Everyman

Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret and stoicism. The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, to his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and 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 the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be. Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century allegorical play whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.