Overlong and wordy, this is nevertheless a good novel, with occasional flashes of Roth's old brilliance. "The Swede" Levov, a Jewish star high-school athlete, lives the American fairy tale: family rises quickly from immigrant to wealthy, principled manufacturers, the son marries a beauty queen, and lives in a marvelous old house in an affluent WASP town. Then his daughter brings the whole glittering balloon down by bombing the local p.o./general store, killing a local doctor. The Swede's life slowly but inexorably deteriorates...with heavily-drawn, and drawn-out parallels to American society Many digressions make this reading experience somewhat like eating at a Chinese buffet restaurant. ( )

The sad downfall of a serious man. Meet Seymour "Swede" Levov, who is living the postwar culmination of the American Dream, but is still pleased to meet you and really cares about what you have to say. The Swede is running the multimillion-dollar glove business bequeathed him by his father, married to a former Miss New Jersey, living in a 170-year-old house in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, and the father of a girl named Merry who was born for--forced into, judging by the name--joy. Joy is their birthright as Americans and the only fitting life for a sports hero and big man on campus, a Marine drill instructor, the scion of hardworking Jewish immigrants whose unstinting pursuit of the middleclass dream has come somehow to fruition in the blond WASPiness that gives Seymour the nickname Swede. He is omnicompetent, omnidiligent, omnirighteous, and omnikind. And his family is lovely.

What on Earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?

Only that their American Pastoral is bought at the expense of the "indigenous American Berserk", and their touchpoints--God, country, the conscientious capitalist, rock-ribbed decency and the blameless refusal to develop their own depths--cannot possibly withstand the physical stresses of the geopolitical, psychosocial, and sexual sexual sexual tensions brought home to roost by the old techniques of control finally hitting hyperspeed. Vietnam confronts the Swede Levovs of America with their hypocrisy, and they can swallow the blow--it's in their nature to be happy, to be okay.

But the children can't. Not the children of this world of boundless promise. They are entirely incapable of accepting the price in hate and blood and neo-imperialism. Too spoiled, you know. Never got the chance to work out their fucked-up guilt with a world war. It all unravels with the children. And so Swede Levov's child starts to stutter, starts to crack, and then she goes and blows up a mailbox and a decent country doctor and her family and the suburban dream and the promise of infinite growth. And that's where this story begins--in human hell.

And the scary thing is that it's not just the historical moment. With deftness, Roth marshals repressed sexuality and miscegenation and being a Jew in America and the tension between the social contract and building something for yourself and . . . the simple decline of age, and just overwhelms the reader with these shockwaves of chaos. There is so much chaos. And with tenderness he embraces his poor Levovs and says, How could they have been other than what they were? And with burning sardonic eyes he says, They were doomed from the start.

I'll never forget that reunion moment with Nathan Zuckerman, the narrator, and the girl who wouldn't let him take off her bra in high school. They fall into each other's arms in tears and she says she should have let him do it and you think, We're all just humans in this together and all we can do is cling to each other in the valley of the shadow of death. And for me--I was no sports hero, but in my own quiet Canadian way I've skirted the valley of the shadow of golden-boyness and the gift for decency and joy that is the result of everything coming easily. And like the Swede, ignored the darkness under this blond life for so long, the need to support and underpin your loved ones and friends and take their pain into you, the impossibility of coming to terms with your own ineffectuality in the face of the chaos, the chaos, and the inability to hate anyone for it except yourself for failing . . . how does the man built to help and care come to terms with the irreducible kernel of satanic rage?

I don't want to end like Roth does, with a question. I want to blink back tears and proceed on an assumption, and not an integrated grand-narrative assumption like the Swede's, which the slightest shock--or tiniest mortal blow--can bring down. I look at the women who dominate the denouement here--the demonic Marcia Umanoff, the sunny, hollow Jessie Orcutt, and the speech pathologist Sheila Salzman, whose role in the plot is pivotal and whose actions have a complex mix of good and ill effects upon which no summary judgment can be passed. But what she does? She doesn't run or hide or lie. She thinks, and resolves, and tries.

