But Everyman is not ER; it fascinates not merely, or not primarily, because of its clinical accuracy, but because of its sensuous intelligence and extraordinary rhythmic sentences, which seem simply to emanate from consciousness, but which we know — all of us who have ever attempted to get anything down on paper — emerge only slowly through revision and rewriting and critical self-examination and excruciating care. On almost every page there are those little cadenzas that characterise Roth’s work, those moments where he seems to hit on a note and take off with it:

In those eleven months before he died he seemed pierced by bewilderment, dazed by his diminishment, dazed by his helplessness, dazed to think that the dying man enfeebled in a wheelchair … could answer to his name.

He riffs memorably on one character: the

vitriolic despondency of one once assertively in the middle of everything who was now in the middle of nothing. Was himself now nothing, nothing but a motionless cipher angrily awaiting the blessing of an eradication that was absolute.

Everyman is a profound account of the agony which accompanies the ecstasies in ‘Song of Myself’:

And I know that all the men ever born are also my brothers … and the women my sisters and lovers.

Roth no longer makes a claim to be the greatest living American writer: Everyman says simply, ‘I am.’

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