Phillip Roth

I just read "Everyman", and since Roth is one of our national icons it seemed like a good idea to find out why.

I confess to being disappointed. The short novel is centered on the medical procedures attendant on aging and death, but the world the unnamed everyman figure inhabits is purely physical. There was no sense of spirit, no transcendent idea, nothing much except regret, memory, pain and the physical body's dissolution. I don't know when I have ever read anything so nihilistic.

I could go into greater details about it (The fact the the strongest memories seem to be about sexual encounters with women the hero doesn't even like very much - that's a topic one could write on endlessly) but if this is a portrait of modern man then it's fairly grim. It reminds me, in fact, of why I now read contemporary fiction so seldom.  So often there's nothing in it to help us to live.

The business of art is, surely, to help us to live well, to be alive while we are alive. Mr Roth does not supply that.