ROTH-O-RAMA

Today The New York Times Book Review published the results of a poll to determine the best work of American fiction of the last 25 years. Toni Morrison's Beloved took top honors, but Philip Roth appeared to be the voters' true sweetheart.

Roth had more books in the running than any other author. Apart from his 1997 masterpiece American Pastoral, a prestigious board of judges that included Don DeLillo and Marilynne Robinson gave numerous votes to Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, The Plot Against America and other Roth titles.

I guess this doesn't come as a big surprise, seeing that the prolific, abrasive and ingenious writer has won just about every major literary prize imaginable, including the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

My favorite Roth novel is American Pastoral, the story of a successful businessman whose life unravels when his daughter commits an act of political terrorism in the late 1960s.

A few days ago I finished his new novel, Everyman. At a mere 182 pages, it's far shorter than most of his works. The prose is lean and exquisite. In keeping with his previous books, Roth expresses a compassionate but undeniably bleak outlook on human nature.

Everyman starts off with the funeral of the man character, a man in his 70s whose name we never learn. Then, in a series of flashbacks, Roth takes us back through the man's life, from his happy childhood to an adult life riddled with illness and marital catastrophes.