Everyman by Philip Roth

This is only the second Roth book I have ever read, the first being The Plot Against America. There's a copy of Portnoy's Complaint on a bookshelf in my mother's house, but I never got around to reading it.

Reading about mortality is really difficult for some people, but I don't mind it. I enjoy stories about elderly people and the loss of youth. Death hasn't been the same issue for me since I had my stroke at twenty, so I think I came to this book with a slightly different attitude than most people my age would.

This book is very good, but I wasn't drooling all over it. The protagonist is well-constructed for highlighting the themes of aging. He becomes increasingly sympathetic as the novel goes on, and he gets closer and closer to death. Aging is usually thought of as bringing perspective, in terms of wisdom, but this novel doesn't let the reader forget that some perspective is very painful.

I would love to narrow down what the most insightful and moving passages are, but then I end up with a list like this: the ones to do with his father, the ones to do with his brother, the ones to do with his wives, the ones to do with his sons, the ones to do with daughter, the ones to do with his childhood, etc. That's almost the entirety of the book! What really does stand out, though, is a short friendship he develops with a member of the painting class he teaches at a resting home. Her painfully emotional descriptions of getting older are exquisite and a good foil to the protagonist's relatively stoic memories.

Overall, this book was wonderful. It described aging and death well because, in the end, it revealed the humanity of the process. According to Roth's characters, being older doesn't change the nature of existence, just its duration. You may think this is a manifest truth, but Everyman reveals the complex pain of living such an obvious reality, especially inside a society that treats its elderly like a different species.