#1 New York Times bestselling author Johanna Lindsay presents
a powerfully romantic Regency-era tale that is breathtaking in scope
and wondrously passionate.
When Sebastian Townshend, son of the eighth Earl of Edgewood, was banished from his family due to the tragic results of a duel, he vowed never to return to England. Now living on the continent, Sebastian has forged a new identity as a deadly mercenary, The Raven. But his former neighbor, Lady Margaret Landor, has different plans for him. Back in England, Sebastian's father has had several accidents and Margaret suspects foul play and deception that reach as far back as the infamous duel. Convinced that only Sebastian can set the situation to rights, Margaret arranges a scandalous bargain with him that includes Sebastian's returning home as her husband. As the newlyweds uncover a deadly scheme, a fierce passion blossoms between them, which neither anticipated -- and neither can resist.
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Everyman
List Price: $24.00
Our Price: $13.97
Your Save: $ 10.03 ( 42% )
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Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Book written by: Philip Roth
Average Customer Rating:  
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Everyman - book description
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780618735167
ISBN: 061873516X
Label: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 192
Publication Date: 2006-04
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Studio: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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Editorial Reviews:
Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality.
The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes.
A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be.
The terrain of this powerful novel -- Roth's twenty-seventh book and the fifth to be published in the twenty-first century -- is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.
Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century allegorical play, a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Everyman? I hope not.
Comment: The title makes nos sense, the story well crafted might interest writers but moves ever so slow and seems to go down hill all the way to the end. The most likeable characters seem those who die out early like his father. But the main character is a sad case of one with gifts that he never appreciated or acknowledged. This is a depressing story, a hard story to tell and the author is to be congratualted for being so skilled in telling it. But I wish I had spent the time reading something else beside a well told unredeeming tale.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Momento Borey
Comment: Forgive the puny title of this review - you see, I just have to do something whimsical to cheer myself up after reading this unrelentingly depressing book. Roth probably intends for his short work to be a brisk bucket of ice-water into the face of any cherished illusions about mortality one desperately clutch at, and the spare design of the book's cover permits no (visual) ebullience, either; a fair warning, indeed, of the very dismal (and, after a while, rather dull) subject-matter within.
So, what can Everyman offer, then, for the discearning reader? Well, the writing is pretty good, which is what one would expect from an author of Roth's pedigree. Moreover, one can take a certain, grim comfort in Roth's (and Everyman's) unsparingly brutal, unflinchingly honest look at illness, old-age and death. Roth seems to believe that, by doing so, a certain dignity is bequeathed to an otherwise ultimately puzzling, and increasingly ever more painful existence. In fact, in reading some of the positive reviews of this work, what stands out is how very appreciative many people are of Roth's stark honesty, giving voice, as it were, to those who have no recourse (anymore) but to face up to life's biggest challenge, the big (D)eath.
But let's face, too much of this sort of thing will, just as often, make a reader want to reach for the pills or gun even sooner than otherwise. After enduring Everyman, the only antidote to fight such bleakness is a complete immersion into the very thing that Everyman would, undoubtedly shun (and shudder over much more than his own demise), namely: psychic mediums, with their promises of a glorious afterlife for us all. For this reader, however, a rosey glow of angel wings is merely the opposite extreme of Roth's vampire-like ability to suck out any and all hope one may hold of existence beyond the grave. Accordingly, I am taking the middle path: I will hope for an afterlife of some sort, prepare, as best I can, for None (by-the-by, can Any of us Truly comprehend non-existence, including Roth? I think not), and, in the Mean time, divert myself via heaps of celebrity trivia, globs of junk food and mindless infotainment. Well, it's the American way, after all, until it all blinks out (hey, who are those people at the foot of my hospital bed? My god, it looks like the young Lucille Ball...and...Helen Reddy! Can that be right? Are They leading me onto this pretty rainbow bridge? Well, Gee. Who'da thunk it???...)
