Product Description

As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.

For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longer-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4611 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-03
• Released on: 1998-02-03
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Amazon.com
Philip Roth's 22nd book takes a life-long view of the American experience in this thoughtful investigation of the century's most divisive and explosive of decades, the '60s. Returning again to the voice of his literary alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, Roth is at the top of his form. His prose is carefully controlled yet always fresh and intellectually subtle as he reconstructs the halcyon days, circa World War II, of Seymour "the Swede" Levov, a high school sports hero and all-around Great Guy who wants nothing more than to live in tranquillity. But as the Swede grows older and America crazier, history sweeps his family inexorably into its grip: His own daughter, Merry, commits an unpardonable act of "protest" against the Vietnam war that ultimately severs the Swede from any hope of happiness, family, or spiritual coherence.

From Library Journal
In his latest novel, Roth shows his age. Not that his writing is any less vigorous and supple. But in this autumnal tome, he is definitely in a reflective mood, looking backward. As the book opens, Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, recalls an innocent time when golden boy Seymour "the Swede" Levov was the pride of his Jewish neighborhood. Then, in precise, painful, perfectly rendered detail, he shows how the Swede's life did not turn out as gloriously as expected?how it was, in fact, devastated by a child's violent act. When Merry Levov blew up her quaint little town's post office to protest the Viet Nam war, she didn't just kill passing physician Fred Conlon, she shattered the ties that bound her to her worshipful father. Merry disappears, then eventually reappears as a stick-thin Jain living in sacred povery in Newark, having killed three more people for the cause. Roth doesn't tell the whole story blow by blow but gives us the essentials in luminous, overlapping bits. In the end, the book positively resonates with the anguish of a father who has utterly lost his daughter. Highly recommended.
-?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Atlantic Monthly, Ralph Lombreglia
.... an allegory seemingly conceived in an abstracted realm of big notions and fixed ideas. American Pastoral is a relentlessly mental book, full of inconclusive rumination on material often left strangely undramatized. And that, along with the book's mystifyingly haphazard structure, prevents it from becoming a "genuine imaginative event."

But in American Pastoral the idea that a stringy-haired, sputtering sixteen-year-old destroys her father's life with a terrorist bomb reads like a piece of apparatus wheeled in from another novel altogether--even from another world. It never ceases to feel arbitrary, trumped up, forced upon the poor Swede. This is mostly because the notion seems to have little reality for the author, leaving him to summarize and philosophize rather than dramatize the concrete.

Roth is a masterly prose stylist, of course, and there are many passages of fine language in American Pastoral--luxuriously detailed descriptions of the author's beloved, doomed Newark, the leather-glove business, the New Jersey countryside, the Miss America pageant, the raising of cattle. And the themes themselves are characteristic of Roth: the trials of ethnic identity, the fate of Old World values transposed to the New World, the wrenching political confusion of recent American history. But these strengths are indulged in a way that becomes the book's weakness. The abstracted treatment of ideas, the weighty, morally serious exposition, result in a novel that holds its material at arm's length from the reader.

A story has to work as a story before it can work as an allegory. If one accepts the novel's dramatic premise and then makes a list of seemingly essential scenes, one finds that very few of them are directly portrayed in the book.

Customer Reviews

Forrest Gumpy
This book gives me the sense that works by successful authors, once they're beyond a certain point in their career, just aren't edited before publication. American Pastoral reads as though Roth dictated it in one sitting. He frequently loses himself in unrestrained reveries and ends up repeating passages verbatim, backtracking through his thoughts, hoping for renewed inspiration or to regain the thread of his story.

Roth casts a conservative glance back at the 60s, looking for somewhere to place the blame for the revolutionary upheaval of the era, and though there are hints of classical tragedy in his story, Roth's links between the minuscule failures of a father and the dissolution of his society are unconvincing. His main character, "The Swede" is a conformist, Jewish jock who will only appeal to those who confuse athletic prowess with character. Roth infuses him with hackneyed greatest generation virtues and announces early on that the character will do nothing but suffer for them. The Swede is unwitting to the point of being witless, and that combined with Roth's unsympathetic caricature of radicalism left me with a bitter, Forrest Gump aftertaste. In general, the characters serve as little more than a lattice for Roth to weave lush descriptions of New Jersey around.

I put up with Roth's mensch and maenads up to the very end, afraid that I would miss some masterful stroke that would redeem such a mess. Rarely have I been so relieved to finish a book, though I have to give it to Roth that his voice alone can sustain a story. That's all that was there.

The Mediocre Gatsby
Meet the ideal American golden boy, Swede, an all-star, perfectly moral glove-making icon who has everything: wealth, health, and talent. Swede has quaint American dreams: a beauty pageant wife, an oak tree with a tire swing, and a healthy, beaming child to swing on it. His dream is sullied, however, when that child -- a stuttering girl named Merry (irony!) -- turns into a political terrorist who goes around bombing post offices. What do you do when your hopes are torn between idealistic paternal love on the one hand, and irrational rage on the other?

