Everyman by Philip Roth
Published 2007 · 182 pages · 39,767 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Everyman to read?
Everyman scores 42 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Roth writes plain American English with medical and jewelry-trade terms (stents, carotid endarterectomy, loupe, tubular box clasp) that the text explains in context. Nothing approaches the ornamental vocabulary of Lolita; it is closer to the clarity of The Remains of the Day.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Many sentences run long and pile up clauses, such as the funeral eulogy, the sea-swimming reverie and the gravedigger's procedure. Dialogue stays short and direct, so the demand is moderate, above The Great Gatsby and well below Proust.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- The book stays with bodies, hospital rooms, jewelry cases and a cemetery. Its philosophy, that there is only the body and no afterlife, arrives through specific scenes. It is more concrete than The Remains of the Day.
- Information density: 47 out of 100
- Roth packs in surgical procedures, watch brands, family history and the economics of a small store. The pace is steady and the book is short, so the density is manageable, like Gatsby with more medical and commercial detail.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- The narrator tells you nearly everything outright, including his guilt and envy. What remains for the reader is judging how far his self-justifications about the affairs and his sons can be trusted. That gives a modest amount of inference, lighter than Nick Carraway's bias in Gatsby.
- Symbolic density: 48 out of 100
- The loupe, the diamond, the watches and the sea recur, and the title is allegorical, but they are signposted rather than hidden. Restrained symbolism like that of The Remains of the Day applies here, with a touch more weight from the title's morality-play echo.
- Ironic distance: 42 out of 100
- Roth lets the protagonist cast himself as an average man while the text shows his betrayals, and Phoebe's voice cuts through. The irony is gentle and sustained rather than satirical, far from Lolita's seductive unreliability.
- Resolution withholding: 28 out of 100
- The plot closes. The man dies on the operating table and the book says so plainly. What is left open is the question of meaning, since the book offers no consolation, which is less ambiguity than in Gatsby.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- The funeral frame opens onto a non-chronological chain of hospital memories from 1942 to the 2000s. The jumps are clear and the structure is a simple, loose life review, a little more fractured than a diary but far from The Master and Margarita.
How Everyman is regarded
Everyman holds a literary regard score of 66 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Prizes
- International Booker Prize 2011, awarded to Philip Roth
- PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 2007, winner
Where the story of Everyman takes place
- One man's life, the 1940s to the 2000s (1945 to 2006), the main setting