Product Description

Seymour 'Swede' Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheriter of his father's Newark glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall - of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8303 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Review
The author's alter ego, Nathan Zuckermann, takes a back seat to narrate the story of Seymour 'the Swede' Levov. a blonde-haired blue-eyed (but, of course, Jewish) family man with the most unRothian yearning for a settled life. This being a Roth novel, anyone who longs for a simple, innocent existence free from the turbulence and hate of the American century, is asking for trouble and the Swede gets it in spades; the Eisenhower 1950s turn into the weird 60s and America goes to pieces. The Swede's wife cracks up, his daughter, the anger-fuelled Merry, puts a bomb into a post office, kills a passer-by and goes on the run, all is madness and despair. Roth has never written better as he rages against the slide into nihilism and permissiveness that has characterised life in America in the last 30 years. Reading Roth is not a comfortable experience but it has never been more exhilarating. (Kirkus UK)

Roth's elegiac and affecting new novel, his 18th, displays a striking reversal of form - and content - from his most recent critical success, the Portnoyan Sabbath's Theater (1995). Its narrator, however, is a familiar Rothian figure: writer Nathan Zuckerman (of The Ghost Writer, et al.) - and in case you're wondering whether he still seems to be his author's alter ego, Nathan is now in his early 60s, recovering from both cancer surgery and a longtime affair with an English actress. Essentially retired, Nathan is approached by a high-school classmate's older brother - and the well-remembered hero of his youth: Seymour "Swede" Levov, once a blue-eyed athletic and moral paragon who strode through life with ridiculous ease, now nearing 70 and crushed by outrageous misfortunes. Swede asks his help writing a tribute to his late father, and soon thereafter dies himself. Piqued by the enigma of a seemingly perfect life (superb health, a successful family business, marriage to a former beauty queen) inexplicably gone wrong, Zuckerman "dream[s] a realistic chronicle" that reconstructs Swede's life - compounded of information gleaned from others who knew him, and centering in the 1960s when Swede's life began to unravel. His only daughter Meredith ("Merry") had rebelled against her parents' and her culture's complacency, protested against the war in Vietnam, claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing in which innocent people were killed, and gone "underground" as a fugitive. Most of the scenes Zuckerman/Roth imagines, therefore, are intensely emotional conversations in which the conflicting claims of social solidarity and individual integrity are debated with pained immediacy. Here, and in more conventionally expository authorial passages, meditativeness and discursiveness predominate over drama. Nevertheless, passion seethes through the novel's pages. Some of the best pure writing Roth has done. And Swede Levov's anguished cry "What the hell is wrong with doing things right?" may be remembered as one of the classic utterances in American fiction. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005, Philip Roth will become the third living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.