It's obvious that Philip Roth, when writing AMERICAN PASTORAL, had The Great Gatsby in mind. The themes are almost the same, even if the execution is a tad different. Charles Baxter, in his book of essays, The Art of Subtext, states that when you have an obssessive and mentally unhinged central character, it is best to have a narrator who can view things from the outside. Moby Dick has Ishmael. THE GREAT GATSBY has Nick Carraway. AMERICAN PASTORAL has Skip Zuckerman.

Wait a minute. No, it doesn't.

One of the greatest flaws of Roth's Pulitzer Prize winning novel is that Roth wisely takes up the utensil of the buffering narrator, only to immediately discard it. Skip begins the Swede's story, telling the tale of disillusionment from a distance, but then Skip disappears and never comes back. The result is jarring and uneven. And, even worse, it serves to underscore every other unnecessary element to the book.

My guess is that this novel won the Pulitzer for two reasons. First, the prize was more in honor of Roth's body of work than in response to this particular tome. Second, the book, in spite of its glaring flaws, is unmistakably authentic and pure. Roth's writing is clear and unblinking, and every detail is so well-fitted, it reads like the script to a documentary.

Unfortunately, this wholesale honesty also kills the book. Roth's PASTORAL is about five times the size of Fitzgerald's GATSBY, but it is only 1/10th as powerful. Roth is not trying to tell any kind of linear, plot-driven tale. This is very much an analysis of American culture, it is a 423 page question about the nature of love and ideals, it is a portrait of a God-Among-Men who must find the wherewithal to deal with the Hellish Spawn he has given rise to.

The idea is brilliant, and if it weren't for the excruciating and maddening amount of detail and despair in the novel, there'd be a lot here worth poring over. Unfortunately, Roth spends so much time authenticating his novel with extraneous facts and mullings that there is far too much to wade through before you actually get to the good bits. Swede despairs and whines and bites his nails for pages and pages and pages while people lie to him, take advantage of him, and listen to him explain every single facet of glove making.

Never before have I felt so much like slapping every single character in a book. Halfway through the novel I bemoaned the loss of Skip. Where was this dull but at least relatable and grounded narrator that had begun the story? Nowhere to be found. Instead, there is Swede, wondering, over and over, what's to be done. What's to be done?

And guess what's to be done? Nothing at all. At the start of the novel you learn that the Swede has a new family, a new wife, new kids, a new direction. He has fashioned, finally, at least a semblance of the American dream, a mask to cover his first failed attempt. The bulk of the novel is about that failed attempt, but you NEVER learn the steps or details that engendered that massive change from Disasterous Daughter to New Fake Life. This is a change that you would imagine would be worth examining, this is a process that is at least as interesting as the destruction that preceeded it. Roth, it seems, disagrees with that.

Endings are hard, hard stuff, even for Pulitzer Prize winners, but this is the weakest of the weak endings. Most good books end in two ways. They either simply fold off the conflict and close the curtains, or they pass the story off to the reader to finish for themselves. Roth opts for the latter, hoping that the mountains of ruminating malarky that preceded it will be enough to encourage some serious consideration. It doesn't work. Instead, it feels like an aborted cop-out, a cheap parting shot, a record having its stylus ripped angrily across the grooves.

All wind and no sails, AMERICAN PASTORAL is moving on several levels, but those levels push against each other, so that no movement happens at all. Read it for the beautiful prose, but expect the last page to be the literary equivalent of having a door slammed in your face. And then maybe you will do as I did: cry out for Skip to help make sense of it all.

Duped by the Pulitzer
Have you ever known someone who, for example, has just gone through a bad break-up, and out of kindness you sit there for hours as you listen to the person's obsessive, often irrational ranting on one overemphasized detail blamed for the break-up when you only want to slap the person back to their senses? That's how I felt reading "American Pastoral." You might say that's the point -- trying to capture the obsessive mindset of someone enduring such a tragedy which felt kind of silly to be honest -- but it didn't work for me. This was a short story filled out with repetitive inner monologue and description so intrusive at times and both so rambling that it went on to the point Roth would stick a break in and restart the scene because even he knew there's no chance anybody could remember what the scene was about. I just wanted to slap him until he understands that we need more than that, even if it's not a plot-driven story! And the huge blocks of text didn't help. Doesn't Roth know that not breaking dialogue exchanges onto separate lines stopped being "in" like 50 years ago? For that, as well as what to me were bland characters I couldn't sympathize with, no spine or structure, and no resolution, I have to question whether Roth knows how to write for a modern audience. It's no surprise that, as inexplicanly critically acclaimed as this book is, it hasn't been adapted into a film and probably never will be: it's simply not entertaining and I don't feel like I took anything away from it besides a desire to avoid Roth at all costs from now on. So why did I read it then, when the book was so frustratingly dull I felt I could die? Like a lot of people writing negative reviews, I was duped into it by its Pulitzer Prize sticker.