Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club. I'm the program's producer Andy Bowers, and our subject today is the novel Everyman by Philip Roth. Our critics have gathered, although not in the usual cafe, and they're ready to give you their unvarnished opinions of the book. We'll get underway right after this.

Nationwide here. You know, the insurance and financial services company, life comes at you fast.

We've told you, now you tell us, submit your moment at life comes at you fast.com.

If we like it, we'll post it live in Times Square.

Submit your moment now at life comes at you fast.com.

I do.

Nationwide mutual insurance company and affiliated companies, Columbus, Ohio. Welcome to Slate's audio book club. I'm Slate's culture editor, Megan O'Rourke, and I'm here with our usual book club members, Katie Roifee, author of Still She Haunts Me, and Stephen Metcalfe, Slate's Critic at Large. Today, we're discussing Everyman by Philip Roth. Our regular venue

is booked today, so we're here in my living room. We're going to organize our discussion

around three passages, which we'll read over the course of the discussion. And Steve will read

our first passage, but before that, I'll give a quick plot summary of the book, and you guys

should feel free to jump in and elaborate, too. So every man is a very short book. It's the story of an unnamed man, the story of

his life. We begin at his funeral, and we progress back to his childhood and then up to the point

of his death, so it has a very striking structure. Our every man was born in in New Jersey to an immigrant family and over the

course of his life he's born, he cheats and he dies. But along the way he suffers an extensive

amount of surgery and and illness and the book is a lot about the the kind of the ravages of the

body and the fact that a person might be

reliable. This is a man with a very reliable character, but their bodies might not be reliable

at all. And it's a story of a family, among other things, but it's also the story of adultery and

all of the themes that Roth loves so much. So, Steve, do you want to start us off?

Sure.

So as you said, the book opens at the man's graveside.

He's being buried.

...