American Pastoral (1997)

Something seems wrong with giving this a 3.5—but at some point, I just got tired. ( )

My least favorite Roth novel. ( )

America. una famiglia ebrea che affeonta la vita. un uomo amato e rispettato. "Lo Svedese" che viene messo a nudo in questo romanzo davvero ecclatante. la verità o finzione della ricostruzione della sua vita. di quella vita buia, e dolorosa che lo ha portato con se fino alla fine... ( )

Excerpts from my original GR review (Jun 2009):
- An..evisceration of 20th century American society. There. Or, is this only what I think Roth was trying to do?
- Seymour "Swede" Levov is the front and center of this story. The entire story is spent cracking, and then...blasting away the veneer of Levov's life, a life as heroic high school star, groom to a princess bride, and heir of a successful glove making business in Newark NJ. Swede and wife Dawn decide to settle in far off Morris County, much to the chagrin of father Lou (who also opposed his match with a Catholic). Dawn takes up cattle raising as a kind of hobby, the glove business grows and all is well.
- Enter a daughter, Merry, who, despite developing a stutter as a child, leads a fairly ideal, involved life. The 60s arrive, and after developing an oddly excoriating opinion of "The War" and Lyndon Johnson at barely 13, Merry becomes wildly estranged from her parents by age 16. She mixes with some "activists" in the Big Apple, and, despite Swede's empathy and ongoing after-dinner chats with her, Merry tragically acts on her persuasions. The aftermath of her crime and her disappearance haunt Swede and Dawn, who each handle the trauma in their own, somewhat delusional ways.
- He is covertly contacted by a contemptible vixen calling herself Rita Cohen, who claims to know Merry's whereabouts and brazenly toys with Swede, in essence blackmailing him. All the while Swede desperately wants to spare the fragile Dawn from false hope, as he naively holds out hope of Merry's innocence...
- If any passage in the book synthesizes Roth's tale, this is it:
"How to penetrate to the interior of people was some skill or capacity he did not possess. He just did not have the combination to that lock. Everybody who flashed the signs of goodness he took to be good...Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife...probably had never even begun to see into himself."
- Is the story overwrought, bloated? Not quite. Is it brilliant? Maybe in bits, but not in total. This was my first Roth. ( )

This book is full of beautiful prose that manages to transcend both tradition and modernity. It also contains a very bizarre plot. I was slightly disappointed that the narrator we meet at the beginning disappears and never returns, but otherwise was engrossed in the unravelling of the seemingly perfect Levov family. The ending was a bit strange, and along with that disappearing narrator, made me feel that the plot had been twisted more than resolved. But all in all, this was definitely an interesting reading experience. ( )