Rating: 
Summary: A Perfectly Constructed, Deeply Moving Novel
Review: This is the first Philip Roth I've read since the Zuckerman Bound omnibus novel was issued in the late eighties, and I must say that, if this is any indication, I'm delighted and impressed with the direction his fiction has taken in the last decade or so. Gone is the self-absorption and Roth's tiring fixation on sex as the center of his fictional universe. In its place is a wide-ranging and devastating portrait of America in the 1960s, and a latter day deconstruction of the fabled American Dream so self-contained and complete that I honestly think it does for 1990s American literature what the Great Gatsby did for the 1920s. Nathan Zuckerman is still with us, but here Zuckerman is an aging, increasingly asocial author who, through the medium of Swede Lovov, is attempting to encompass and comprehend the quirks and tragedies of his generation. Who is Swede Levov? The All-American hero: blond, handsome, a high school football and basketball phenomenon, clean Marine, and heir to a glove-making fortune. The Swede is also Jewish, and he passionately believes that he has successfully lived by the rules of and gained access to Gentile American society, with all its supposed rewards. So when he marries a former Miss New Jersey and moves out of Newark and into a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in bucolic Old Rimrock, New Jersey, it looks like the Swede is ready to settle into a long, happy, and prosperous life--a true American pastoral. Yet come the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and the radicalization of his beloved daughter Merry, things go tragically awry. When Merry becomes a fugitive from the FBI after bombing the local post office, the Swede struggles to comprehend what went wrong, not only with his family, but also with the America in which he once had such an unshakable faith. What impresses me most is how Roth manages to hold American idealism in perfectly poised tension with the dark side of American politics and economic individualism. The Swede is a compssionate, thoughtful man who deserves success and happiness, yet he is such a stereotypical representative of American idealism and blind allegiance to the American Dream that he is inevitably singled out for victimization. In brutal contrast to everything the Swede believes in are the betrayals and lies of Vietnam and (eventually) Watergate. Lurking in the background too is the urban wasteland of Newark, the town of his (and Zuckerman/Roth's) youth, reduced to a ruin in the wake of the 1960s race riots. According to Roth, someone has to pay for these political and economic injustices, even if that someone is a man as likeable as Swede Levov. Only a writer as gifted as Roth could hold such an ambitious fictional design such as this together. It's a brilliant success, because you will end up both caring deeply for the Swede, while also realizing that, like Willy Loman, he believed in the wrong dreams and ended up paying a terrible price. I have since read "I Married a Communist," the Roth novel that followed "American Pastoral." It interrogates the 1950s in the way "American Pastoral" does the 1960s. "I Married a Communist" is also very successful, but I don't think it matches the sheer scope and scale of what Roth achieves here. "American Pastoral" is something of a masterpiece, the culmination of forty years of writing, and you just have to read it.
Rating: 
Summary: We know we can't understand each other, yet still we try
Review: _American Pastoral_ is the story of a man named Swede Levov, and how his life has mirrored the torments that ruptured his nation in the Sixties: the war, the assassinations, and his nation's ``loss of innocence." Before the war, he was a town hero; afterwards, he is a rotted-out husk of a man. Along the way, his daughter has bombed a local post office and killed a citizen of their small town, and afterwards she's converted to Jainism and renounced harm against all living things. Swede tries valiantly to keep his life together, but we get the feeling that he hasn't done it so well by the time he dies (toward the beginning of the book). _American Pastoral_'s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, revered Levov as they were growing up. Swede was an athletic superstar who in some way embodied the progressive spirit of the times. More importantly (in the context of the book), he embodied that sort of spirit for Zuckerman. The years pass. Zuckerman becomes a writer while Levov takes over his father's glove-manufacturing business. Both are successful in their own ways. Some 40 years after graduating from high school, Levov calls Zuckerman out of the blue and takes him out to lunch. They converse briefly. Levov seems heartbroken, and all Zuckerman's voyeuristic interviewing doesn't reveal why. They leave lunch, and some months later Levov dies. Zuckerman first suspects the usual suspects to explain Levov's torment - that Levov's brother is gay, for instance. None turn out to be right, and Zuckerman finally learns about Levov's daughter's crimes. He spends the rest of the book trying to explain Levov's life: How has he spent the last 40 years of his seemingly idyllic life? How has he descended from hometown hero to the man we see before us? As far as I can tell, the latter 3/4 of the book is fictional, even within the world of the book. Zuckerman is trying to reconstruct what the world must have been like for Levov, because he has no clue what actually happened within it. That Zuckerman's description of Levov's life *must*, in fact, be told fictionally, is revealed by this passage early in the book: ``You get [people] wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them wrong all over again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of *other people*, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims?" Yet Zuckerman tries to describe Levov. In so doing, he's really describing himself. This is a book about one man's worship of another man, and what the latter man's demise has to do with the American condition generally. What happens when our heroes disappear? What does it mean that we construct gods out of men, and how does it affect us when they fall?
