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Everyman
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
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Everyman
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Summary
There is no more decorated American writer living today than Philip Roth, the New York Times best-selling author of American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. He has won a Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, and numerous other distinctions.
The hero of Everyman is obsessed with mortality. As he reminds himself at one point, "I'm 34! Worry about oblivion when you're 75." But he cannot help himself. He is the ex-husband in three marriages gone wrong. He is the father of two sons who detest him, despite a daughter who adores him. And as his health worsens, he is the envious brother of a much fitter man. A masterful portrait of one man's inner struggles, Everyman is a brilliant showcase for one of the world's most distinguished novelists.
Critic reviews
- 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award, Fiction
What listeners say about Everyman
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
- Francis
- 05-05-07
An eye that hath kept watch o'er man's mortality
This is a sombre, powerful novel,a moving portrayal of how, an ordinary, flawed man -hence Everyman - faces death. Enjoyment would perhaps not be the appropriae word for such a theme but I found this novel a gripping and worthwhile experience. Roth is a most skilful writer and the reading by George Guidall is finely judged.Compelling listening - if you are prepared to think about your own mortality.
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8 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Bee
- 10-08-22
Small but perfectly formed
Description of an imperfect, therefore a real, life. Perhaps postpone listening if you're already feeling melancholy.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Ruairi
- 26-03-20
A picture of a messy and complicated life
Through the telling of one man's life you are challenged to see the absurdity, shame, joy, and wonder of your own.
Very short in the reading but will stay with you for long after. Worth a read
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 03-11-16
a perfect book for audio
Emotional, real performance. Sensitive and honest. A brilliant story very well told. Very enjoyable, almost like listening to a play. Roth' s language is so vivid , so creative and precise. Beautiful!
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Anthony
- 04-02-15
Vintage Roth, slow, sensitive, moving
Beautifully written story published in 2006 about life, death, family, loyalty, illness, and more. Loving descriptions of family relationships, adultery and disloyalty, truth and trust. Especially moving segments on hospitals and doctors, friends, death and the Jewish cemetery and funeral service. The terrible thud of the first clods of soil placed on the wooden coffin by the close family members is accurately and beautifully described.
Days before the narrator's death, he places $100 in the hand of a black grave-digger, thanks him for being so dedicated and taking such care over his important work, as well as caring for the graves he had dug earlier for his parents.He recounts a frequent comment of his father's - "Better to give with a warm hand".
Four hours of transportation into the family, mind, home and challenges of Middle-American secular Jewish ageing lives, preparing for and the inevitability of death.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
- JOHN
- 31-05-06
Full Frontal Roth
This is a powerful book. If you are looking for a happy ending, denouement, or epiphany – look elsewhere. Right off the bat this book begins at the end, the funeral of the main, nameless character. So there are no illusions about how the story ends. But that’s really the point, because that is how the story ends for every human. Says the author, ‘old age isn’t a war- it’s a massacre.’
In a short space the back-story is filled in; from the main character’s childhood, his loving, Jewish parents, his doting big brother to his three failed marriages, his career uncertainty, his selfless daughter and estranged sons. Throughout, his medical history is detailed, along with his hypochondriacal dread. All of this is related in perfect Philip Roth unflinching fashion. And if this sounds dry, it is anything but. Roth skillfully lays bare the humanity of each character in only the way this author can.
This book will make the listener look at his or hers own life and mortality and I must say that it impacted me as strongly as any novel in recent history.
As with all Roth’s novels one can’t help but wonder that some of the material is autobiographical. Just how much is or isn’t makes no matter, because it could be universally autobiographical… for every man and woman.
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17 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Darwin8u
- 27-01-17
Old age isn't a battle. Old age is a massacre.
The older I get, the more tolerant I get of Roth's later novellas. I remember thinking when I read one ten plus years ago that they were simply indulgences. Roth throwing off and idea and turning it into a novella. Why couldn't he go back to writing his great novels. Now, as I read some of his last several novels these last several months. Older now. I think I might understand. They aren't as robust as his great novels of the 1990s. But they are still pretty fantastic. They are memoirs. They are ... reflections of life prior to death, life in anticipation of death, life contemplating death. They are the murmurs of a man standing on the edge of the abyss.
There were certain parts of this novel that seemed to touch aspects of my own life. I too had a brother who seemed to have perfect health. My older brother could fail to brush his teeth for a year and not get a cavity. He rarely had a headache, a fever, a cold. He was an Army Ranger and later a decorated helicopter pilot. I was the opposite. Flat feet, pigeon-toed, diabetic, rheumatic, thyroid issues, bad teeth, Marfan syndrome, heart issues, struggling with pain nearly every day of my life.
There seems to exists in brothers that share this weird imbalance a measured shadow. At one level there is care and concern and on another level an almost hero worship that easily slides (at times) into a jealousy and enviousness that makes one empathetic to Cain.
Anyway, this is a very human novel about loneliness, aging, relationships, memory and death. It isn't perfect and far from Roth's best, but it is still very good and FAR better than 'he Humbling'
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15 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
- Pamela Harvey
- 01-07-06
Abused by the Narrator
I am giving this book a hefty four stars just because the writing level is Philiip Roth delivering his usual consistent quality, his facility with language much in evidence, his brilliance in targeted metaphor, and his characters meticulously drawn and never cliched. And he is one of our national literary treasures, along with Updike, Charles Frazier ("Cold Mountain") and Anne Tyler. There are other writers I've missed, but, contrary to belief in some circles, literature seems to be thriving as our national art form at the moment. Not that we always need a national art form, but I disagree that "the novel is dead".