I'm gonna be a speech pathologist too. But broader than that: I think to be a healer is the highest human calling. To heal the specific ill is a prayer against the unhealable infinitude of human pain. ( )

Nathan Zuckerman returns to narrate the story of his childhood idol, Seymour "The Swede" Levov. The Swede has lived a charmed life as a high school sports star who becomes a successful businessman and marries a beauty queen. His life takes a dark turn, however, when his troubled teen-aged daughter succumbs to the violence and hysteria of 1960s America. His earnest pursuit of the American dream does not prepare him for the betrayal that he ultimately experiences, and he dies without being able to understand or accept the undeserved cruelty of his fate.

Roth frames the story of the The Swede with Nathan Zuckerman's own attempts to understand the man he had once idolized. Zuckerman ultimately realizes that he has misread The Swede, that what pertains on the surface of the person does not well reflect the unknowable core of suffering and responsibility that motivates him from within.

This is a nuanced portrait of a magnetic personality and those who orbit around him without ever guessing at the tragedy behind the man. ( )

This is my third Roth, following Portnoy's Complaint and Sabbath's Theater. I was voluntarily Roth-less for about three years following each of my prior Roth reads, and it will likely be three more years before I pick him up again. It's not Roth's prose that accounts for my reluctance. He write good, especially when he's describing Newark in its bustling, industrial heyday. But I don't read novels to get depressed, and Roth's novels depress me. It's not the subject matter - my current fav Denis Johnson isn't all about rainbows and unicorns. But Roth's powerful descriptions of his characters' internal miseries effectively drag me down into the hopeless territory they are inhabiting. The lack of resolution of the most interesting plot line was also irritating. ( )

Got this out of the library, kind of hated to take it back. Roth is as good as ever, maybe better. So, it's ten years old now, and maybe the stuff about the daughter sounds a bit dated. But the voice is irresistible, and the details about the glove making business turn out to one of the best things in it. So, maybe I'll buy, if I can find room on the shelf. ( )

wow, amazing writing, story has really stuck with me ( )

I have read almost all of Roth's ouevre, and this is his great tragedy (Sabbath's Theater is his great comedy). Fueled by rage, grand in its reach, deeply historical, it is a masterwork. For a good article on its virtues (contrasted with the mediocre Indignation, Roth's most recent novel), see this article in the online Dublin Review of Books:
http://www.drb.ie/more_details/08-12-...
5 stars and unhesitatingly part of my core collection. ( )

I am not okay with giving Philip Roth one star, after all he wrote Ghost Writer and a bunch of other good books. This one, however, did nothing for me. The prose was too dense. The story too plodding. I'm sure it's an amazing book, but not one I'm ready to read yet. ( )

Very difficult and very good. A little perplexed at how we just leave the narrator (Nathan Zuckerman) for the Swede. I liked only having his perspective though. Still, not seemingly tragic enough because we never return to the narrator for summation and criticism. Maybe that’s why it’s as good as it is. Maybe it suffers from not being able to be better than it was. Still, feels like something is missing. Great prose. Great, great characters. A little too much influence on gloves, but gloves serve as a good, extended metaphor for hiding the icy coldness of the American pastoral. ( )

It’s going to be a while before I read another “classic American novel.” One of the few things that I was thankful for while reading this was that it was half the length of Underworld by DeLillo. Apart from that, there wasn’t much else that impressed me.

This is a story of someone’s life. The blurb on the back says that it’s the revelation of the dirty laundry that a perfect looking American-dream achieving citizen keeps under his shirt. Well, yes, that’s what it’s about and, I think if that was all it was about, it might not be a bad novel.

But Roth, like DeLillo, fills the novel with all sorts of...

All sorts of what? Read the rest of the review (and comment!) at Arukiyomi. ( )

A man has it all except he can’t control his daughter who blows up the local post office to protest the Vietnam war. The book really looks at every character in great detail showing that everybody has their cracks, even all those who seem to have it all, they too have skeletons in their closets or their private little pains. Is the American Dream real or is it something that is not attainable? Book club book. ( )

I recently finished an outstandingly beautiful novel (THE MASTER PLANETS by Donald Gallinger), and immediately went into one of those "I'll-Never-Find-Anything-As-Good-Again" funks. Then I found this book, which is not only a brilliant piece of literature (it's by Roth, after all), but also deals with some fascinating issues similar to those in PLANETS--issues I wanted to read more about.

