Everyman / Un Homme by Philip Roth
Translated in French by Josée Kamoun
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist, born in 1933. He gained fame with the 1959 story collection Goodby, Columbus, and has since become one of the most honoured authors of his generation: Roth’s books have twice been awarded the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received the Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral. Everyman was published in the US 2006 and in France in 2007.
Everyman – we never know his name – has been married several times. He has two sons from his first marriage who resent him for leaving their mother, and one daughter from his second marriage who treats him with kindness and compassion, though he divorced her mother after beginning an affair with a 24-year-old Danish model, who subsequently became his third wife. Having divorced her as well, he has moved in his old age to a retirement community at the New Jersey shore, where he lives alone and attempts to paint, having passed up a career as an artist early in his life to work in advertising in order to support himself and his family. The book traces the protagonist’s feelings as he gets increasingly old and sick, and his reflections of his own past, which has included his share of misdeeds and mistakes, as he ponders his impending death.
Philip Roth by Matthew Bandsuch for NYTimes (May 7, 2006)
When I started to read Roth ten years ago, I was not very found of his writing. I would rather read his homonym Henry Roth. Both have this desire to ask questions about their middle-class Jewish-Americans, but if I really enjoyed Roth (Henry), I was not convinced by Roth (Philip) style . At this time, I devoured the Mercy of a Rude Stream’s four toms by Henry Roth: Une étoile brille sur Mount Morris Park (A Star Shines Over Mount Morris Park), Un rocher sur l’Hudson (A Diving Rock on the Hudson), La fin de l’exil (From Bondage) and Requiem pour Harlem (Requiem for Harlem) and scraped Philip Roth after reading Portnoy et son complexe (Portnoy’s complaint), La Tache (The Human Stain), Opération Shylock : une confession (Operation Shylock: A Confession), etc.
Perhaps, I was too young; perhaps I couldn’t understand the difference between erotic and pornographic at this time, perhaps I couldn’t appreciate contemporary authors…. Because I don’t think that Philip Roth has changed, I think I have changed. When I moved to the US 18 month ago, I bring in my luggage Pastorale Américaine (American Pastoral) and Le Théâtre de Sabbath (Sabbath’s Theatre) and I started to discover really his novels, to appreciate his sense of body, of pain, of his sexual desire description… With Everyman, Roth has dealt with the destiny of a man and of everyman. A superbly work I have read in a great French version.
