Everyman
By Philip Roth
(Vintage, $13)
Many people say they'd like to die peacefully in their sleep. No one adds the further hypothetical condition, simply and obviously, that the death they'd desire would be before the years of degeneration and, in truth, decomposition that accompany old age. While you may exercise, eat right, and feel great, your body is slowly killing you, and there's nothing you can do about it.

If Philip Roth's latest, a compact tale titled Everyman, has a thesis, it's this: You're going to die, and it's not going to be a barrel of laughs. As you age, one medical problem will snowball into more and more problems; your visits to the hospital will be as frequent as those to the toilet; and, of course, all your friends and acquaintances will die before you, so you'll be alone, cold and bitter. You'll learn that fancy doctors these days can take a vein out of your leg and stick it in your heart, as if you were some lonesome, miserable Rubik's Cube. You'll learn that a stent can be inserted to expand your coronary arteries in order to diminish high blood pressure. You'll learn that your bones have the consistency of Funyuns. What, then, is the purpose of a lifetime of healthy living?

The protagonist of Everyman, whose namelessness draws a plentitude of reader-supplied monikers (mine was Olden Coughfield - feel free to use it), is himself dead. The book opens at his funeral, takes a leap back in time to the beginnings of his medical problems, and then worms its way back to his corpse. If this smacks of familiarity, recall Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which opens at Ivan's funeral, takes a leap back in time to the beginnings of his medical problems, and then worms its way back to his corpse. The major difference here is that purely Rothian secular morality and sugarless wit. One of the great lines in the book occurs when Coughfield, who teaches a painting class at the nursing home, explains to one eager student, "Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work." Is Everyman an exposition on The Unbearable Lightness of Being's evil grin, or is it a 182-page argument for assisted suicide? We'll leave you to decide. The big question, though, is: Will you go out with some dignity? - J.D. Reid