Philip Roth's Everyman is a profound book about the physical deterioration of the body and the accompanying hopelessness and helplessness that accompanies this experience. To make matters worse, the hero of the story - he remains nameless throughout the story, I assume he is the "everyman" - has desperately botched up his life with numerous affairs. Three marriages are ruined by his unchecked passions. Two children are alienated from him. His life is one of deep regret - regret made more intense by his hopelessness in the face of bodily deterioration. A convinced atheist, he doesn't even have religion to help him cope.

Everyman suffers deep regrets, but remains unchanged in his passions. "But there's no remaking reality" is his life's slogan (78).

The most powerful sections of this book are the reflections on the painful process of aging. While in a rest home he teaches a painting class. During class a student, Millicent Kramer, experiences deep back pain. He invites her to rest on his bed. We expect that this situation may end in another sexual encounter, but instead, it ends with Millicent's open reflections on aging:

"I do apologize for all this," she said as he was leaving. "It's just that pain makes you so alone." And here the fortitude gave way again and left her sobbing into her hands. "It's so shameful."

"There's nothing shameful about it."

"There is, there is," she wept. "The not being able to look after oneself, the pathetic need to be comforted..."

"In the circumstances, none of that is remotely shameful."

"You're wrong. You don't know. The dependence, the helpless, the isolation, the dread - it's all so ghastly and shameful. The pain makes you frightened of yourself. The utter otherness of it is awful." (91)

Everyman encourages her to take another pain pill ("What could it hurt?"). Within a week, she kills herself through an overdose of the same pills.

In spite of the inevitability of continuing physical decay, Everyman harbors the fantasy that he may regain his youthful strength. At the rest home, he watches young women jog by. One day, he gets up the nerve to introduce himself to one such woman. He oogles over her body and yearns for her. He asks her if "she is game" for some fooling around. She takes his number, but never calls him. After this rejection, he reflects, "Nothing any longer kindled his curiosity or answered his needs, not his painting, not his family, not his neighbors, nothing except the young women who jogged by him on the boardwalk in the morning. My God, he thought, the man I once was! The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No 'otherness' to be felt anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being" (130).

Although he never completely resigns himself to his eventual demise, he slowly begins to accept its inevitability. "But now it appeared that like any number of the elderly, he was in the process of becoming less and less and would have to see his aimless days through to the end as no more than what he was - the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing" (161).

If Everyman could write his own autobiography, he would call it The Life and Death of a Male Body (52). Sadly, this is the most he can say about life. Whether it is the pain or his atheistic philosophy speaking, the tragedy remains. He is no more than his body. He has lived exclusively for his body - and paid severely in broken relationships and empty passions. The loss of his body is thus the greatest evil he can imagine. His pain is incurable.

Early in the book we learn that Everyman loves to reflect upon the "imperishable" quality of diamonds. The word "imperishable" excites him. He yearns for "eternal life" but one gets the sense that he would waste his eternity in an endless pursuit of fleshly fantasies and infidelities.

Does this accurately reflect the ultimately experience for us? Does Roth intend Everyman to reflect the human condition or one possible way to approach life? If this tragic and empty end is true for all, then what do we do with Everyman's older healthy brother who seems to have his life together or Everyman's daughter who unconditionally loves him in spite of how he has treated her? Is their virtue commendable or futile?

In short, I found this to be a profound, disturbing, challenging, and provocative book. Not only will I think differently about the inevitability of the deterioration of the body, I will also think differently about how I will live my life.