Customer Reviews

American Pastoral: A Novel American Trilogy (1)

5 star:		(48)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

Maybe I'm picking nits, but technical details can be important, too.

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.

There are a number of basic themes in this book:

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

With American Pastoral, Philip Roth came pretty damn close to writing America after WW2. While I was reading Underworld, I thought Delillo had pulled it off, but now I know better. I'll admit, at the start I wasn't hooked in, but by about page 11 I became aware that I was reading greatness. You know that tingly feeling you get when you realise that the book you are about to read is special? That's what I had.

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 book is about Swede Levov, the star of a high school in Newark. The first 125 pages is an excellent book, as Swede contacts the author for a meeting, and our narrator offers observations and speculates about Swede's life. Fine and good, maybe no Pulitzer, but a nice read. Then many bad things happen to Swede, far out of any real relation to reality, and we realize the author's agenda. In real life, he would be afraid of the Swede, a big, imposing guy. In this book as an author, he controls the character, and has the ability to inflict great cruelties upon him, and the book takes on an unreal aura midway through the book. Swede's daughter, a hippie, takes upon an unreal persona too. Books like a delicate balance deserve these prizes, this is a good book which deteriorates.

American Pastoral is a brilliant work of literature. If you're looking for a novel that moves along rapidly and spends little time on character development and analysis, you might want to pass. However, if you're looking for a slower, deeply textured and obsessively detailed work, go for it.

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.

P. Roth has always seemed to me to be an aquired taste. His books are quirky but there's no mistaking that the man is a genius. I came to this book after many years absence from reading his work and it amazes me how fresh he still seems. I would also recommend another great book titled THE BARK OF THE DOGWOOD which is also excellent.

At the beginning of the book I was so absorbed that I couldn't put it down, but by the middle, it was just so unrealistic and boring. The women in this book are not portrayed well, at all, and there are so many misplaced scenes. I had a lot of high hopes for this book because I couldn't stop reading it, but in the end I didn't feel sorry for any of the characters.

I am not a writer, I am a reader. When I find a book as grand as 'American Pastoral', I am truly grateful. Having come of age in the sixties I can appreciate the right on characterizations, cultural milieu, and the east coast at that time. I'm not from Newark but I am from Queens and somehow they're very connected in my mind. I hadn't read Mr. Roth's books in decades and I thought of him as 'the guy who wrote Portnoy's Complaint'. Yes, he is that guy but he has matured in his writing just as his characters have grown, wizened and given life to themselves. Both Zuckerman and Roth have experienced more over the years. Life is like that. A good book is a true find for me. This is a good book and a great read.

My initial reaction to AMERICAN PASTORAL was that it was a search to understand a life characterized by a shell of outward perfection hiding unimaginable family horror, one which mirrored Americaï¿s own wrenching progress from liking Ike to dissing Dick. I loved the rhythm of the probing, uncertain prose, but like a lot of readers (apparently), felt it rambled at times. Then, on the advice of a friend who had read the book a second time, I went back to the section on Zuckermanï¿s high school reunion, the conversation with Jerry Levov about his brother the Swede and, in particular, Zuckerman's own thoughts about sharing the book he had written about the Swede with Jerry before submitting it for publication (chronologically, the end of the book). Doing that completely threw my original opinion for one big loop, as I realized the Swede's story was in fact the product of Zuckerman's imagination and not the imparted truth of an omniscient narrator, as I had somehow managed to lull myself into believing. Instead, AMERICAN PASTORAL became the story of a literally gutted writer (he's had his prostateï¿and many might say, for Zuckerman, his Muse--removed) paying homage to his craft. Except for the general fact that his daughter Merry bombed a local post office, the Swede's whole story in Book 2 is a fabrication, ultimately saying more about the writerï¿s power to move, shock and tell a damn good story than it does about Seymour Levov and America in the Sixties. In that regard, the bookï¿s two most powerful conceits are the passionate kiss during Merry's 11th summer and the Swedeï¿s encounters with Rita Cohen. Both are charged with sexual grotesquery, and both are so at odds with anything we actually do know about the Swede that you have to wonder if they are only the product of Zuckerman's musings. But why would Zuckerman fabricate such shocking scenes about one of the nicest guys youï¿ll ever find in modern literature? That's what I could not figure out. And I concluded itï¿s because they're not for figuring out, just as great stories and the art of great storytelling are not for figuring out, but for stirring emotion and provoking thought. And, in the case of AMERICAN PASTORAL, not on such relative ephemera as the dysfunction of Sixties America, but on timeless subjects of fate, shifting fortune, family and loss that are more the province of Greek or Shakespearean or Biblical tragedy. As I was reading AP, Merry's quick unravelling unnerved me no end, both because of the idea that it could happen to any family, and because I have my own daughter, making even the slightest analogies to Merry all the scarier. But as I finished the book, and especially after Iï¿d re-read the reunion episode, the character I kept thinking about was Lou, who Zuckerman portrays as a kind of loveable, old-world, avuncular character when he is no doubt (as Zuckerman's imagined conversation with Jerry about Louï¿s portrayal suggests) a ... of an employer, husband and father. The other character that forced me to re-think the book was Rita Cohen, one of the most gut-churning characters I've ever come across. She is so pernicious, so unremittingly cruel, that she can only be digested as an abstraction: part Macbeth witch, part Greek chorus and part Hamlet's ghost, always there to stir up the Swede's pot and propel his fate. (I also wonder if she isnï¿t a wry jab by Roth at those who call him a misogynist, as if heï¿s saying, You think my female characters are bad role models? Try this one on for size.) Viewing the story as an abstraction also made me appreciate Roth's style of poking around the edges of issues, trying to find the heart of many weighty matters. What at first seemed ï¿ramblingï¿ instead became lyrical, and, in the end, made every word feel vital.

