Everyman by Philip Roth

Roth's canvas is a poignant meditation on being human. His everyman is painted fearful of illness and death and of growing old. Millicent tells him his choice (and ours) in life is to either be a force upon life and take control of it or let life control him. Following the latter, he is rendered worrisome, vulnerable, incapacitated by his choices, and limited in his ability to act. He believes that life is to be endured and taken as it comes. But as an old man, staring at imminent death, he is stricken with loneliness, desiring of intimacy, left to reckon with a fate of bleakness, oblivion, and nothingness, stagnate in his loss of youth and vitality.

Alienating everyone he cares for, save his daughter Nancy, he retires to his joy of painting. This finally renews his creativity and imagination, but, soon, it becomes boring and unsatisfying. He (and us) cannot sustain himself on something like painting alone. He misses the human connection, that need to love and be loved. No affair or lust for a younger woman or nostalgia for swimming or his father's jewelry store can fill that void or offer an escape.

Everyman is a novel about facing mortality. It is a novel about what it means to grow old. But it is also something more: like the bones in his parents' graves, it is a novel that strips down humanity raw. By depicting humans for what they are, it teaches us to live with vigor and meaning, with love towards others, lest we become like the everyman: feeble, ridden with regret and loss, becoming aware of our mistakes only when it's too late, diminished to a caricature of ourselves, all brought upon by ourselves: “I am seventy-one. This is the man I have made," he says.

With some of the finest prose I've ever read, this is one of the best books I've read.