As just one example: I am not Jewish, but have noticed in certain writings something uniquely poignant in the Jewish love for America immediately after World War II. This was the country that had taken in many Jews' parents and grandparents in a way never before experienced, I believe. For the first time they were not outsiders, but simply immigrants in a land full of immigrants. And for the first time, every opportunity--in this nation of bounteous opportunities--was open to them. It is not surprising that the name "America" would become almost a hymn on the lips of many American Jews in this period, that they would develop an unparalleled love for their country. As all of America basked in a cornucopian economy and the righteous sense that our own good works had entitled us to it, American Jews were, perhaps, "Ultimate Americans." So it is also not surprising that, like everyone else, they also gave little thought to the idea that the richness of life here was too well fed by our military industrial complex and exploitation of Third World nations.

The protagonist, Seymour "Swede" Levov, certainly does not think about these things, and therein lies his downfall. As Amazon reviewer Ian Muldoon so aptly notes, the central question of the book is whether it is acceptable for Levov to to accept that he is one of the lucky ones and simply enjoy his place in time and history, or whether his good luck also carries an obligation. An inherently decent man, Levov does not look beyond his own life to wonder if it impinges on the lives of others. But his daughter cannot feel so sanguine. Merry has not had the good fortune of Seymour and his wife to be thought "perfect": She grew up with a terrible stutter, over which her beautiful parents agonized. Is this what gave her the ability (willingness? determination?) to see the fissures in the edifice they revere? In any event, she sees the fissures yawning, and her answer is to place sticks of dynamite in them. And later to withdraw so far from the world that she scarcely eats so as not to "destroy plant life," and will not even wash for fear of "harming the water." She has started by demolishing the world around her, and is now obliterating herself. Miraculously, the stutter that at one time "terrified" Levov is gone... as she herself soon will be.

AMERICAN PASTORAL is the story of a beautiful nation that, about 40 years ago, let some part of its best self slip away. As the "Ultimate American," Levov is the perfect symbol. As he thinks, so thought we. ( )

A moving, affecting read centering around the life of Seymour "The Swede" Levov, a once successful all-American father and husband who watches as his life -- his "American pastoral" -- disintegrates. Skillfully narrated and emotionally evocative, I was particularly broken when the Swede attempts to find and hopefully reconnect with his ill daughter Merry. Definitely a book that will stay with you -- Roth is a master of language. ( )

United States--History--1961-1969--Fiction.

God, this is a depressing book, but it is among Roth's best novels. In the main character, the Swede, Roth gives us a near-perfect 20th century American man. He is handsome, athletic, has a loving family and a good head for business. He is married to Miss New Jersey. He seems to have everything he could ever want. But, of course, that is never the case, and nothing stays perfect, as Roth's often-used narrator Nathan Zuckerman points out. For the Swede has a young daughter who, while intelligent and full of potential, hates her affluent, all-American family and everything they represent. And in the wake of her becoming a terrorist, Nathan Zuckerman tries to imagine what might have driven this young girl to such drastic extremes in behavior and, at the same time, he tries to hash out how America has come to be embroiled in the extremes of the Vietnam War.

American Pastoral is a superb novel. ( )

American Pastoral is Philip Roth's meditation on the rise and fall of a certain American dream. The "Swede," (Roth's main character)is an athlete, a scholar, and a fine, hard working man who builds a business into a small empire. Finally achieving a sort of American country squire existence, the Swede discovers that his only daughter secretly despises his values. With the help of violent radicals, she blows up the quaint local post office, and succeeds in killing a doctor. The rest of the novel charts the Swede's agony as he attempts to understand this shocking event and its meaning for a man who always believed in the post war promise of a healthy, thriving, American paradise. ( )

I've read two books by Philip Roth previously: Goodbye Columbus which I can't even really member and Portnoy's Complaint which is such a horrifying example of misogyny it made me swear of Roth for life. So I was a bit leery when my alumni chapter book club selected American Pastoral (1997) for our February meeting. A few pages into the book there's a scene at a Mets game at Shea Stadium and I started warming to the book a bit right there.