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Body Electric Shorts Out
Comment: This is the perfect way to take your Roth if you dig him in short doses. Roth has written a Saul Bellow novella and it shows why Roth should stick with this format. I love this book - it says its piece and gets out. The passages about the boy and the ocean bring you to tears. So lovely, so full of life, so full of wistful knowledge that you can try to stay with a beautiful moment but you're losing it as it happens. Every time I plunge into the surf at Ocean City, I think about Roth's transcendent meditation on the loss of youth, the loss of courage and the foreboding shadows of oblivion on the face of the water. I paddle hard and strong into the surf, tears in my eyes. Lovely stuff.
N.B. As usual, his dialogue stinks but there's so little of it, you can skim over it and miss nothing.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Just as he'd feared from the start"
Comment: I have avoided reading Phillip Roth for so long now, it was becoming a point of pride - so many people liked him so unreservedly that I was sure he wouldn't appeal to me. Additionally, in every review I've ever read about any of his works, the characters he chose to write about sounded distateful and the manner of writing self-indulgent. Since the conclusion usually was that Roth was his characters, I felt even less reason to seek him out. I also believed, fairly or unfairly, that Roth began writing at a time that was so buttoned up and reserved that the nature of his explicit work garnered him undue attention, and that graphic sex and foul language masked an average talent. Once his reputation was sealed though, he became an icon and too difficult to dislodge.
Over the years, I have often picked his books up off the shelves, chastising myself for not investing the time to see what the hubbub was all about, but eventually replaced them as I remembered just how turned off I was after reading one review or another. I suppose graphic depictions of sexual activities have their place in literature, but personally I don't believe it's justified nearly as much as it takes place. When I run across those scenes, I usually feel as though the author is trying to manipulate me by trying to excite me - and I really rather they didn't do that.
Anyway, back to Roth: Maybe this is the kinder, genter, mellower Roth, because there was only one mention of a graphic sexual nature - one that was so totally unnecessary (and surprising, given that up to that point there had been none) that it bordered on the ludicrous. It literally jarred me out of the story, and it took some effort to get back into the narrative. I can't believe any author hopes that happens to his readers.
Aside from this incident, the rest of the story follows a man, an 'everyman' as Roth might have us believe, who is waning in life and power, who has reached the last stage of his life, full of regrets and afraid of death. He has no belief system in place, and has cut himself off from nearly everyone. Even those he's remained close to are not in the position to relieve his anxieties anymore.
If all this sounds like a bit of a downer, it is, up to a point. It's only in the last few pages where Roth provides for his character to finally grow up. A secular man, nonetheless our 'everyman' finds a very ancient comfort to guide him into the next stage, and steps forward to (unknowingly) accept his fate with a maturity lacking for his entire life.
I get the feeling the 'Everyman's' intended audience is Phillip Roth. If so, I hope he finds real comfort in the ending he's constructed. Though I could not relate to nearly any detail in this everyman's life, Roth made me empathize completely with the idea of a man approaching the end of his life who has regrets and looks forward with fear and dread. I can even say I sympathized with him - we all do things that have hurt others, though we may not have wanted it to turn out that way. To be consumed with obsessions to the point of ignoring the people who are important to us is an American pastime, and Roth's everyman has to face up to a lifetime of it. Because of this, it's easy to believe that for him, "Old age isn't a battle, it's a massacre."
'Everyman' won't make me run out and buy up the rest of Roth's work, though I can now say that I'm no longer unfairly prejudiced against him. Regardless of what I may have thought in the past, he is definitely talented enough as a writer to illuminate this everyman, and whether it's a self portrait or not, Roth effectively points the reader right to the heart of his character.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre"
Comment: This book opens, aptly, with the funeral of a nameless protagonist. It then follows on with a series of flashbacks on his life, raising probing questions concerning his (or really, everyman's) existence - on the tedium of day-to-day living, the pain of regret and loss, the debilitating nature of illness, and above all, "the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life". Most of the book focusses on his later years, when these existential struggles converge with painful and livid intensity. Such is the power of the narrative, despite its economy of words, that it manages to convey the full extent of the protagonist's conflicted self with an almost terrifying rawness. In a particularly memorable scene in the closing pages, our protagonist walks through the graveyard he would eventually be buried in, and has the gravedigger explain to him the finer points of grave-digging in methodical detail. Resigned to death, he draws comfort from it - that final leveller which alone is predictable in an otherwise uncertain and brutish existence.
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