Rating: 
Summary: getting people wrong...
Review: The central dillemma of "American Pastoral" is that the "ability to penetrate the interior of people" is beyond most people. Apparently this is true of people and books as well. Since starting this wonderful, passionate, infuriating novel, I have often returned to the same page, the same paragraph rereading what serves as the thematic statement of the novel."You fight your superficiality, your shallownes, so as to try and come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogacnce...take them on with an open mind, as equals man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong." There it is, simple and straight forward. Phillip Roth is a very giving novelist. He states his point. Not just once, but again and again he echos this sentiment. And still people never fail to get this book wrong. The superficiality is to take this book as the tale of the Swede's tragic undoing. Or to take it as a recounting of Merry's misguided rebellion. Or even of Nathan Zuckerman's obsessions. This is a book about how the self is infinitely unknowable. How one can never truly understand oneself, much less others. What makes this novel so brilliant, in my humble opinion, is not simply the very true message the book carries. In the hands of a lesser writer, this could come off as a platitude, a cliche, so overstated as to become meaningless. Instead, Roth gives you a collection of dazzilingly complicated characters, beyond simple definition, only knowable through the words of themselves or others, but unknowable all the time. One reader complained of being frustrated with not knowing whether this was truly the story of the Swede, or a fiction of Zuckerman's mind. And to that I say, that is the point. We can't know the Swede except through the fiction we create in our own mind, our attempt at understanding that is always a little fiction, a little wrong. One person accused Roth of overwriting. no doubt, they had in mind the long passages detailing the making of gloves in dazzling overspun details. To that I say, this is absoluetley necessary to the structure of the novel. That these trivialities occupy so much of our time and our lives. That superficiality and depth know no difference in the swamp of our mind or our estimation of people. Swede, the man judged to be just a father and a business man, a normal people, a collection of surface details. How could a responsible writer leave all of that out? This book, engaging and complex, is what all great literature should be, a life in and of itself. A character at once identifiable by it's traits, but unknowable except for what we believe in our own minds it to be.
Rating: 
Summary: disappointing work
Review: I should start by saying that this review must be considdered incomplete...as I was unable to even finish this dreary book. But that should be taken as the heart of my review. This book was completly unreadable. I made the mistake of taking the book on vacation with me...it was the only thing I had to read and so I was forced to suffer through 200+ pages. It was a struggle. As soon as I returned home I picked up another book, happy to be free of Roth's horrible work. Some problems: it was easy to get lost in Roth's three-page paragraphs consisting of conversations, often you would have to go back to trace who was saying what. Isn't it a a basic rule of english...new speaker...new paragraph. Roth in his Pulitzer prize winning greatness seems to have forgotten that rule. The story started out with potential, unfortunatly that potential was never reached. Part of the reason is because it is never clear whether the story we are hearing of the Swedes life and all it tragedies actually occured, or was the story fabricated by Zuckerman who was just giving us his opinion of how things might have played out for the Swede. Maybe the answer is given later in the book, but I doubt it. Finally, seldem have I read a work by an Author whose contempt for women is so transparent. From the class reunion were the men gather to talk about how much they hate their wives...to the fact the the one thing that destroyed the Swedes perfect life was his horrible daughter Merry...if not for HER everything in his life would still be apple pie. If Roth intends this to be a story about the death of the American dream shared by so many durring the fifties...he seems to be saying that women are responsible for that death. It's the American version of Adam and Eve, and again it is Eve who is responsible for the fall. Wholly pathetic!!!