Rating:
Summary: A very moving novel
Review: I read Portnoy's complaint 25 years ago. I haven't read Roth since. But after reading about his creative flow during the 1990s several times, I picked up American pastoral. I was moved by it. The story is simple enough as you can read in other reviews, but they way Roth gets into the psyche of Swede Levov is so moving, How he portrays his emotions, longing, fear, confusion. When I wasn't reading the book he was still with me, in my mind.
Being non-American, but living in country, Sweden, that is highly influenced by the US it also gave me a interesting picture of how America was changed during the Vietnam war.How the American dream crashed into a new reality it couldn't handle. The novel is also a marvellous portrayal of a family in crisis. The book is divided in 3 parts. I found the first two excellent and was preparing myself for a five star review. Unfortunately he drags on a bit in the third part, with some slow and rather uninteresting passages. I found myself thinking, I got the message. You don't have to hammer it in.
Still a very satisfying read and one that will make me read more books by Roth
Rating:
Summary: prepare to be sucked in
Review: This is a wonderful book, and I highly recommend it. However, if you plan to read it, please steel yourself for a very dense, emotionally gripping experience. "American Pastoral" can be very disturbing. If you're like me, you won't mind this sort of intellectual disturbance; but make sure you're in the right mindset for it (this is not a book I would recommend to anyone who is feeling particularly depressed). I found that it was a little slow in the beginning, but as I kept reading I couldn't put it down. The story, in fact, is one that the narrator (a writer) is "making up"; but as the book goes on and you get deeper into the plot, that detail is forgotten. Instead, you are led to concentrate on "the Swede", a man befuddled by life's imperfections and by his own personal tragedies. This book is very well written and I really enjoyed it, in a masochistic sort of way.
Rating:
Summary: Splintering of the American Dream
Review: Swede Levov has it all: looks, beauty queen wife, big beautiful house in the country, money, power, love of his craft...
Its just too good to be true. Enter Merry, his stuttering daughter, who feels that she cannot live up to the world that her parents have made for her. Solution: Blow it up!
Excellent story about the splintering of the American Dream or as one reviewer put it, welcome to the American Berserk.
As other reader's have stated, the ending is a bit climatic, in a sense, but could it be that Swede is having a total nervous breakdown as his sheltered world melts away around him?
Rating:
Summary: The sound of things falling apart
Review: The thing I found interesting about this book was the way it detailed the splintering of American culture, the decline of our cities, the erosion of moral consensus, the growing irrelevance of religion, the self-absorption alcohol, drugs and permissiveness represent, the futility of politics and the impossibility of understanding without trying to blame anyone or anything.
I think if you enjoy Herman Melville, or maybe a novel like Louis Begley's "About Schmidt," you might give this one a try. Engaging, and extremely thought-provoking. Just don't come to it wanting to be cheered or reassured.
Rating:
Summary: Everything that was once perfect is in ruins for the "Swede"
Review: This is Roth's finest book that I have read. I have always liked the author's unabashed use of sex and the Id in his book, but at times it is so absurd it's distracting. However, in American Pastoral, the sex in the book is in balance with the scenarios in the book. Mary Levov, daughter of the high school hero Swede Levov, is a stuttering, fanatical, and highly impressionable child that drives her father from the perfect idyllic life to one of despair and loneliness. Swede's daughter gets herself involved with a passionate anti-Vietnam group and she ends up planting a bomb in a local post office killing the town doctor. Mary is on the run and Swede along with the rest of the family shoulder the guilt and the pain of their daughter's folly. This situation exacerbates the differences in Swede's marriage, his relationship with his parents, his job, and his overall place in the world. Everything that was once perfect is in ruins. Everything is short-lived, except sadness and despair. Mary, a bright but insecure child jumps from extremisms, and becomes a Jain instead of a violent protestor. Everyone knows of Philip Roth's incredible abilities, but it was nice to read a serious book of his without the overpowering Freudian Id in the mix. This is one of the most entertaining and best books I have read.
Rating:
Summary: Everything you know is wrong
Review: I hadn't read anything by Philip Roth since 'Goodbye, Colombus' in high school, some 15 years ago. Tired of most modern fiction, with it's painfully rendered characters and insignificant explorations into domestic problems, I sought out Roth to give me some exposure to the great questions of American life. Well, he delivered by creating an American family dealing with a particularly problematic domestic situation, and the irony wasn't lost on me. What's most fascinating to me about 'American Pastoral' is the Swede's acceptance of the fiction of himself created by those around him. Is he really the unthinking success that others believe him to be, or is he merely the son of hard-working immigrants who will never feel part of the American fabric in the way his WASP neighbors do? Swede's birthright as an American, a self-made man, an optimist, is contrasted with his experience as father of a killer. He is betrayed of his dreams by his own flesh and blood, but is he responsible by creating a myth of life his daughter can only rebel against, since there is no way to exceed what her parents create for her? And isn't that the point of being a child, to do even better than your parents?
