“Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

I’ve read almost all of Roth’s books, and he continues to reign supreme as my favorite author, though Everyman was definitely not my favorite of his works.

Like many of his novels, Roth explores some dark themes in this book – particularly those related to growing old and coming to terms with your life’s work. This book is part of Roth’s short novel phase (Indignation, Nemesis, etc) and like the others, it is a chapterless book that falls well short of 200 pages. It was a fast, pleasant book, that did make me think about mortality in a different way. That said, it doesn’t really showcase Roth’s genius the way American Pastoral or Letting Go do.