Philip Roth
Everyman
2006

Everyman takes its title and its theme from the medieval play in which an unprepared sinner is informed by Death of his imminent judgment day. Everyman, in that 15th-century incarnation, is deserted as he faces his maker by first his friends and his family and then his wealth; these impostors are followed by his strength, beauty and knowledge. All that is finally stacked in his favour in the divine audit are his good deeds. It is not a cheerful tale.

Roth's Everyman, who is godless and nameless, is already dead and nearly buried when we meet him. His few surviving advertising buddies, from the old New York agency where he was once creative director, are around his grave in a broken-down Jewish cemetery beside the turnpike, listening out for the man they knew in the orations of those who knew him better. His second wife, Phoebe, half paralysed by a stroke, the one woman he ever loved, whom he left for a Danish model of 24, recalls him only on their first holiday together, 'swimming across the bay', full of life. His brother, Howie, remembers him in his boyhood, when they both worked for their father who had a jewellery store, full of dexterity and promise, fascinated by the workings of watches, intent on the tiny mechanics of time passing. The others he has left behind, his two embittered sons from his first marriage and his forgiving daughter from his second, begin the process of covering him in earth.

Tim Adams
Sunday April 30, 2006
The Observer