Admittedly, there is a lot going on here, and not all of it congeals, or works together. But certainly enough of it does, and for whatever indulgences Roth engages in (let's face it, the man has earned the right) 'American Pastoral' deals with questions of national identity, ethnic identity, and what it means to be a parent, an American, and a man. Leave it to Roth to allow his characters to get their hands dirty in the muck of America's dream, to hurt and scald each other and thereby to act in the only way that is honest. Everything else is just an act.
Rating: 
Summary: The most overrated book I have ever read.
Review: The central problem of Phillip Roth's book (and I'll just cut right to the chase, because I'm sure you've gotten your plot synopsis elsewhere) is in its double-stuffed narrative and completely uncompelling, two dimensional characters. To the first point: about the seventh time that the plot failed to keep moving because of a flashback covering well-trodden ground (like, say, The Swede's wife's Miss America experiences) I wanted to chuck the book and move on to something else. I do not mind digression, after all, I am a major David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo fan. Unfortunetly, this book is incapable of maintaining a compelling narrative while being digressive. It lacks all the humor Roth is notorius for, and rather than make many brilliant deep observations, settles for making the same ones again and again and again. THe second problem-- one of character is a bit more complex. I don't care for one second whether or not characters are sympathetic. I love Lady Macbeth and Hamlet, but I would never invite either of them over to my house for dinner. ROth has never been good at sympathy, in an attempt to make a sympathetic protagonist, he has instead created... well... a non-entity. A carbon-copy aryan jew (if that were possible), a star athlete, owner of a major business. A man capable of expressing two things: pain and joy, and fairly incapable of thinking about either one of them. Roth then surrounds his protagonist with three female characters, none of them written with complexity. This, at least, is not surprising, Roth invented several jewish female stereotypes in Portnoy's Complaint, so the fact that he is still incapable of writing women isn't too surprising. The one great part of the book is its final chapter, but after reading 380 pages waiting for it to good, you might be very much dissappointed. If you want a really interesting book about America, pick up DeLillo's "White Noise".
Rating:
Summary: The nightmare of a perfect American family
Review: _American Pastoral_, is an thoroughly engrossing, but sad and ultimately tragic story. Philip Roth's lively style of writing never allows the novel to become depressing. Seymour Levov was a three-letter man in his Newark, New Jersey high school, excelling in baseball, basketball, and football. Seymour's sobriquet was "the Swede" because, although he was Jewish, he was also blonde, tall and broad shouldered. He later became a very successful businessman, having taken over from his retiring father a Newark glove manufacturing plant. Seymour then met and later married a drop-dead gorgeous, Irish-Catholic girl, named Dawn, from an Elizabeth, New Jersey working-class family. Encouraged by friends, she entered several beauty pageants and was eventually crowned Miss New Jersey. Dawn later reluctantly agreed to compete (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) in the Miss America content. The product of the union of this perfect couple was a brilliant and sensitive daughter they named Meredith, nicknamed "Merry." Despite having a stuttering problem, Merry became a brilliant student, with many friends. In fact everything in the Levov family could be called idyllic, until Lyndon Johnson decided to escalate the War in Vietnam. To Merry, LBJ was the murderer of innocent Vietnamese women and children, as she never failed to scream at her otherwise liberal parents. Then, everything fell apart--Merry ran away and planted a bomb in the post office in their peaceful, upscale community of Old Rimrock, New Jersey. The bomb also blew up the general store, causing a prominent and beloved Old Rimrock physician to be killed. Their beautiful Merry, the light of their lives, became a wanted fugitive. Through his being blackmailed, Seymour was eventually allowed to locate Merry. This previously robust girl was emaciated and living in extreme squalor among derelicts, and maybe worse, in one of the worst "bombed out" sections of Newark. Dawn suffers a nervous breakdown and is hospitalized. She undergoes a physical transformation as a way of reclaiming her former beauty and her sanity. My only reservation about the novel is that Philip Roth, as he often does in many of his books, needs to rant and rave about the supposed ever-present animosity and suspicion between Jews and Gentiles. I found Lou Levov's, Seymour's father, inteview (i.e., interrogation) of Dawn about how Christian she planned to raise Lou Levov's future grandchild throughly distasteful. It also had very little to do with the crux of this otherwise very powerful and compelling novel.
|
