American Pastoral

Rating:
Summary: Deeply textured and obsessively detailed work
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Tremendous character analysis; deflated us with weak ending.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful and Personal
Review: American Pastoral is a beautifully-written epic of the American family. The protagonist is Swede Levov, an ex-high school athlete, and the plot revolves around his dealing with a tragedy. That tragedy is his daughter's bombing of a general store in their rural town. The novel begins when Swede is 70 and gradually works its way back to the time of the bombing, and then forward to 5 years after the bombing. This narrative form allows the reader to experience all of Swede's emotions. The novel deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize, it is a winning depiction of American home life, and realistically relationships between fathers and daughters. Roth's characters are very true to life. Definitely recommended.

Rating:
Summary: a powerful novel
Review: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

After reading Roth's novel 'The Human Stain', I had to wonder how anything Roth wrote could be better than that one. After all, 'The Human Stain' did not win the Pulitzer Prize, but 'American Pastoral' did. Could this book really be so much better that it would win the highest literary prize in America. The short, uncomplicated answer is no. I don't think that 'American Pastoral' is the better novel out of the two. The longer, more complicated answer has the ultimate conclusion of: While I feel that 'The Human Stain' is the better of the two novels, 'American Pastoral' is an excellent novel and extremely well written. With these two novels, Philip Roth has earned his spot on my list of the great American novelists.

'American Pastoral' is another novel narrated by the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman was a couple of years behind Swede Levov in high school, and decades later Levov contacts Zuckerman. Zuckerman tells Levov's story. Unlike 'The Human Stain', Zuckerman is not a major player in the novel but rather sets up the context for telling the story and then steps out and just writes about the Swede. The Swede was the Golden Boy in his high school. Everything he did turned out perfect. He was the star athlete and everyone wanted to emulate him, even Zuckerman. The Swede ended up marrying Miss New Jersey and seemed to live a charmed life. He did not go into professional sports as expected, but rather followed in his father's footsteps by working in, and later taking over, his father's glove factory.

In talking to Zuckerman, Swede lets it drop that there was a major tragedy in the family but doesn't ever say what it was. Zuckerman assumes that Swede's younger brother, Jerry, is gay and that it tore Mr Levov apart. But that's not it. Instead it has to do with Swede's daughter, Merry, and how her actions in her teenage years just broke the family apart. Swede had the perfect life, the American Dream, and that dream was shattered. 'American Pastoral' is the story of that dream, and it is also the story of the harsh shadow that the American Dream can cast. We see the idealized American Dream of the 1940's and 1950's, and we see what happens to those who live the dream when it stretches into the 1960's and 1970's. 'American Pastoral' is a powerful novel spanning a generation and has to be considered one of Roth's greatest novels (despite what I said about 'The Human Stain'). I'm usually disappointed by Pulitzer Prize Winning Novels, but not this one. It is slow moving and methodical, but always interesting.

Rating:
Summary: verges on a soap opera, but offers a bleak view on america
Review: This is the story of a guy who tries to contruct a perfect life, from sports heroism in high school and marrying a beauty queen, to a huge house in the New Jersey countryside. Of course, his world of appearences comes crashing down on him when the going gets rough. ALong the way, there is lots about post-War American society as well as the ravages of aging.

Unfortunately, given this great premise and the inexplicable fact that it won a Pulitzer, this novel fails on many levels. First, it is written in a rambling, almost stream-of-consciousness style that is distracting but also totally failed to envelope me in its rhythm and world-view. It is personal taste to a degree, but I simply did not like it much. Second, while the tragedy is piercing and frightening to any parent, the novel keeps leaning towards melodrama without quite wholly falling into it. I mean, the guy could appear to have a charmed life without marrying a former Miss New Jersey and then suffer from something less than his beloved child becoming a fanatic political murderer. Life is hard, illusions are shattered, and falls are brutal by far less than all Roth's soap-operattish exaggeration. Third, the only truly three-dimensional character is the Swede, the paragon who crumbles under all the pain. You see him from a lot of angles, whereas the women remain the merest caricatures, peeping into his constructs and illusions without gaining much real life throughout. Even his brother is in the end easy to label as the angry-brother-become-arrogant-surgeon as is his harddriving-poor-immigrant's-son father. And none of these characters, not even the Swede, is rich enough to live on in my imagination.

WHile I was disappointed in these problems, which I believe make this novel mediocre, there were many interesting points, but again they tend to be personal and I don't believe would carry over for most other readers. I lived for a time in the New Jersey he describes and travelled often through bombed-out Newark, about whose history Roth informed me in the book. I also very much enjoyed the stuff about the glove industry, but then as a business writer I admire business owners. Moreover, I knew people like the Swede and Roth makes a convincing case for the confusing anguish they feel when things go very wrong. Plus, as I said, it brings the parent's ultimate fears for their kids to the surface. Finally, there is the panorama of American life, which Roth succeeds in evoking, but again that can be viewed as parochial and of little interest, say, to my European friends, most of whom did not like this novel.

In balance, I did enjoy this novel and it got me to think, but I expected a far, far better performance. Recommended tepidly, with these reservations in mind.

Rating:
Summary: Swede Levov! It rhymes with...'The Glove'!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Infuriating
Review: American Pastoral is written in quite eloquent prose and tells a rather harrowing story of how a father and mother deal with a horrendous act committed by their daughter. Roth goes into great detail about several different topics from glove-making to the Newark riots. At times, I felt like throwing the book across the room. During one section of the book, when Swede is about to meet his daughter, whom he hadn't heard from in five years, Roth goes off on several tangents. I wanted to read about where Merry had been, what Swede's reaction to her would be, what Merry's reaction would be. Instead, I sludged through page after page about the Newark riots or what happened when Merry was younger, etc. while Swede was left standing there looking at the dog and cat hospital where he'd been told that Merry worked. ... But then, the bulk of the book was told as backstory. I also don't know why Zuckerman was a character in the book, much less the narrarator (although I was glad that he was pretty much forgotten after the first 100 pages).

This was the first of Philip Roth's books that I had ever read. I came to Roth because of his literary reputation, and I chose American Pastoral because it had won the Pulitzer Prize. It will be some time before I pick up another Roth book. I think I'll read something by Larry McMurtry now....

Rating:
Summary: We grow old.
Review: Why does every book that wins the Pulitzer make me feel like my life is useless? I guess they know the truth ... We are as insignificant as ants and as doomed as day old fruit flies.

Rating:
Summary: Painful!
Review: I hated this book! The book was bogged down with boring details that did not add to the story (ie: multiple pages on how to make leather gloves). I didn't feel that any of the characters were likeable or even worth caring about. Our book club read the book so I forced myself to read the entire book, and disliked the book as much at the end as I did at the beginning.

Rating:
Summary: The most horrible thing I have ever read
Review: This book made me harken back to my law school days, longing for even the most dense and boring text or treatise. Anything but reading the long, drawn out text of Philip Roth. I am even more turned off of Pulitzer winners than ever before. But, that is just the beginning. Even without this verbal assualt that practically brought me to tears, I would detest the book so much that I almost wished the author harm!

This book is dry, it cries out for editing. Everything about the story from chosen narrator perspective (why?) to the content itself is . . . frustrating. That is the best word I can choose to describe my complete and utter despise for this book. It was boring, it was unpleasurable. I had no feeling or interest in the characters or their plight in life. Maybe, if I was an older, white male from this era and socioeconomic status I would have enjoyed American Pastoral. But, I am not, and therefore I offer this warning to any prospective reader or bookgroup: Stay away from Philip Roth, you will thank me.