Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7504 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-21
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Synopsis
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.

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.

Customer Reviews

Very disappointing
Having discovered the brilliance of Roth after reading The Human Stain I was very much looking forward to American Pastoral, the first in the Nathan Zuckerman Trilogy.
If I had read this book first I would not have read another! After a very promising start the storyline drifts off at the point Skip Zuckerman invents the life story of Swede Levov.
At that point the prose becomes unbearably tedious to the very end of the book without any respite. If there was a point to it then it was completely over my head - very very boring and wouldnt recommend it.

American obsessional
American Pastoral is the first of a trilogy so loosely connected that even the publisher draws no attention to it. It wasn't until I had read the third volume - The Human Stain - that I realised I had come in at the end, and went back to the beginning with this book (the second volume is I Married A communist).

But reading The Human Stain first does throw American Pastoral into relief. The writing in American Pastoral is as magnificent, but the combination of plot and polemic far less satisfying. Whereas The Human Stain races along in a taut tension between the uncovering of secrets and the unmasking of humanity, American Pastoral is an obsessional, almost pathologically forensic, dissection of the American Way, with the plot acting only as a frustratingly episodic driver.

On the face of it this is a tale of how a man who is the perfect embodiment of the American Dream is blighted by the sheer simplicity of his perfection. He is undone by deviancy right on his doorstep. It's a deviancy he is powerless to prevent because it comes from the person to whom he is most devoted: his daughter.

It's a brilliant premise - so brilliant you long for more of the book to focus directly on it. Yet much of what you get instead is gloves. Yes, gloves. Your knowledge of the glovemaking process will be mightily improved by this book. And though it works as a device for a while, it comes eventually to feel as if you are being beaten to death by metaphor.

And that is true of many of the other meticulous digressions too. Roth scratches at the itch of Americana with a relentlessness that borders on autism. Since he is such a brilliant writer this mania is not without its insights - and humour. But it makes for a tough read. And when you finally reach the shocking drama of the final pages you are left feeling robbed of the more direct - but perhaps no less effective - narrative that might have been.

Very nearly the novel that defines America
The first novel in the second Nathan Zuckerman trilogy sees Roth's alter ego as interlocutor. The story revolves around Seymour `The Swede' Levov, the tall, blonde son of Jewish immigrants, a gifted athlete who inherits a successful glove factory, and who patriotically joins the Marines and marries an Irish Catholic beauty queen, unblinkingly embracing the Anglo-Saxon perception of the American Dream. Devoted to his wife and daughter and intensely proud of his family business, all goes swimmingly for the Swede during his country's triumphant heady post-War years. But he fails to appreciate that the American Dream like all utopias cannot (by definition) exist. It is just an imaginary ideal state, and means different things to different peoples and communities at different times. It also predicates losers and victims. So when his adored daughter Meredith, crippled by a childhood stutter, becomes first a murderous revolutionary terrorist in reaction against capitalism in general and the Vietnam War in particular, spitting venomous hatred against the world that her parents had lovingly constructed, and then turns into a pacific Jain ascetic, his descent into the (suburban) American nightmare begins. Everything begins to crumble as the treachery and deception behind the façade of decency emerge to persecute and haunt him. There are some blistering passages, fulminating exchanges between the Swede and his daughter, the deranged and enigmatic Rita Cohen, and his hard bitten brother Jerry, where he is physically and mentally worn down by the ferocity of the attacks on him, on his life and all that he had ever believed in; his entire worldview. The Swede had until then seen himself as a man who had sought merely to raise his family in peace and provide for their every need but America was rapidly changing around him and values of the past were being redefined in a more sinister and immoral light. What had been self-help, personal industry and ambition to the Swede and his parents were now despised as capitalist exploitation and ugly greed by his daughter's generation.
Seymour Levov as a metaphor for economic powerhouse, self-made America and his daughter Merry a metaphor for the country's ideological decay and subsequent moral and social disintegration in the 1960s and 1970s, American Pastoral is very nearly the novel that defines America. I say very nearly because Roth's fierce, breathless style, the complexity of his writing, his lofty political and social satire, and prickly ambivalence towards Jewish identity and traditions are not to everyone's taste. But there's no denying the energy, the power and the sense of time and place, the nostalgia and ultimate disillusionment. Absolutely brilliant.