I started this book with very high hopes - I'd only read one other Roth, the short and highly sarcastic "The Breast," and I had heard that in recent years he'd turned more sober and objective. To me this meant Roth was coming of age, a voice expressing a fuller range of our hopes, fears, loves and angers.

Much of "American Pastoral" satisfied this desire. Book one (of three) is a 100-or-so page, somewhat tedious prologue, where Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman intruduces the main character and creates a setting to present his secret story. With book two, it settles into a wonderful exploration of inner and outer lives. This central section, and most of book three, is beautifully written and reads effortlessly, making the first part feel worthwhile. By combining real world places (hint - it helps a lot to know New Jersey) and politics, with fictional characters whose lives embody the times and themes, Roth puts us directly into the drama of the story.

This sounds like a cliché; but through lengthy description, we learn by stages about the conflicts inside the main character. Seymour "Swede" Levov, a handsome, Jewish industrialist and high school athletic hero who marries Dawn Dwyer, Miss New Jersey of 1949, and whose vigor and generosity of spirit bring him success in business and to a life in the affluent (and WASPish) Jersey countryside, suffers a tragic fall when his radical daughter Merry goes berserk with one murderous bombing, and then others. As she begins a life on the run, he and Dawn endure recrimination and only-partial recovery. We watch Swede in a journey through his past and his present, an apparently peaceful man who learns to accommodate the real world by devising his own reality. This seems the central theme, just how we are to construct a world that we want to live in. His traditional, Jewish father, and his angry brother, are respectively full of shame and hatred for the daughter, but Swede, who still wants to know what went wrong, is frozen - first in denial, later in incomprehension.

In the reading, we come to identify the people and the many facets of their predicament. Yet in the end, the plot is dropped, and that's where it failed as a narrative. American Pastoral ends symbolically and inconclusively. We never learned Merry's ultimate fate, what happened to Swede's marriage, or even the real identity of Rita Cohen, the vicious young woman who may or may not have been Merry's accomplice. I know it's a novel of ideas, but a book that goes to such trouble to develop characters and establish plot, should keep its promise and resolve the plot. It made me wonder Why Roth went on at such length, in so many sections. Why tell us the whole background to Swede and his family, and their latest heartbreaks, and then not finish the story? If the point was simply to illustrate clashing symbols and themes, it could have been done much more economically.

American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize, I think largely on the strength of its exposition. Much of it reads like an essay we'd want to write ourselves, from our very heart and soul, exploring our own tensions, flowing and unfolding with nervous honesty. I wish those Pulitzer people cared more about story-telling, since this is how the greatest writers, Dickens, Melville, Twain, Nabokov, and others, truly touch our lives.