Philip Roth's twenty-seventh book takes its title from an anonymous
fifteenth-century English allegorical play whose drama centres on the
summoning of the living to death and whose hero, Everyman, is intended to
be the personification of mankind. The fate of Roth's Everyman is traced
from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of
his childhood summers and during his hospitalisation as a nine-year-old
surgical patient through the crises of health that come close 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 relentlessly stalked by
his own menacing physical woes. A successful commercial 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 bitter envy, and the lonely ex-husband of
three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. Everyman
is a painful human story of the regret and loss and stoicism of a man who
becomes what he does 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.