American Pastoral [Audio Cassette]

Like an Olympic slalom medalist who can't fasten his bindings properly or an Oscar-winning director who can't communicate his ideas to the sound guy, Philip Roth seems to have won a Pulitzer Prize with a poorly constructed novel.

Our narrator, the recurrent Nathan Zuckerman, spends ninety-some pages establishing that he doesn't know anything about glove making and that the details he imagines about the lives of other people (particularly his schoolmate, the Swede) are consistently wrong. The rest of the book consists of details of the Swede's life he ostensibly dreams up during a dance at his high school reunion. I waited through the whole story for him to pop up again at the end like Bobby Ewing, noting that he was all wrong again and brilliantly explaining why the whole dream was so shrewd, but Roth apparently forgot all about him (presumably somewhere before the detailed passages on glove manufacture).

What if Shakespeare had had Falstaff come on to describe the shipwreck in The Tempest and then just hang out onstage and watch the rest of the play? Sure, Roth raises some actually interesting themes and questions about rebellion, complacency, and the American Dream (and race relations, and religion, and skin-deep appearances, and adultery, and Communism, and prostate cancer, et al. ad nauseum), but that Zuckerman guy bereft on the sidelines really bugged the heck out of me! Other critics might suggest I ignore this inconsistency, but why should I have to? Plenty of authors (I'm sure even including Roth) have addressed interesting themes and questions in novels that were also well-crafted, but apparently no such novels had come to the attention of the Pulitzer board by the spring of 1998.

Maybe Roth was trying to be avant-garde and I'm just an idiot. If you want to experience some true point-of-view mastery read Nabokov. If you want to see style abused to enormous effect read Joyce. If you, too, want to lose track of a character or two read Pynchon. If you want to feel like an idiot, read AMERICAN PASTORAL.

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.