Everyman (Philip Roth, 2006)

“Everyman” opens with the funeral of an unnamed protagonist: a restrained event populated mostly by silence, which the reader experiences as an outsider. Philip Roth uses this starting point to barrage the reader with illnesses, failed marriages, and death, and tell the life of the deceased, unnamed man, focusing solely on his darkest moments. The novel draws inspiration from the 15th century morality play “The Summoning of Everyman,” in which God tallies a man’s good and evil deeds to determine his salvation. Roth similarly seeks to measure the worth of man, in accordance to his sins and moral failures. Despite the bleak stage Roth gives him, the reader is able to identify with the protagonist. This is “Everyman’s” greatest success: the universality of the human weaknesses it describes. We are the everyman.

Like most of Roth’s works, “Everyman” is constructed flawlessly, carefully releasing information about the protagonist’s life until the funeral’s silences acquire deep meaning. Roth’s prose flows very smoothly, and allows you to know the main character, but never to enter his mind. Like God’s judgment in the original passion play, Roth welcomes the reader to measure the value of the everyman’s life with no room for subjectivity. “Everyman” is not a perfect book, but it is definitely another triumph by one of the essential writers of our time.

Highly Recommended (A-)

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer, 2005)

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" follows Oskar Schell, an extremely creative boy who lost his father on 9/11. He sets out to find the lock for a mysterious key his father left behind, traversing New York’s myriad neighborhoods. The novel has moments of greatness, particularly Oskar’s grandfather’s descriptions of the bombings of Dresden, and the child’s initial encounters in his journey. Foer also allows the reader to enter the protagonist's imaginative mind through the book itself, which intertwines text and images beautifully, and even plays with the typeset. The last third of the novel, however, feels rushed, as it attempts to resolve several complex storylines in a limited number of pages. By the end of the book, Foer has built a complex mythology around Oskar's unique vision of the world, but fails to fully develop it, thus providing a lackluster climax.

The novel is often heartbreaking and reminds us that we would all like to be able to respond to tragedy like children: to imagine that skyscrapers can grow roots to avoid ever falling down, and that our loved ones left us an impossible mission so we can stay close to them even after they depart.

Recommended (B+)