This brief, disconsolate and in certain respects disagreeable novel starts with the funeral of the anonymous (eponymous) hero and ends with his death. The circularity in the narrative is a powerfully expressive feature of a book whose formal intricacy could be thought the most interesting thing about it. Of course, we only fully appreciate the novel's structural virtues once we have finished reading it, and if we came to it fresh from the invigorating experience of Sabbath's Theatre or the American Trilogy or The Plot against America, and were hoping for something less well-behaved than structural virtue, we will have had a lot of adjusting to do. Resolute about facing up to the bleakest facts of the human condition (the progressive deterioration of the body, the miseries of illness, the humiliation of old age and, at the end of it all, death's unrefusable invitation to oblivion), Everyman defines itself in Roth's ebulliently productive oeuvre precisely by what is missing from it of his irreverence and vitality.

LRB 25 May 2006 | PDF Download