A FEW YEARS AGO the American writer Alice Sebold published a wildly successful novel of grief and recovery entitled The Lovely Bones.

Narrated by a young adolescent woman looking down from a construct called “heaven”, and observing the heartbreak of her family and friends who have been shattered by her murder, the novel’s vast success was predicated, in part, upon its elegiac, reassuring vision of the Sweet Hereafter.

More than that, it brazenly embraced that most spurious word in the modern American lexicon: closure. Now always cited in the wake of any personal or civic tragedy, “closure” gives fuel to the lie that you can somehow cauterise life’s most appalling wounds; that you will, in time, overcome the black recesses of grief and negotiate your way into calmer waters.

No wonder the Sebold novel sold millions: it took one of life’s most unthinkable tragedies — the loss of a child — and anaesthetised it with a bucket-full of balm.

But can anyone ever truly achieve closure when faced with the realisation that corporeal existence is but a frail enterprise, under constant capricious threat from disease and quotidian life? And then there’s the sheer awful biological fact that each and every person dies. Or, as Philip Roth notes in his brilliant new novel, Everyman: “Everyone thinks at some time or other that in a hundred years no one now alive will be on earth — the overwhelming force will sweep the place clean.”

Indeed, when it comes to ruminating on morality — the way we will all be forced to depart “our fullness for that endless nothing” — Roth refuses to play the closure card or trade in specious bromides on the negation of pain. To him, death is brutally final.

And considering that the America he inhabits has recently borne witness to a widespread “Christian renewal” he shows considerable nerve by articulating life’s cruel conclusiveness with atheistic bluntness.

“The flesh melts away but the bones endure. The bones were the only solace there was to one who put no stock in an afterlife and knew without a doubt that God was a fiction and this was the only life he’d have.”

As a novelist, Roth has always addressed the grubby stuff of life (achieving fame in the late Sixties with that novel about onanism). His continuing interests throughout his long, ever-astonishing career have always revolved around the lies that we tell ourselves to get through the day, the disaster area that is interpersonal relationships, the sham optimism that keeps mercantile America spinning, the crippling emotional ties that bind. Now, in Everyman, he confronts the nullity towards which we all travel.

But Roth is not the sort of writer who trades in elegant metaphysical ruminations about death and its attendant mysteries. If anything, this novel is rooted in the realpolitik of human transience, and the horror of growing old: “The inevitable onslaught that is the end of life.”

Roth’s Everyman isn’t some archetypal amalgamation of humankind. Rather, in keeping with this writer’s tradition of rooting everything in the here and now, he’s a New York advertising guy — and someone who has fouled up many aspects of his life.

His first marriage was a catastrophe, and his two sons from that maelstrom have been estranged from him for years. Marriage No 2, on the other hand, was a happy one — until the passion drained away and he started to engage in that most common of midlife male mistakes: thinking with one’s penis.

His wife’s denunciation of him — when she discovers he’s been shtupping a Danish model — is a masterpiece of outraged invective. And his third out-of-guilt marriage to the Danish model is a testament to that old adage: sleep with a bimbo, end up with a bimbo.

In short, Roth’s Everyman is a very rueful man, repenting at leisure in a New Jersey retirement community.

Though his brain is alive with memories of the jewellery business run by his late father, and his years in the ad game, and the daughter who adores him (but has herself made a disastrous marriage), his loneliness is acute . . . and he still so wants his sons to forgive him, and to understand that you can’t apply Manichean rules to the mess that is life. Meanwhile, his immense regrets are heightened by the cardiovascular illnesses that have made his final years seem like a continuing medical campaign.

Roth spares us little when it comes to detailing the minutiae of disease, or the grim technical details of the procedures that attempt to prolong life. Nor does he pull any punches when describing, with tragic precision, the sense of “waiting” that accompanies one’s dotage — killing time before time kills you . . . and watching your contemporaries disappear around you.

And yet the genius of this short, bleak, remarkable novel stems from the way that Roth turns his desolate assessment of death into something bracing: an angry acceptance that mortality is the price we pay for the sheer wonder of this thing called life.

“I thank you for your concreteness,” Roth’s hero tells a gravedigger who explains to him the mechanics of digging a final resting place.

In turn, I thank Philip Roth for his concreteness; for casting such a cold, crystalline eye on the unfairness of death, and concluding that there are no answers: just the terror of nothingness that we all share.

Douglas Kennedy’s novel, State of the Union, is published in paperback by Arrow on June 1.

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