Roth also gets special points for taking an "everystory" in which nothing unusual happens, a plot that unfolds day in and day out in lives across the country and all over the world, and turning it into a narrative with magnetic appeal and drama in detail. Isn't that what writing is about, really, the small everyday details?
But the story suffers from the narrrator's contribution. I respect Guidall's vast experience as an interpreter of audiobooks but in this case he just doesn't forge that critical bond with Roth. Throwing lines away, muttering like a sixtysomething curmudgeon himself, he removes any possible intimacy with the story and with its characters.
It compares negatively to the sensitive reading of Roth's "The Human Stain" by Arliss Howard, in which his rendering of lyrical phrases gave me chills and was the equivalent of listening to a musical work as significant as Handel's "Messiah" for example.
Instead of portraying a sensitive man dealing with the everyday challenges of a pedestrian life, Guidall gives us an oldish fuddy-duddy, sounding much like the aging, annoying uncle who appears at holiday dinners. Ergo four stars, not five.
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6 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Doggy Bird
- 24-03-13
Excellent narration, my favorite American author
This was a pleasure to hear, such an intelligent book. George Guidall's narration profits from the fact that he seems very comfortable and familiar with the text and its meaning as well as a generally pleasant voice.
I love Philip Roth's novels best of all American fiction, and this effort is a touching though short examination of the struggle with our common fate - to be one day full of life and loving life and the next day to die.
This particular struggle to understand his unavoidable fate concerns one man, very much from New Jersey, whose funeral opens the novella. His life and his work are seen through the prism of his relationships to those who attend his funeral. But the book seems (as so many of Roth's books do) as a personal cri de coeur, a struggle to understand illness in a man whose older brother has never been ill and to understand why he is so alone after so much love and passion in the first six decades of his life.
What I love so much about Roth's writing is the depth of his quest to understand how to live via an incredibly rational intelligence and a great feel for the absurd anchored in a time and American place. Not every book is perfect, but they are all better than most. Roth could only have written in America, not anywhere else in the world - his novels are those of immigrants and their succeeding generations and very anchored in the places and time in which he has lived. Perhaps that is what the Swedes say they don't like in Philip Roth's work - I recently read a comment that Americans don't get Nobel prizes because they are too 'narrow'.....but that is what I love about Roth's novels, how they illuminate what is unique about this time and place in America.
His later novels touch me at a level few authors can reach because they ask the most fundamental questions about life and love and fate while addressing our connection to time and place with an affection and an attention to detail that is unique. In 'American Pastoral' his discussion of Newark and the glove industry are like a paean to the artistry and craft of that time. In 'Everymen' he gives the same treatment to the jewelry trade in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He is able to represent the beauties of the world as it was when he grew up without suggesting that the past was better than the present. He pays tribute to the virtues of the past without worshiping it as better than today. He gives a sense for the nature of generations as they recede from the generations of immigrants who came here.
Roth writes of the landscape of his life with such detail and love, it always makes me emotional to talk about why I love his books so much.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
- Mark
- 10-09-06
Superb
As one of America's preeminent writer's, Philip Roth sets the standard for depth and insight in his novels, and "Everyman" is a worthy addition to his canon. Without judgement or irony, Roth takes us into life's struggle with demons and angels. Roth unfolds, not so much a story, as an observation, capturing the pain of life in such of peace, if not happiness. Whether this speaks to the universal human condition I cannot say, but as a someone who walks with those who are struggling with their live's meanings, I can say that Roth gives something to reflect upon with every turn of the page. This should be required reading.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
- Michael
- 01-07-06
Excellent reading
George Guidall is an excellent reader for Roth's novella -- unlike many other readers, he doesn't overact, and simply gets out of the way of Roth's prose. Recommended.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- A. Potter
- 08-02-16
Existential bourbon on rocks
Wow, this book sneaked up on me. Philip Roth traces the life of a single, anonymous ‘everyman,’ starting at his funeral and then, as if rewinding a videotape, bringing him back to life to reveal the man’s lifelong health problems and big-brother envy, lustful escapades with a hot Danish model at the peak of his advertising career, and the heartbreaking loss of his one good marriage. In the end, we see a humble, resigned, observant, willing, stubborn, sad, mentally capable man still filled with so much love (and lust) but few people left to give it to. I judge great fiction in part by how much I end up thinking about my own life and the lives of the people around me while reading it. I was often forced to pause while my mind careened off to my own thoughts and life, and the lives of my aging parents. Despite so many poor choices, Philip Roth’s 'everyman' is a decent man, but in the end, decency is not enough. Death, decay, and uncertainty still await us all.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
- Brian Michael Fielding
- 02-12-08
Unblinking Existential Portrait of a Man
Roth has written yet another brilliantly full-blooded character in this engrossing story of a man at the end of his life. Examining his own history, his family, his friends and his choices the protagonist is revealed as flawed and vibrantly real person. Who isn't. This is great writing, great literature and the story is filled with tension and release, making ita terrific listening experience. Highly recommended.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Paul
- 28-05-18
Fabulous Phillip Roth
Roth explores the thoughts that go through an aged man. Most older men will relate. Reader was spectacular. The words of Roth are like hands flowing through snow
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
- M. I. Wolfson
- 10-08-08
Depressing
If your over 70 years old, don't read this
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1 person found this helpful