Rating:
Summary: Roth Can Do Better
Review: I am glad Philip Roth has his admirers; it take the pressure off me. To be fair, I liked some of his early books. I first read Goodbye, Columbus in 1977 and I still recall the sense of awe his writing gave me. He said so much with so little. Even the names of the characters were rich with significance, making it a book to read on many levels. In that slight book, Roth said tenfold more than in the hugely overwritten and dull American Pastoral. Actually, I consider it quite an accomplishment for Roth to make a book with political terrorism in it into something so completely boring. It's knowing what Roth can do that makes the vast, undiscipined logorrhea of American Pastoral so painful. If I had not been obligated to finish this book for my book group it would have been thrown across the room within Part One, probably in the third or fourth imagined conversation between Levov and his daughter Merry. This book reads as though Roth sat down, typed without pausing and walked away, never once rereading to edit a sentence. It is self-indulgent, undisciplined and completely, almost unremittingly terrible.. Occasionally, Roth aspires to his old brilliance. There are flashes of true insight that are about as plentiful as the chicken in Campbell's soup. When he writes about the drinking neighbor woman and people simply getting tired of themselves....that had a ring of truth. When he wrote about Swede sensing his wife Dawn still loved him, but was rejecting him because that could make her new -- a woman without a terrorist daughter -- that was beautifully compassionate and empathetic. But Roth was stingy with his genius in this book and most of it is a thin gruel. Roth uses Zuckerman as his narrator -- a mistake, in my opinion. Zuckerman is the ultimate unreliable narrator and it's clear that the entire narrative is nothing but the product of Zuckerman's own obsessions. It reveals more about Zuckerman than Swede -- of course -- and focuses on the least interesting element of Swede's life. American Pastoral is a Job-like inquiry into why bad things happen to good people -- to be specific, how did good parents like Swede and Dawn produce a daughter who was sweet and loving until adolesence and who then became a terrorist bomber. Of course, the answer is unknowable and it takes Zuckerman forever and a day to concede that point. A much more interesting story to me would be how does a man, who loses everything in such a horrible, soul-searing way find the courage to try again. How, after having a child go so hideously wrong, does Swede get the courage to do it over, risking disaster not once, but three times with three sons. However, Zuckerman doesn't spend one paragraph on the question of how one finds that courage. His interest is completely absorbed in finding the one point where everything went wrong -- a fruitless,impossible quest that took altogether to many pages to accomplish.
Rating: 
Summary: This is a Cold Pastoral not an American Pastoral
Review: A pastoral is an urban fiction celebrating bucolic life in the countryside. As such, this book appears misnamed. If irony is intended then the title might have better been Cold Pastoral following Keats. For that's where this book leaves me: Cold. I confess I like a book that reaches some sort of moral, esthetic, or logical conclusion; that has a beginning, middle, and end, and that is not over written, pretentious, self-conscious, and repetitive. And so I don't like AP. As a writer, I always was taught that Backstory should be in the mind of the writer not in his book. And I was taught that you don't tell the reader about all that research you did to find out how they made gloves in the old days, or what the Miss America thing is all about, or why the Jains wear those silly veils. Each time Roth goes off into such detail I hear the index cards rustling in the background. I shouldn't hear those cards, because the information should have been seamlessly woven into the narrative. Nathan Zuckerman and Philip Roth (narrator and author of AP) are not necessarily the same person any more than art must necessarily duplicate life, but it is interesting that Zuckerman and Roth both were born and raised in middle class Jewish households in Newark, N.J. Both are successul white Jewish male writers writing for over forty years on what it was like to grow up in Newark in a middle class Jewish family. Both like to make the Jews, especially Jewish men, look bad. Both Z and R (I am not making this up) graduated from Weequahic High School, where during a reunion, Zuckerman (and probably Roth) decided to make up a story about the High School sports hero, the Swede. Just as dreams reflect the psychology of the dreamer, the story must reflect the psychology of the maker. Not a very good psychology it is: Filled with buried resentment, jealousy, and rage and overburdened with some pretty fantastic subplots and multiple characters from central casting. You will do better spending your time reading something else.
