The medieval morality play known as “Everyman” belongs to a genre that no longer exists: a drama about death with a happy ending. The rudimentary action is set in motion when Death visits Everyman to demand that he appear instantly before the judgment seat. The rest of the play consists of Everyman’s search for character witnesses – people or things that will take the final journey with him to plead his case before God. But one after another, all his resources fail. Fellowship, Kindred, and Goods refuse to go with him; more terrible still, Beauty, Strength, and Discretion, even his Five-Wits, “all run fro [sic] me full fast.”

Yet “Everyman” does not leave its hero completely bereft.When everything physical has deserted him, Everyman is reminded that he still has spiritual allies. There is Knowledge, that is, the knowledge of salvation in Christ; Confession, which frees him from guilt; and Good Deeds, which will argue on his behalf before the heavenly judge. Death, for the medieval author of “Everyman,” is not an end but a passage, and the true believer has everything he needs to make the passage safely. That is why the play, which starts out as a pageant of loss and terror, can end with a ringing consolation: “Now hath he made ending,” Knowledge proclaims, “Methinketh that I hear angels sing / And make great joy and melody / Where Everyman’s soul received shall be.”

When Philip Roth named his new novel “Everyman” (Houghton Mifflin, 192 pages, $24), he did not just have this medieval precursor in mind; he was deliberately setting out to rewrite it and to unwrite it. Mr. Roth has no quarrel with the first part of Everyman’s ordeal, the emptying-out and stripping-down in preparation for death. His novel is, in fact, a transposition of this ordeal to the 21st century from the 15th, and from allegory to novelistic realism. What Mr. Roth denies, what he excises from his Everyman’s story with surgical rigor, is the promise of a world to come, the consolation that makes death theoretically bearable.

“Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life,” Mr. Roth writes,

and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn’t stand the complete unadultness – the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. No hocuspocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us.

The question Mr. Roth asks in “Everyman” is simple: How does such a man, who says loudly what all of us suspect to be true, act in the face of death? The answer, as disclosed in this compressed novel or novella, is that he is both base and noble, antic and serious, contemptible and admirable. Mr. Roth’s protagonist, kept carefully unnamed, is a retired advertising man, an art director who postponed his early ambition to be a painter until it was too late. He has divorced three wives and fathered three children – two sons, who hate him, and a daughter, who is devoted to him. He is Jewish, but has no interest in Judaism, except as it surfaces in his memories of his fiercely beloved parents. He has few friends and lives mostly in isolation in a retirement community in New Jersey, where he moved to escape Manhattan after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The unfolding of this modest biography is the substance of “Everyman,” which opens at its protagonist’s graveside, flashes back to tell his life story, then circles around to close with his death during coronary surgery. Compared to the erotic and neurotic Gargantuas who have populated Mr. Roth’s novels in the past, his hero this time seems nearly wholesome in his averageness. Indeed, Mr. Roth, bent on creating a universal allegory, insists on this point: “he was not flamboyant or deformed or extreme in any way … he was reasonable and kindly, an amicable, moderate, industrious man.”

But if this Everyman is no Mickey Sabbath, masturbating demonically on his mistress’s grave, he is also not quite the homme moyen sensuel that Mr. Roth clearly wants him to be. Rather, he comes across as the distilled essence of all of Mr. Roth’s protagonists: bright, ferociously articulate, self-obsessed, maddened by lust, ensnared by family, endlessly pleading his case before the world.The family resemblance to Portnoy and Zuckerman and Kepesh is inescapable, especially when even this quiet man – who insists that “most people … would have thought of him as square” – falls into a sexual obsession of a very Rothian kind.The hero ruins his second marriage, by far his happiest, out of overpowering lust for a young Danish model, and his odes to her body (“that little hole and what she liked him to do with it”) have the unmistakable accent of Mr. Roth’s transgressive eroticism.

In fact, it is the accent, the voice – even more than the concern with sex, Jewishness, and death – that mark the hero of “Everyman” as yet another incarnation of Philip Roth. As in a laboratory experiment, Mr. Roth has removed all the other variables that go into the creation of a novel – plot, characters, setting – in order to demonstrate that his voice is the one indispensable element in his work. Here, for instance, the protagonist is railing against his adult sons, who have never forgiven him for leaving their mother:

He had tried often enough when they were young men – but then they were too young and angry to understand, and now they were too old and angry to understand. And what was there to understand? It was inexplicable to him – the excitement they could seriously persist in deriving from his denunciation. He had done what he did the way that he did it as they did what they did the way they did it.

And so on for paragraphs, with the intoxicated, hammering eloquence that is Mr. Roth’s truest register. It is no coincidence that this tirade of self-justification is where Mr. Roth’s prose reaches its peak. In fact, Mr. Roth’s style could be defined as the music of self-justification, the uninterruptible speech of a man desperate to prove his case to the world. That is why Mr. Roth’s best novels can be so claustrophobic: Even when they are not first-person monologues, they serve as echo chambers for their heroes, designed to amplify their pleading voices. It also explains why some readers have such an allergic reaction to Mr. Roth. If you don’t like his personality, his novels offer no place to escape it, no other consciousness in which to take refuge.

Despite the title, then, “Everyman” never really becomes a universal allegory. No character who sings arias as fluent and impassioned as Mr. Roth’s could ever be abstract enough for that. Yet here Mr. Roth’s rhetoric is so pure, and his themes so large, that his Everyman becomes, if not typical, then archetypal. That is the effect of a passage such as this one, when he visits his parents’ graves in the cemetery where he will soon be buried himself:

They were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones, and he stood as close to the bones as he could, as though the proximity might link him up with them and mitigate the isolation born of losing his future and reconnect him with all that had gone. … Between him and those bones there was a great deal going on, far more than now transpired between him and those still clad in their flesh. The flesh melts away but the bones endure.

Mr. Roth refuses to euphemize the dead as “remains,” as though some other part of them had left the corpse behind.They are simply bones.Yet accepting this fact does not, strangely, render the mourner mute,as logically it should. “There was a great deal going on” between the living and the dead,the bones and the bones-still-clad-in-flesh.

This realization, coming at the end of a novel in which death provokes so much fear, anger, and wildness, feels something like an epiphany. Bereft of supernatural consolation, Mr. Roth and his Everyman find the next best thing in the Shakespearean humanism that teaches “the readiness is all.” When, shortly after this reverie, the protagonist encounters a gravedigger who patiently explains the technique of burial, the allusion to Act V of “Hamlet” is broad but completely ingenuous. That Mr. Roth earns the right to this allusion, coming at the end of this terrible, clear-sighted, very moving book, is the best proof of his true stature as a writer.

akirsch@nysun.com