“Old Age is a Massacre”: Community Building in the Face of Political Disasters in Philip Roth’s Everyman and Lore Segal’s Half the Kingdom

ABSTRACT:Literature and other media often depict older adults as lonely and isolated. Even when older adults are portrayed as part of a community-building process, agency tends to be assigned to younger characters. Through comparative close readings of Philip Roth’s Everyman (2006) and Lore Segal’s Half the Kingdom (2013), this article shows that other paths are possible. In these two novels—Segal’s more explicitly than Roth’s—the responsibility lies in the hands of older characters. They build communities while facing what they interpret to be external political forces that make the aging process more difficult than it needs to be.