American Pastoral (1997)

Here's what I hope is true: Philip Roth wrote this book, narrated by 'Nathan Zuckerman,' in order to criticize the hero-worship to which Zuckerman/Roth is liable at times, as evidenced in the first of the Zuckerman novels. He wrote it to reveal the stupidity, self-satisfaction and arrogance of baby-boomer generation Americans, who think everything was great when they were kids, think everything's crap now, and think this is the fault of everybody else. He particularly wrote it to show how extremely rich white men of a certain age treat women and non-white people and usually also other rich white men.

Here's what I'm pretty sure is true: Philip Roth wrote this book because he's really sad that The American Dream turned out to be not so perfect. This imperfection can be blamed on women (e.g., the women in this novel are, in turn: adulterers, 'cold,' over-intellectual, terrorists, mentally unstable, or, in very rare cases, lucky enough to be the mothers of rich white men (wives, on the other hand, are all adulterers). It can also be blamed on black people.

Other reviewers have managed to show their rage at this book by bringing up an individual passage, and they are, indeed, all rage-inducing. My most rage-inducing passage involves the main character regretting that the U.S. dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki... because, thanks to that, he never got to fight in world war II. Yep. For some perspective on this, keep in mind that 9/11 had 3000 casualties. That's 20 times fewer than the smallest estimated number of casualties in the *less* deadly Nagasaki bombing. That is how self-absorbed Nathan Zuckerman/The Swede/Philip Roth is.

Luckily, this is all told within a very witty narrative frame: none of this stuff actually happens even in the novel. It's just a narrative written by the narrator, the aforementioned Mr Zuckerman. He's explicitly making it up. And therefore, nothing is sincere and everything is open to question. Eye roll.

Of interest, on the other hand, is the way Roth combines his 'James-lite' style with his 'Portnoy-rant' style here. That would make the book worth reading, except that he manages to get rid of both the Portnoy humor and the James self-awareness. So it kind of ends up reading like an emo song composed by a forty year old man who hasn't heard any music since 1943.

Despite all this, and despite the fact that the last 100 pages are completely superfluous (why not tack on another 100 about how - after his daughter turned out to be nothing like him and his wife cheated on him and he dies of cancer - well, also, his dog died?), the book is worth reading for a couple of striking scenes.

But best American novel of the last 25 years? Not even on the long-list. Someone needs to do a study of how Roth became the great American novelist of the late nineties. Is it just because the former candidate for this position started writing dreck (Updike)? Was it the just the self-serving conservatism of the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama years? That's an essay I want to read. ( )

This is a really great book, and definitely the best I've read by Philip Roth. There's some sort of Death of a Salesman link here.

It's somehow fitting that I thought of my dad when I read this book, and then after I gave it to him (twice by accident!!) he read it and liked it, but looked at it in a totally different way than I did. ( )

Not sure. Loved lots of it; some bits not at all. ( )

I read this with the Thursday night group in Lincoln Park. The story tells of Swede Levov, whose life is cast into the fires of the nineteen-sixties. The narrator is a familiar Rothian figure: writer Nathan Zuckerman (of The Ghost Writer, et al.). Nathan is now in his early 60s, 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.
The Swede's glove factory almost did me in as I had an overwhelming desire to never read another sentence about the leather trade. But perhaps this over the top presentation was necessary to persuade the reader that Swede is unable or has insufficient means to comprehend the Newark riots of 1967. Many of the scenes 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. This is some of the best pure writing Roth has done. A writer who is unafraid to linger in the minds of furious men, he leads us fearlessly through this man's grief, bewilderment and rage, and perhaps through the history of that era. ( )

It might just be some mild ADHD kicking in, but for me Roth took too long to say too little. I didn't find any of the main characters compelling enough to maintain my interest over 400 pages, and Swede's desperate self-doubting got tiresome -- it seemed like he was saying the same thing about his daughter ("WHY???!!"), paragraph after paragraph and page after page. The ending left me confused. I understand the value of leaving things unresolved, but the story only seemed to be half-told. I was much more interested in seeing how Swede's relationship with his daughter developed after that fateful encounter 5 years later, how it shaped his decision to leave his wife and start a new family elsewhere, and how all of that affected his father. I suppose those were all incidental details to the main theme of the novel (the decay of the "American Dream"), but those incidentals were much more compelling than the incessant hammering home of the theme. ( )