EVERYMAN by Philip Roth

Everyman is the least impressive Philip Roth novel in years, maybe decades. It may well be the most mediocre work of his entire career. It's a lightweight, decidedly minor performance, seemingly not the work of the American master who gave us that Everest of outrage, Sabbath's Theatre. The elegiac is not Roth's mode, and when he essays it he lapses too easily into banality. Everyman reads like a book any good writer might have written; nothing says 'Roth' here. I sincerely hope this is not the shape of Rothian things to come.