Rating: 
Summary: My alter ego
Review: While reading several of Roth's other books, I became amazed at his ability to put into prose, some of my deepest thoughts about various life situations that I found my self in at one time or another. We are about the same age and of the same cultural background. He grew up in Newark, I grew up in Brooklyn. In "Portnoy's Complaint", he referred to his cousins, Leon and Sidney. My name is Leon and my brother is Sidney. In "American Pastoral" as in "I Married a Communist", Zuckerman's father was a podiatrist who had office hours in his apartment. My father was a podiatrist who had office hours in the apartment. I also worked in Newark during the time that "American Pastoral" takes place and can relate to almost every detail of Roth's descriptions of the streets, the ruins, the underpass in Ironbound next to the destroyed house that Merry was in. The emotional turmoil of the characters, described in so much detail is indicitive of Roth's ability to touch every fiber of the human psyche and burn an image into the reader like no other author. Roth writes like he was a fly inside my brain. It was frightening to see so much of my own feelings written in such eloquent terms. Needless to say, I loved the book.
Rating: 
Summary: That took a while...
Review: So I've never read a Roth novel before, and the one star (instead of a two or three) is partially motivated by indignation that a book this mediocre (from a presuambly good writer) can claim the pulitzer the year Pynchon came out with Mason Dixon...I'm rambling. And unlike Roth, I don't have an editor or anyone to critize my writing now. On the other hand, it seems like he just ignored his anyway. He's not a bad writer...he can turn a phrase as well as anyone, but the prose simply didn't flow. I can take pontification, sometimes its expected. The character's about to make a speech, here it comes... I don't like it when I can tell every single time, when the way they talk shifts into "here's the moral mode". Leaving aside what I perceive to be the morals that emerge from the text, he's characters delivered his rant brilliantly. Write an essay or cut the novel by 200 pages, I saw Newark once, its unecessary to restaiblish the connection by telling me about glove craftsmanship again. and again. Preachy and dogmatic...here, I haven't told you about how the radicals are idiots, intellectuals are idiots, this whole individualism w/o cultural tie to bind your thinking is producing idiots. By the way I'm Jewish. But wait, I'm Swede, so obviously I've abandoned that side of me for Wasp America, see how I have been destroyed...By the way, I remarried and had three kids. No you don't see how I recovered. You just get to glow in my pithy ending of how screwed up we are moment of gladness. ...I think I need an editor...but now I have to say I come from an entirely different generation, and while I come from New Jersey, I have no sentimentality that would connect me to the time period. Do i believe Swede's to be the author's view? the disappearing Nathan who's writing this? Merry-Sheila-Marcia, the three women who exemplify some kind of left but have no thought betweent hemselves? How exactly do you turn into a Jainst and still have no remorse? Rita Cohen, and perfection itself Dawn...too perfect. The point, perhaps. Interesting...about as much as Count. In style it was clunky, the characters were flat carcitures or they fight against any sense of rationality. The elder Levovs were the most well-rounded and even then they aren't int here long enough for new insights in character to write a book about. Elder conservatives...oooh. Its indictment of radicalism is somewhat reasonable, but why the extreme cast? People did horrible, evil things, with bombs and everything else. Some of it was rhetoric, brainwashed and otherwise. But Roth never shows what made America make its way out. There was deep anger in the nation and it obviously rose from somewhere, and for powerful reasons stronger then Merry's pamphlets. As another reader stated, it is a male and white. Then again, he's a male white writer, what else? I'm male and asian and I'd probably write like that. But instead of some form of self-analysis, or acknowledgement of event he possibility of flaws in his sentiment, Roth creates a world that lacks any insight into why he's come to think this way and things really didn't work (and why they've gotten better, it certainly wasn't a return to our ethnic communities that did it) and constant ranting about how wronged we are.
Rating: 
Summary: American Pastoral
Review: A very slow start, with a character who diappears soon into the book, never to return again. THe whole book was rather slow, and very disjointed, hopping from one time frame to another, which was often confusing. However, it is a book worth reading, as it illistrates the conflict in the 1960's between the established way and the new free thinking movement.
