Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

by Barbara Ehrenreich

In one of his last novels, Everyman, Philip Roth’s protagonist, who is essentially the same Rothlike, sex-obsessed character who has starred in most of his novels, must face his own physical deterioration. Well into his seventies, retired and largely estranged from his family, he is still hitting on women at least a half century younger than himself. Mostly though, he is aging—tormented by his increasingly unreliable penis and by atherosclerosis, which comes to require heart surgery every year. The setting is increasingly claustrophobic as it moves among waiting rooms and hospitals before returning to the cemetery where the story started, at a family funeral, and where his own body will eventually rest. It is unlikely that Roth knew anything about inflammaging or the cellular basis of atherosclerosis, but he accurately summed up the biological situation when he wrote that “old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”