Rent Everyman

Synopsis

Philip Roth's 27th novel begins at its unnamed protagonist's funeral, then leaps back in time to various moments of injury and deterioration (a childhood hernia, a burst appendix, heart failures of various kinds, the sad end of friends and family), and finally concludes with his death upon the operating table. Life, in Roth's devastating and Godless universe, is merely a delayed appointment with the void. It is a terrifying and brilliant novel, a literary scream of defiance against the fragility of the body and mind. Again and again, the protagonist tries to stave off death through passion, sex, love, creativity--by any means possible. In Roth's hands, this angry, tortured, fatuous striving becomes the stuff of great literature.

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