Rating:
Summary: A dark, haunting portrait of the contemporary American dream
Review: In this novel, the first in the "Zuckerman trilogy," Roth presents the multifaceted story of Seymour "the Swede" Levov. The novel's opening is narrated by Skip Zuckerman, a writer who was best friends with the Swede's younger brother Jerry back in their high school days. Zuckerman never knew the Swede well; thus his initial perspective on Seymour's nature is entirely superficial. Through Zuckerman's eyes, we become acquainted with the Swede from a distance- a brilliant tactic on Roth's part, since it makes his true story seem all the more incongruous. Skip knows Seymour only as the star athlete, the proverbial "golden boy," who grew up to inherit his father's glove factory, marry a former beauty queen, and live in a beautiful house. In Skip's eyes, Seymour is practically perfect, and therefore empty inside. He goes so far as to say, "He's not faking all this virginity. This guy is the embodiment of nothing." But as Skip becomes once again involved in the world of the Levovs, the truth of Seymour's existence begins to unfold, and Skip quickly retracts his statement and emphatically asserts, "I was wrong. Never more mistaken about anyone in my life." For all that Seymour has achieved and all the acclaim associated with the mere sound of his name (Levov! It rhymes with the love!) come coupled with a hamartia, a tragic flaw, an Achilles heel. The Swede's fatal flaw, however, is not so much a flaw of his own personality. Rather, his weakness is anthropomorphized- it is his daughter, Merry. Despite (or perhaps because of?) growing up under the watchful eye of two perfectly "normal" parents, Merry becomes a radical Communist and commits an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism, one that pushes her into hiding for the rest of her life and that pushes the Swede into a world more bizarre than his worst nightmares, a world that could not be more contrary to the rest of his perfect little life. So, how does a loving father "like that" produce a daughter "like THAT"? The Swede's American pastoral is of the Great Gatsby variety- money, a beautiful woman by his side. His daughter, on the other hand is perfectly content to live in a hovel under a train trestle and try to starve herself to death to achieve spiritual perfection. Are these dreams equivalent? Aren't they one and the same if they give equivalent pleasure to their holders? What could possibly make one superior to the other? And, when it would be so easy to let go, what keeps them inexoribly tied? Roth proposes hard questions in this novel, questions to which no answers can be found. And that is entirely ok. It's also what makes this book so frightening. In American Pastoral, Roth skillfully intertwines his deep professorial prose with simple, and often darkly amusing, anecdotes and narratives. He successfully tones down the sexual fantasia that usually overpowers his novels. Throughout, American pastoral is a gripping read that never stops asking hard questions and continually challenges the sanctity and normalcy of the American dream.
Rating:
Summary: An Elegy for American Innocence
Review: Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for this riveting, quietly horrifying novel that shatters the idyllic illusion of an America that once might have been, but will be no more. American Pastoral is a brilliant commentary on our inability to effectively see beneath the surface of apparent well-being and contentment in others. The first of the "Zuckerman trilogy," (which ends with The Human Stain), American Pastoral recalls and builds on Roth's most accomplished and self-referential fiction of the past. As the novel opens, Skip Zuckerman, the childless, unattached, first-person narrator of the trilogy has a chance meeting with a boyhood hero at a baseball game. This hero is Swede Levov, an older man who is still, impossibly blonde, blue-eyed and youthful; a legend within his predominantly Jewish neighborhood. Swede is the very embodiment of "America" and all that "being American" stands for. He is, Skip is sure, incapable of living anything but the perfect, and perfectly rewarding, life. Swede's brother, Jerry, was Skip's best friend, so when Swede asks for a meeting with Skip, Skip is a little puzzled but not all that surprised. Swede, however, doesn't ask anything specific of Skip, but talks of his sons and his memories of Newark before and during World War II. This meeting, though, is pivotal to the novel's central question and its meaning soon becomes crystal clear. As the novel progresses, Skip attends his high school reunion and, while making note of the various deficiencies shared by the sixtyish men and women in attendance, becomes convinced that no human being ever really knows or understands another. He is depressed by all the conversation about cancer, divorce and the various problems associated with growing older. It is Jerry, though, Swede's brother, who tells Skip the one thing that will disillusion more than any other. Roth's brilliance as well as his