The novel tells the story of Seymour "Swede" Levov, a handsome and talented high school athlete who gains legendary status in his WWII-era Newark neighborhood. After the war ends, Swede marries Miss New Jersey, inherits his father's glove-making factory, and settles in a stone house in rural New Jersey. Swede and his wife Dawn raise one daughter Merry, Swede's pride and joy. The American Dream appears fulfilled. Everything comes crashing down as Merry becomes involved with political extremists protesting the Vietnam War and bombs the local post office/general store, killing one man.

That's basically the whole story in a nutshell, but the fills the novel's many pages with long passages of the characters' inner thoughts as they examine their lives. This storytelling style is especially illuminating - gripping even - when it focuses on Swede Levov. Unfortunately, Roth is ever the misogynist and thus his insights on the female characters are rather one-dimensional.

The novel also has an odd narrative structure. The first third of the book is written in first person by Nathan Zuckerman, who 45 years after graduating high school still has an obsession with Swede Levov the high school athlete, an obsession that tests the bounds of credibility. After a hundred pages or so, Zuckerman drops out of the narrative as a character although one has to assume that he's still narrating the entire story, which creates a question of whether or not he's a reliable narrator. The whole novel ends unsatisfyingly with no closure whatsoever.

I've mixed feelings about this book. Parts of it are brilliant, bringing a place, an era, and a personality to life, but it's also weighed down by wordiness and inconsistency ( )

Here is Philip Roth turning his spotlight up to blow-torch intensity to look with searing realism at the members of a star-crossed American family, some of whom wished to live an American dream and others who wished to have their own dream for America. Set against the background of civil protest and violence which intruded into people's lives during the Viet-Nam war, it closes with an enigmatic question for the reader, but there is no uncertainty whatever about the overwhelming ability of the author to capture in words the passionate emotions and conflicted thoughts of people caught in a vivid American experience. Very highly recommended. ( )

So actual!

Beautifully written in the beginning, but at some point the pacing breaks down and the plot drags on. ( )

Perfectly crafted. A bit too depressing to call "enjoyable." A window into experiences of my family members that I missed- First-Generation Jewish immigrant culture in the pre-War days, World War Two, life as an anti-war protester during the Vietnam war. Learned more about glove-making than I ever expected to know. ( )

The writing in this book was amazing. To think that Roth could keep our interest about the topic of one family's relationships, and give me so much to ponder is quite a feat. There is so much symbolism in this book it fit together so beautifully. ( )

Beautiful written story of a time of cataclysmic change in American history that brings a "normal" American family to the point of questioning everything they value and believe. A captivating telling of the revolutionary 60's in America that is fascinating but resolves in an unsatisfying way. ( )

3075 American Pastoral, by Philip Roth (read 10 May 1998) (Pulitzer Fiction prize in 1998) Since I read all Pulitzer fiction prize winners, I read this book. The book has liberal use of obscene language which is totally unnecessary to the story. The book has funny incidents, and is easy enough to read. But I did not think it very memorable. ( )

More brilliant, energetic writing from Roth. But the plot on this one bothers me. It seems to me Roth wrote AP just to win that Pulitzer. It seems to touch on a few themes that are guaranteed to pull at the heartstrings and speak to the prejudices of his generation, but it all rings hollow. I can't bring myself to care about the characters, not a single one. Not that that's normally a dealbreaker, but here it's tough to care about these mostly cardboard characters that Roth is trying to hold up as the examples of generations. But the writing - the writing is what pulled me through this. Not even the plotting, which is predictable at best, but Roth's white-hot, seething prose. This is astonishingly well-written hackery, ultimately. And unfortunately. You could sum it up by noting that the best parts of the book were about glove-making and Newark. That doesn't bode well.... ( )