Everyman

Philip Roth's twenty-seventh book takes its title from an anonymous fi fteenth-century English allegorical play whose drama centres on the su mmoning of the living to death and whose hero, Everyman, is intended t o be the personification of mankind. The fate of Roth's Everyman is tr aced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic b eaches of his childhood summers and during his hospitalisation as a ni ne-year-old surgical patient through the crises of health that come cl ose to killing him as a vigorous adult, and into his old age, when he is undone by the death and deterioration of his contemporaries and rel entlessly stalked by his own menacing physical woes. A successful comm ercial advertising artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him, the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his b itter envy, and the lonely ex-husband of three very different women wi th whom he's made a mess of marriage. Everyman is a painful human stor y of the regret and loss and stoicism of a man who becomes what he doe s not want to be. The terrain of this savagely sad short novel is the human body, and its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.