufresne, Debra Magpie Earling and David Gates, and Roth received $15,000. The finalists were Charles D'Ambrosio's The Dead Fish Museum, Deborah Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel and Edward P. Jones's All Aunt Hagar's Children. Not every critic was won over: in the London Review of Books Nicholas Spice wrote that "none of the suffering and death in it is singular enough to move us."
Roth later grouped Everyman with Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009) and Nemesis (2010) as four short novels he called Nemeses. In October 2012 he announced that he had stopped publishing fiction, and he died in Manhattan on May 22, 2018.
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