Philip ROTH ... Everyman (2006)

PHILIP ROTH has a new novel entitled Everyman (2006) out, a story of illness, regret, loss and death, to be published by Jonathan Cape in the U.K. and Houghton Mifflin in the U.S. on May 4, 2006. A grim and heartwrenching portrait of Death and the many emotions preceding it. “He’d married three times, had mistresses and children and an interesting job where he’d been a success, but now eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story.”

In precise and intensely poetic prose, Roth uses Death to chronicle the life of a man, and in so doing he tells the story of every one of us. The contradiction that lies within the core of this excellent morality play is that, despite knowing that Death is inevitable, we live in constant denial of it. But Death is constantly hovering around us, at all moments of our lives, always on the prowl for fresh victims to feast on. I believe this is going to be Big.