Rating: 
Summary: First, but not last, Roth
Review: I read this book based on the recommendation of a friend, and I consider it some of the best advice I have received recently. Roth is a wonderful writer, he uses a passionate vocabulary and creates wonderful characters and in this book writes an engaging story into which the reader is drawn. It follows the hidden failures and internal stuggles of a man who had everything and by all accounts was happy and successful. His life, however, had fallen apart after his formerly wonderful daughter bombed a local store and killed a man. Watching him crumble and have to confront his deamons is fascinating. It is a wonderful novel and I cannot recommend it enough to any fan of fiction who has enough time to read an excellent book carefully.
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Summary: Fascinating, gut-wrenching period piece
Review: This is such a great book, and yet it is so hard to read. From a purely technical standpoint it is brilliantly executed -- as are all of Roth's books -- setting up conflict after conflict, crisis afer crisis, with a complete (and refreshing) lack of real resolution. Nothing trite here. But even the most technical and literate of readers will invariably get caught up in the complex, heartbreaking pathos of this book, exploring as it does the undoing of a family that, on its surface, would seem to define the truest essence of what it means to be American. The turbulence of late 1960s America serves as both a thematic foundation and a plot accelerant, and I have to say that I feel Roth deftly captured the spirit of the times: the anger, the naivete, the mindless adherence to shallow ideals (on all sides) and the radical and painful transformation of our mercurial culture. The examination of a life being gradually and irreversibly destroyed (that of the main character, Seymour Levov), and those around him who help to destroy it (principally his daughter, Merry, but also his wife, his "friends," and some mysterious secondary characters), is portrayed so expertly that I periodically had to put the book down because it was almost too much to bear. Nevertheless, this book is truly an epic piece of contemporary American literature, and absolutely deserving of the Pulitzer.
Rating:
Summary: His finest
Review: Roth just seems to get better and better. This is his finest work (along with Sabbath's theatre)--forget the magical realism and the embedded narrative. This book is a unforgiving but poignant meditation on the 60's--which had the patina of exhuberance but as Roth so deeply understands an underlying hurt, a pathology that wrecked peoples lives--that caused damage that will take years--if ever to get over. I was a participant but I sensed it--the danger--in some inchoate way--at the time. It takes a great writer like Roth to articulate that dementia. Walker Percy sensed it also and wrote about it, but even his fine work (Lancelot for example) cannot match the subtlety the humor and the utter terror that Roth exposes. Be aware that Roth is not exxagerating--he is on the mark. The moral disintegration and the sanctimonious (and just plain old) violence really happened. The book is not a political tract--I am just focusng on that, but he details the period with the precision of an historian. He understands the "mere anarchy" that was the real agenda of the times.
I omit his brilliant language and literary crafsmanship--his understanding of wounded human spirits because that should be obvious.
He is the greatest writer of our times.
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Summary: Interesting from the first page- I loved it-A must read!
Review: As Mrs Seinfield says of her son "How can you not love him?" the reader may say as well of the protagonist of AMERICAN PASTORAL- Seymour Irving Levov. And yet long before the end we may also conclude that "the Swede" as he is affectionately called, is an unsympathetic and hollow soul. To me this book is about America. Where has she been? Where is she now? What will she become? The book also ends with questions and to some readers these questions may remain unanswered and may even be unanswerable. And yet, Mr Roth, at least to my mind, does provide some answers, at least by implication.
The central question asked is this: Isn't it enough for the hero Seymour Irving Levov just to BE and to take in his life what he finds before him?
What does Seymour take? In a nutshell, the bounty of being born in America at a particular time. He takes what his father had built(a successful glove factory); he takes as his wife Miss New Jersey 1949; he takes a heritage home and a parcel of richly productive land on which to raise his family. He leaves school at 14 in order to take up this bounty.
In the novel as a representative of the past, the hero's father rants about American having strayed from her "path", whilst his idealistic daughter, representative of the future, acts to give reality to her beliefs by disowning her mother and her family and becoming a "terrorist" and murderer.
Maybe it isn't enough to take what's offered. Maybe there is an obligation on the Swede, and by extension on all those who enjoy the bounty. How, when, where and to whom these obligations are directed is a larger question.
AMERICAN PASTORAL may be described as a novel of ideas, but to me the characters are so vivid and memorable, and the narrative so strong, that such a description amounts to a disservice. In addition, the information provided on the glove making process I found fascinating and memorable and an important element in establishing the growth of America as an industrial powerhouse. The decline of the industry too, and the whims of fashion, the effect of Jacqui Kennedy on that industry ( Camelot indeed)all helped to complete the beguiling background against which the lives of the characters are played out.
