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Call it "The Death of Ivan Ilych 2: Modern Times."

It's true, Roth is considered to be a modern day Tolstoy. But is this type of tale (already told and retold)... necessary?

It's all my fault. In my summer marathon of small novels (though inversely large in quality) I've been through devastation after devastation, drama and death... Animal, Michael K., Elizabeth Costello, et al. This one involves the unnamed EVERYMAN, who is, of course, you and me, and it takes the novelistic maneuverings that Roth is so much revered for to transform it into THE QUINTESSENTIAL LIFE STORY. Or is it actually The Story of Death?

Anyway, Everyman goes in & out of the hospital, and this would probably be where most of the action takes part. The second place where most of the action takes place? The cemetery. But Ilych, only by the blunt bump he receives as a stupid oversight, is doomed in a different way than our (modern) Everyman is. Everyman has a say in things, knows the medical lingo, has money. Their lives are different; fates however, irreparably equal.

The Rothian motifs do pile up. We remember the countless cemetery scenes from other Roth novels, but more specifically "Sabbath's Theater." (This one also begins there.) All the sex ("Deception"). All the dire emotions washing over older, broken Jewish men ("The Human Stain").

The anecdote is necessary: always necessary. The themes have not been drained yet. Although the tale is quite specific, it must be mentioned that Roth masters that considerable challenge of making one man stand for the billion of others. The shared fate of death, the Unifyer, is what Roth, as an aging novelist, as an aging man, contemplates; with an ease & with a poetry as brutal as Tolstoy, Roth knows exactly how to earn his IMMORTALITY.