masterful and well-crafted prose draw us into American Pastoral and allow us to participate in the mundane life experiences of its characters as if those experiences were our very own. We live through school reunions, failed marriages, duplicity and waste as Skip proceeds to a more detailed examination of the life of Swede Levov. Swede's life, Skip finds out, was nothing like he had imagined it would be. Obsessed, Skip begins a novel that focuses on the life of Swede Levov. Although Skip is making up a lot of his book as he goes along, the story is nonetheless true and it is a story that will resonate painfully with anyone who has ever felt alone, in control, out of control, or who has thought that he or she knew all about someone they have cared about deeply. As the facts about Swede Levov's life slowly unfold, as his secrets are unearthed, the glossy veneer of satisfaction, contentment and perfection begins to slip away from his life. As the man behind the persona is fully revealed, we come to realize, with Skip Zuckerman, that in anyone's life, one torment can, and often does, lead to more and more agony until its inevitability is appalling. American Pastoral is more of an impassioned dialogue with its readers than a convincing and linear story. This is not a warm and comforting book that will leave a glow in your heart after the last page. In fact, its most convincing and most powerfully-written passages are those in which Swede and Skip discuss and reflect upon human nature's congenital loneliness. American Pastoral is a painful book; it is a book that explores a dark and lonely side of human nature. But it is masterfully written, in prose that is spare and elegant and, above all, authentic. At its heart, American Pastoral is a gorgeous elegy for the American Dream; a funeral ode to an innocence that has long since passed away.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting plot, but somewhat overindulgent
Review: Roth's general plotline is extremely thought-provoking and interesting - the Swede and his antagonistic, fanatical daughter; his ruminations on what along the way has caused her to be the way she is. When the above was part of the story, I was compelled to read. However, the other 3/4 of the book strike me as self-indulgent passages Roth included simply to show just how well he thinks he writes, and how all-inclusive his research and knowledge can be. These passages often trudge along slowly and take the reader away from the main plot at hand. This could have been a 5-star, very disturbing, fascinating study, which at times it is - but altogether, it walks the line between the aforementioned to being a pompous bore.
Rating: 
Summary: Occasionally enjoyable, but highly overrated
Review: Philip Roth's writing has never impressed me the way some of his contemporaries' has. "Pastoral" is a perfect illustration of why this is the case. The premise (the story of a tranquil, suburban family suddenly confronted with the absurdity and violence of the 1960s) is promising enough; the character of "the Swede" is impressively written; the first quarter of the novel flows smoothly, almost lyrically. Unfortunately, that is where the novel seems to become derailed: paragraphs of beautiful prose are often interrupted by pages of hopped-up, melodramatic sentiment. (It's the same plague that befell Roth's "other masterpiece," Portnoy's Complaint - an extraordinarily promising beginning that eventually turns sour.) At its best, Pastoral is a very penetrating look at American suburbia and the tumultuous sixties. At its worst, it reads as an Oprah Winfrey selection, full of stock characters who serve no purpose other than to ram home Roth's narrative "point" and over-the-top dialogue/scene setting and unbelievable dialogue (The Swede's final encounter with his daughter was a particularly egregious example of the latter two). In another writer's hands, Pastoral might indeed have been worthy of the Pulitzer. As it is, we catch only glimpses of Roth's genius, and are left to slosh through the unremarkable rest. I'd give it three-and-a-half stars if I could
Rating:
Summary: how does he get away with this ?
Review: after reading sabbath`s theater,which i found to be a great book i was looking forward to another literary wonder..... more like a literary blunder is what i got. is it possible for one man to write so bad and get away with it? i guess if you have a name you can . i kept waiting and all i got was a repetition time & time again of the same thing. maybe if it was a 100 pages instead of 600 it would work. out of respect for the author i finished the book waiting for something to change.......it never did.
Rating:
Summary: A slow but purposeful build-up.
Review: I wanted to give it 5 stars but couldn't because the first half of the book was slow and left me with many questions. The conclusion of the novel however, was ingenious in its portrayal of the "normal" family gone awry- also hinting at the illusion that Americans like to engage in by thinking of their lives as perfect when in fact, dysfunction runs abundant.
|