Rating: 
Summary: America Out to Pasture
Review: Although I just got around to reading this book, it was delightful. Roth very astutely details the outer and inner life of the second and third generation Jewish immigrant to these shores. The striving for success and the need to blend into the general culture led Jews here to really believe in the melting pot.. Thus the key word in American Jewish life for amny years was melt.It was the key the operating principle. Yet in the process most American Jews not only abandoned their culture, religion , language (Yiddish) etnic identification, culinary arts, and values, but mocking these ideas became part and parcel of the new American jewish civilization. Thus Roth presents us with Sweede Levov who is Jewish in name only, no religion, no culture, nothing marrying the former Miss New Jersey Dawn Dwyer ,Sweede becomes an American. Well reality sets in with his daughter Merry and we see that America ins not only Apple pie the suburbs, sports, middle class lifestyle, but it can be tragedy as well, like Merry blowing up a country store a part of American pastoral and killing one of the Wasps in the process. Characters are finely developed and Zuckerman is here again. Unfortunetely for Roth his own pahetic Jewish knowledge restricts the interplay and role of true Jewish values in this book. Yet it captures American Jewry from 1930-1980. Worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: This book was annoying.
Review: This book's writing style was tedious--a very poorly written book as far as I'm concerned. The sentences were unnecessarily packed--often 10 and 12 lines long--and the 2- and 3-page wanderings between lines of dialog were maddening. I had the feeling I was following someone who didn't really know where he was going or why. The book club I go to gave it 9 thumbs down and only 1 thumbs up. I read Portnoy's Complaint when it first came out years ago and didn't like it either, and this current book reminded me of it despite the almost 30 intervening years. It was my book club's consensus that this would be our last Roth selection. I am dumbfounded as to how a book like this could win a Pulitzer Prize. What do they use for criteria? Surely not writing technique.
Rating:
Summary: The prose is the thing.
Review: The first three quarters of the book were good then the plot sort of fizzled out. However, when reading a Roth novel, the characters and the plots are not always well developed. But that's not the point. Its his prose that's worth the price of the book. His language is so beautiful that flaws in characters and plots are not nearly as important as the way his words fill the page. He has no equal in that regard.
Rating:
Summary: American novel: going back to basics
Review: I do not remember the last time I have so enjoyed a novel that is so traditionally written. I believe its appeal must be broad-based. Someone with a PhD in Ameircan Lit. would enjoy it as much as someone who casually picks up a book. Whereas the traditional position of writers has been to condemn bourgois culture, Roth goes deeper; his sentiments form an ambiguous mix of nostalgia and self-hatred. Another layer in the novel is a beautiful depiction of Jewish emmigrant communities traced through three generations.
Rating:
Summary: Gloves, American Heroes and utter boredom
Review: I suppose that when the main character is going on and on and on and on and on about glove making that it is supposed to be a metaphor for the innocence which he lost. Unfortunately I don't care much for glove making, it doesn't excite me. And since at least 100 pages of this 500 page book are about glove making, I hate the thing. The first chapter has me intrigued. Philip Roth's novel alter ego has gone long in the tooth and has come to accept his neurosis and his description of Swede Levov are great, but then he starts telling it from Swede Levov's point of view and since Levov is a middle-aged, middle class, middle of the road businessman who only wants a dull suburban existance, he's dull. Even his insane radical daughter is boring. SHe can't say much for herself besides the profanity that you get in the average Rage Against the Machine cd. At the end of the book I am left wishing that the daughter had not only blown up the post office but the entire stupid family and town. Maybe it would have ended sooner.
Rating:
Summary: Silver's narration is tops
Review: Ron Silver's narration of the audio version is among the best readings I've ever heard. Astounding. A fine way to enjoy this Roth masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: Apocalyptic dinner party and Deep Throat.
Review: The American Pastoral is a widening abyss demarcated only by the incurable abscess of moral and structural decline around its ever-expanding rim. Can one discover the exact event that caused the wrong? Futile. Suture the abscess and drain the decay? Never. Live right? Love well? Neither provides nor protects. The world is like a glove that has been turned inside out. All design and color have gone underground. "Swede Levov" hits the endangered species list and Orcutt leads the vanguard for the vigorously vapid. Glove making and cattle raising. Riots and neighborhood blight. Dinner party and Deep Throat. The details in the story are mesmerizing, the background, imposing, and the digressions, demonic. Roth attacks the denouement with an exciting staccato touch, but he diminishes the effect by employing too many fermatas. A conversation is interrupted while the ethos of an entire generation is outlined before the conversation continues. The misanthropic mystery that is Rita Cohen, who calls during the apocalyptic dinner party and then evaporates, unsolved, can only be likened to a sudden glottal stop that truncates the music too harshly. And finally, the grand fermata that is Zukerman - on hold since page 89 while he "dreamed a realistic chronicle, began gazing into his (The Swede's) life." If the mental copulation of possibilities were an Olympic event, then Zukerman (Roth) would be solid gold.
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