I found this novel a profoundly interesting and moral examination of matters crucial to the survival of those things for which America professes to stand tall - freedom, equality before the law, justice - as well as a moving creation of a range of characters. A must read.
Rating: 
Summary: Great writting, pity about the personalities
Review: Just finished this book. First read of Philip Roth and I think he is a great writer, lots of brillant description, background and life.However the 3 main protagonists, Swede, Dawn & Merry are so flat that they are hardly 2 dimenisonal. If they were ment to be ciphers for the American experiance of the 60's and 70's....it fails to engage or make me identify with it or them. All 3 remained unreal, even Swede's rage near the end left me unmoved or concerned. There are attempts at "magic realism" in this book, but, I couldn't engage in it. As a descriptive writter he seems over welming in his ability and will go down as America's Dickens or Hardy. A prize winner? no I think not.
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Summary: And I'm a Philip Roth FAN.
Review: Let's see, John Updike's "Rabbit, Run" was brilliant, and so he is awarded a Pulitzer prize instead for "Rabbit is Rich", by far the worst book in his four-part Rabbit series, rambling, pointless, seemingly unedited. Then there is Kennedy's insipid "Ironweed" and Chabon's sprawling "The Amazing Adventures of Kavialer & Clay", but for me "American Pastoral" clinches it. I've read fifteen other Philip Roth books, several of them twice, and all are better than this -- with the possible exception of "The Facts", which doesn't really count since it's not a novel. (Let's list them: "Goodbye Columbus", "Letting Go", "When She Was Good", "Portnoy's Complaint", "The Breast", "The Great American Novel", "Our Gang", "My Life as a Man", "The Professor of Desire", "The Ghostwriter", "Zuckerman Unbound", "The Anatomy Lesson", "The Prague Orgy", "The Counterlife", and "The Facts".) So what does a Pulitzer prize mean? It means, apparently, that the novel is lousy but the author has talent. In any case: 1) I LIVED through the sixties. This book does not come close to capturing them, and the events it drones on about are preposterous and cartoonish. 2) Its climax is forced, contrived, and unconvincing. (It's a bit unsettling by the way to see so Nixon beat up on in the time of the much more blatantly unscrupulous, aggressively self-serving, cynical, and mean Bush II.)
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Summary: Sixties at their worst
Review: One of the knocks on this book, even from reviewers who have liked it, is that it trivializes the rebellious spirit of the 1960s through the screeching lunacy of Merry Levov. There were countless examples of logical, righteous protest, they argue, and by showing only the thoughtless Merry and her equally deranged companion, Rita Cohen, and the ingratitude of black rioters in Newark, Philip Roth comes off as someone who missed the decade altogether, perhaps in seclusion doing research for Portnoy's Complaint. I think, however, that Roth's one-maybe-two-dimensional portrayal of Merry and the other revolutionary forces of the '60s was precisely the point. This novel was not so much about the turbulent '60s as it was about the disintegration of the '50s. The story is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman and told through the (imagined) eyes of Swede Levov, both of whom graduated high school before 1950. Roth is not only concerned with the collapse of the Swede's American dream, but also with his assimilation into American society, his pursuit and eventual attainment of the American dream -- all typical characterstics of the '50s. The Swede had no concept of the attributes which we typically ascribe to the '60s. He was too busy worrying about how to make the perfect lady's dress glove. The reason Roth did so much research and wrote in such painstaking detail about the glove industry was to tell the reader precisely what Lou and Swede Levov's lives revolved around. Since the Swede is the only character whom we see others through, of course he isn't going to question himself for being concerned with such things as D rings and piece rates. It's up to the readers to draw the inference that maybe, just maybe, the Swede is out of touch and too concerned with materialism and achieving the perfect life. This is not necessarily a terrible thing by itself. What Roth aims to do is not to paint a 100 percent historically accurate portrait of the '60s, but instead to illustrate what a horror the '60s looked like to someone who was not a participant in the counterculture movement -- to someone who had something to lose. The best way to do that was to take the worst of that counterculture movement -- self-absorbed adolescents who raged against their successful upbringing in order to conform to the growing popularity of the rebellion -- and spill it onto the page, to show how berserk this decade was to someone who was in no way trained for it. To show how justified, cool-headed and rational some parts of the '60s revolution were would have detracted from an integral theme of the book, as imagined by the Swede: He learned "the worst lesson that life can teach -- that it makes no sense." Also, keep in mind that Zuckerman is the book's narrator, and he is imagining nearly all of the story. He is trying, somehow, to make sense of the Swede's tragedy. It's possible that Merry really had a few more redeeming characteristics than is written, and than Jerry Levov says she did. The best way to make sense of tragedy sometimes is to say the whole world is crazy, and maybe that's what Zuckerman did, turning Merry into a raving lunatic in order to show that there was nothing the Swede could do to save her or himself. What Roth has done, with Zuckerman's help, is something along the lines Tim O'Brien talked about in his novel The Things They Carried -- to create a story that is emotionally true, if not entirely factually true. At its core, this novel is an allegory, with the Swede representing the all-too-perfect 1950s and Merry the tumultuous, unexplainable '60s. In order to get across the full effect of this gulf, Roth had to show the '60s at their worst.
Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece, but Lacking Some of Verve...
Review: This story of Swede Levov is almost a perfect rendition of a man in search of American Dream, and how life and things beyond your powers, can devastate you along with the dream. As some other reviewer mentioned, this novel shares things in common with "The Great Gatsby", in theme (as mentioned above) and the narrative techinique (a recessed, observant narrator). This is as muted as a Roth novel will get. The tone of the prose is almost autumnal, and it's unfailingly beautiful at all times. The unraveling of Levov is heartbreakingly sad. The anarchist daughter (probably the only "Rothian" chaotic character in the book) is like a figure from a nightmare, and clashes with the rest of the characters/world of the novel. Other than that, a fine retrospective of a certain era of America (Jersey, of course), and a man who dreamed its dream and wanted to, but failed to do good by it.
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Summary: Nihilism and Transcendence:An Ethics of Cynicism?
Review: Philip Roth has long been one of contemporary America's most popular and gifted writers. In the 1990's, Philip Roth began the seventh decade of his life, and commenced the fourth decade of his publication history. Roth, long the terror of the American literary establishment, has blossomed in his later life, the acerbic tone of his characteristic rants somehow mellowed and deepened by a moving wisdom which reflects a profound self-understanding. 'American Pastoral' is precisely a crystalline distillation of Roth's own experience of the last 50 years of American life and culture, which is evoked in a lush prose, refulgent with dazzling metaphor and imagery. Here, Roth 'digs in' to the culture of the 60's and 70's in a careful, judicious, and (dare I say?) compassionate manner: he explores the intense dynamics of the radical cultural shift and explosion of tradition which accompanied the anti-Vietnam war effort beautifully, and evokes endearingly the concerns and naivete of child- and parent-hood, while situating all of this in the simple yearnings to belong experienced by so many cultural "others". Despite the emotive qualities of his story (and the telling of it), he is in no way sentimental. Roth (or Nathan Zuckerman, to long time fans) uses the ruptures and discontinuities which shattered the cozy ideals of 'the American Dream' to highlight a fundamental insight into the human condition. Namely, that the world is meaningless, and that it only becomes meaningful through our interaction with it. The recurrent vexations of life are, for Roth, the world's stubborn insistence on non-conformation to our images of it. Despite (and through) Roth's depiction of the devastating heartache brought upon an honest and 'decent' man by his inability to protect his loved ones and to control his surroundings, Roth points beyond the platitudinous moralizing which distorts so many works of art to an at once more realistic and sublime perspective on the world. Roth doesn't tell us 'how to look at the world', rather, he merely reminds us that 'looking at the world' is precisely what we are doing--and nothing more. Altogether, 'American Pastoral' is a controlled, seething, slow-burning explosion of a novel which probes at once the full range of the modern American experience while simultaneously posing and answering some of the most timely and relevant questions facing post-modernity. This book is highly recommended, probably (maybe 'Operation Shylock'?) the greatest (one of the few which deserve the term great) of Roth's 22 fictional publications, and a fabulous capstone to a marvelous and extremely important writing career. Hats off.
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Summary: a Rugelach - a madeleine it will never be
Review: Zuckerman eats a ruglach cookie with cinnamon and raisins and nuts, and hopes to get what Proust gets when he eats a plain vanilla madeleine dipped in tea -- a complete awakening of his memory. It doesn't happen, for the writer. But for the reader, it does. A whole world unfolds and then unravels before you. For me, it was a from a viewpoint that I not only never understood before, I never even thought about its existence. How did the straight non-hip people think and feel and see, while we flower children were ending a war and fixing the world? And what about those who took the rhetoric of the 60s and 70s so seriously that they never came back to any semblance of normalcy? Here these questions are made compelling and the answers vividly brilliant. I didn't know those Pulitzer prize people were so smart.
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