John Dugdale
Mortality Tale
In Philip Roth’s 2001 novella, The Dying Animal, the protagonist, David Kepesh, was forced to confront mortality in a former lover – a young woman sentenced to death by cancer. In Everyman, also a short work, the dying animal becomes the hero himself: it opens with his funeral, and ends with the operation that killed him.
The narrative enclosed by these scenes begins with the unnamed figure’s largely idyllic childhood in 1940s New Jersey, where he eagerly runs errands for his jeweller father (whose shop is called Everyman), reveres his older brother Howie, and adores swimming in the sea. Although after naval service and art school
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind
'Don’t think of Watergate as being about a break-in, but about what the break-in exposed: dirty ops, dirty tricks, dirty money.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-the-presidents-mendacity
'The leopard skins that she wore like a big-game hunter, the swaggering strut ... every detail semaphored power and valiantly atoned for inadequacy.'
Peter Conrad weighs up Laura Fairrie's documentary about Jackie Collins and her 'shag-happy fiction'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/easy-writer