I'll bet my first edition of Portnoy's Complaint that when finalists for the National Book Awards are announced October 11, Philip Roth's latest novel, Everyman, will be up for the fiction prize. This account of an old man's journey toward death was a literary event this year, and not just because of its considerable power. The Grim Reaper was much on the minds of serious writers and their readers in 2005. Joan Didion's memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, which describes the grief that flowed from her husband's fatal heart attack and her daughter's struggle with illness, had won the NBA prize for nonfiction. (It's now headed for Broadway.)

The virtue of both these books is their refusal to gild the grief of dying with any higher purpose. But this unsparing candor leads to a self-enclosure that fits all too neatly into the culture now. It's not surprising that two of our most important writers are telling us that death is an insular experience that transcends social circumstance. This ultimately conservative message is part of the same process that has put self-obsession front and center in American politics.

We expect great writers to stand against the tide, as Didion and Roth once did. Their best work is broadly dissident, and they've always written with acuity about class and caste. But death seems to have eclipsed their awareness. The major passion Roth's protagonist feels is anguish at the loss of his youthful vitality--the "tubular sprout" he was as a boy. For Didion it's the shattering of a routine that was central to her well-being. "You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends," she writes. At times it's hard to know whether she's grieving for her husband or the charmed life they led when he was alive. Roth, too, lets the affluence of his protagonist go unremarked, as if it were simply typical. But his Everyman really isn't that, and her insights into mourning aren't transferable to the vast majority of people. Death is when the forces that shape us show their hand.

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