American Pastoral (1997)

This story is set in the late sixties and early seventies in Newark, New Jersey and reflects the social upheavals of the time. It is a framed story. The first chapters we are introduced to Zuckerman (author) and his admiration almost worship of the Swede, a high school athlete. At a reunion, in which Zuckerman is a speaker, he learns that Swede is deceased. Zuckerman, always curious about Swede begins to imagine the life that Swede lived as it was impacted by his daughter's decision to bomb the local post office. The rest of the book is this imagined story (which Zuckerman publishes) of Swede.

The story is accurate historically for the Newark riots of 1967, Watergate, the Deep Throat movie (the first x rated movie that we all flocked to see publicly) as well as the Black Panthers, Weathermen and Angela Davis. LBJ is president and the US is deeply invested in sending soldiers to Vietnam. The main character, Swede, is based on a real athlete that attended Weequahic High School. I really wondered if this school was made up. The "equa" in the middle made me think that the author was saying something about these Jewish kids attending school in the US. I do think there is more in this story than the historical events. It is a story of Jewish American who marries an Irish Catholic girl and the changes in the family from the grandparents who came to the US, sold gloves on the streets and finally established a factory business. The family erodes or changes from all Jewish, to the boys marrying Gentile Girls to the daughter who is not Jewish or Catholic and abandons all the family values and hates her family for having a profitable business.

The title American Pastoral, does it refer to the immigrant experience for the Jew who came to the US and found peace and the life without persecution? Towards the end, the author mentions Thanksgiving as the true American Pastoral. A time where everyone can come together whether they are Catholic, Jewish, or Gentile. Thanksgiving really is the best holiday. I liked this story. It was engaging and the characters are well developed. You forget that this is just Zuckerman's imaginations and that we really know very little about Swede or his daughter Merry. Compared to the other book by Roth that I've read, Plot Against America, I liked this much better. I will read more of Roth at some point. ( )

A specific and very context-sensitive tragedy that still manages to be credible and accessible today. You can feel Swede's effort to stay in control amid a battering ram of events. The retrospective structure amplifies and drives the story along and invites a re-read. ( )

Philip Roth’s American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize for a reason. It is everything an intelligent historical fiction novel should be…plausible, fact-based, multi-layered, and empathetic, among other qualities. Spanning three generations of a New Jersey Jewish family, we see the assimilation of the glove-making, Levov, patriarch into American working middle class culture, and the perfect son who assumes the business, marries the beauty queen, and ascends into upper class society only to watch his radical ideologue daughter devolve into a domestic terrorist in the name of stopping the Vietnam war. Through the Levov’s rise and fall, Roth imparts to the reader that everyone’s life is always complex, sometimes messy, and absolutely subject to fate’s intervention. ( )

Philip Roth's style was never my favorite. ( )

Philip Roth's style was never my favorite. ( )