American Pastoral: A Novel (Paperback)

1 Growing from innocence to experience

2 The shattering of the American democratic ideal

3 Nature/nurture

4 Parents and children

It is a very good read but Roth never gives up going over the themes in minute detail. I suppose the main theme is that human spirit is unpredictable and no matter how much love and nurturning we give it is never possible to ensure our kids grow up like us. Our love for them and care can in fact be the very thing that screw them up. I dont agree with that concept but it is there in this book.

By separating the book according to Milton's "Paradise Lost" Roth is signnalling that he is dealing with some pretty big issues e.g.the fall from Grace into despair.

The problem with the book is that it is relentless: it just keeps on presenting the same theme with example after example. It becomes a little bit tiresome; but Roth's writing is so superb it carries the reader along.

The American Patoral is the ideal world of democracy - apple pie and happy families but Roth explains that this is just a sham, which is so easily destroyed. BUT - it never is destroyed becasue the SWEDE JUST KEEPS ON GOING.

Roth seems like a man possessed; a torturer who never stops the screw from turning. I got a sense that he in fact hated the society that America has become. But I am not so sure that this is true, because its critics are so venal themselves (Merry is hardly a sympathetic or likeable character).

CONCLUSION

The book is extremely well written and interesting; it has an obsession with detail much of which to a non USA citizen was a bit tedious.

It was extremely ambitious and succeded in discussing some pretty major areas of life and the human spirit

The story is fairly straight forward, but it is told in an interesting way. It seems that the narrator (Zuckerman) had an infatuation with the school sports hero who had everything: girls, success, looks, all that jazz. Later on in life when Zuckerman is a successful author he meets up with The Swede, who wrote him a letter asking to help write a biography of his father. Zuckerman is intrigued by this, mostly because of the power his high school years had over him, so he accepts. But the Swede doesn't tell him anything, then, at a reunion a few months later, he learns that the Swede died of cancer.

So, Zuckerman decided to recreate the Swede's life, find out where it went wrong and what happened. He has a few clues from the Swede's brother and from his own memories, but most of it is imagined. It is a good way for Zuckerman to meander on about how life affects you and how you affect it, what happens to people behind closed doors that we just don't know about and, touchingly, how a father can love his daughter so much when she disappoints him at every turn - and tragically at that.

The ending wasn't particularly punchy, but it finished well with a nice tie-up of the few threads that needed to be tied up at all. Like life, not everything ends on the point of a period, and American Pastoral reflects this. I feel that a younger man couldn't have written this book, that it really did need the weight of years and experience to create, and I feel better for having read it.

Highly recommended.

This was a strange reading experience for me. The author, Philip Roth who won a Pulitzer Prize for this book, accurately describes precise locations - neighborhood, street, three-family-house, school yard, synagogue - where I grew up in Newark, New Jersey. He should know since he grew up there himself as did my parents at the same time in 1920's and 1930's.

There is a vivid depiction of the 1967 Newark riots. Being nearby as a 16-year old, I recall that one day there was fire and smoke and tanks rolling down the street and the next day there were block after block of boarded up, bombed out buildings.

Swede Levov, the book's protagonist, is a high school superstar. He is a first generation Jewish-American kid who is tall, blond, and athletic. He aspires to everything that many of the turn of the century immigrants wanted for their children, for them to assimilate fully and realize the American dream. For Swede, the American dream is transformed into a nightmare. As the book jacket aptly states, "overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk."

Swede marries a Catholic girl from Elizabeth who is crowned Miss New Jersey, takes over his father's glove manufacturing company in Newark, and moves with his new wife to a suburb about 40 miles to the west despite his overbearing father's protests. They have a daughter Meredith who they affectionately call Merry and who, as she grows up, is anything but merry. She stutters when she speaks and when she speaks, and shrieks, it is often in protest.

Merry gets swept up in the radical protest politics of the 1960's - civil rights, Vietnam. She learns how to make bombs and, still a high school student, is implicated in the explosion of the post office in her quiet suburban town. The blast kills a well respected and beloved local doctor and Swede's American dream. A perfect life in the perfect suburb is quickly transformed into domestic disaster.

Swede, early on and before the fall, is presented as a hero who strides and glides through life, full of grace, admired by all, and unperturbed until the increasingly inescapable underbelly of American life as we know it today catches up with him. The dinner party at the end of the book brings Swede face to face, hilariously and tragically, with many of the contradictions and questions that come to besiege him.

As Swede the hero becomes the prototypical when-bad-things-happen-to-good-people tortured soul, American Pastoral leaves me thinking that there's a little of Swede in all of us and, what was once the American dream is at best an anachronism or was, just beneath the surface, never more than an illusion.