American Pastoral

Rating:
Summary: A difficult, boring read
Review: I read all kinds of literature: heavy, wordy, light, whatever. I firmly believe, however, that when I start counting the number of lines it takes the author to complete a sentence, it's time to quit. I gave up. Toni Morrison's portfolio is easier to read than American Pastoral!!

Rating:
Summary: Short response to Picqueur.
Review: I'm back again so my star-rating should not be averaged in to the overall customer rating. I just think that Picqueur over-did any anti-Gentile element of this book in his/her review. If anything, the Jews who are anti-Gentile look like fools in this book, notably the Swede's father who actually puts the Swede's wife through a negotiation session of how much Christianity will be allowed into the life of any future grandchildren, while the Swede just sits there, allowing his father to make himself look idiotic and make the Swede look sheepish and weak. Overall, I didn't find the Jew/Gentile schism to be the point of the book as much as how the humanity and fallibility of our heroes are revealed as we look beneath the surface of their lives.

Rating:
Summary: So maybe you were expecting Frantz Fanon?
Review: Don DeLillo's UNDERWORLD--the best novel written by an American since Faulkner died--was shut out for the Pulitzer Prize by Philip Roth's tragedy of a star athlete, star businessman, Marine drill instructor and assimilated Jew nonpareil whose American dream unravels before his eyes. Swede Levov--a golden-haired Jewish prince who's a legend to his high-school classmates--has assembled his life in perfect order. He marries a former Miss New Jersey; runs his dad's glove business; and raises an at first lovely daughter, named, with top-heavy irony, Merry. But one fine day sixteen years after her birth, the stuttering, unpacifiable Merry protests the Vietnam War by planting a bomb in a small-town post office; and the Swede's descent is positively Sophoclean.The pathos in AMERICAN PASTORAL is Ibsen by way of Arthur Miller; and the sobersided moralism of DEATH OF A SALESMAN weighs heavily on every page of this long, baleful novel. Roth's antic, hectoring voice is in evidence, but it's stuffed into the mouth of the Swede, whose torrential commentary all amounts to "But why? Why me?" The answer--strangely parallel to the conceit of Rick Moody's THE ICE STORM--seems to be that the Lord has punished the Swede for pride: in thinking that he could be a good, might-as-well-be-gentile American, the Swede brings suffering down on his head. Roth even has Swede's arrogant, brilliant, wholly combative brother (who do you think he's based on?) deliver the moral for pages on end: The Swede always did the "right" thing, made everybody happy, never made a fuss, and now look at you!Better Ariel Sharon than Harvey Milquetoast, seems to be Jerry's--and Roth's--point. Or, to put it more coarsely, better to be a disruptive, disreputable Jew than a Jew who thinks the gentiles are his friend--because wait till you see what they have in store for you! (The Levovs' neighbors, a plaid-pants philanderer and an aging tippler, are like an unsmilingly intended version of what Lenny Bruce's parents think Gentiles to be.) Within its limited scope, Roth pulls off amazing feats--the book is like a Pulitzer-calibre streak of talk-radio rant. But its limitations grow more and more exposed as the book goes on, chief among the conception of the goddess-of-discord daughter. Roth gets very well inside the head of the Swede, his decency and dismay, but can't imagine Merry as anything but a spiteful, sociopathic poser, copping any attitude to cause her parents life-shattering grief. But what if she really believed this stuff? What if it meant something to her, other than as a way of thumbing her nose at her parents and their world? Roth can't empathize his way into her head; more shockingly, it doesn't seem to occur to him to try. The daughter becomes an emblem of what these kids are coming to. (An entire chapter is devoted to a morally outraged discussion of teenagers watching DEEP THROAT.) And Roth pulls a terrible rabbit out of his hat near the end--he tries on the possibility that the Levov family nightmare was caused by the Swede's marrying a shikse! This is the schism that makes a character kill four people. Leave it to Philip Roth to recap the American century by characterizing the nation's deepest rift as...the misunderstanding between Gentiles and Jews? Like Woody Allen, who has begun heisting plot elements from Roth's recent novels, Roth seems in need of a trip outside his own circumscribed world. Maybe then his novels will earn a caption wider-reaching than his current "Why me, o Lord, why me?"

Rating:
Summary: Emotionally difficult read; well-developed main character
Review: This book can be a difficult read, making you examine your own family issues. It is very well-written, and has one of literature's best-developed main characters: the "Swede" Levov. At the beginning, he is a one-dimensional hero to the narrator. As the book continues, the layers of the Swede's complex life are stripped away, and the narrator sees him as a man, and so do we. It's heart-wrenching and realistic.

Rating:
Summary: This is a great book.
Review: Phillip Roth has hit the jackpot with this book. His heart-wrenching canvas depicting Swede Levov makes one want to continue reading, even when the book is over. His scintillating vocabulary gives the book a sense of realism that, quite frankly, I have never before experienced in reading. As you can see from my rating, I agree whole-heartedly with the Pulitzer Prize awarded to this book.

Rating:
Summary: Dropping the Bomb
Review: Roth enlightens the reader with trying to abolish preconceptions as misconceptions. We see that nothing is as simple or shallow as it seems; yet, is all the glove-making and beauty-queen blabber page after page necessary? "American Pastoral" seems to give us a presentations of ideas in Roth's mind, but offers no salvation at the finale. Too many loose strings for a novel that has been exalted by the Pulitzer. The Swede's pathetically passive personality would personally drive me to the point of rebellion as well. I found myself lost somewhere among Roth's rambling mazes of oblivion: Where did Zuckerman disappear to? Was Rita Cohen even an existent character? How did Merry go through a metamorphosis from being a violent, raging, radical bomber to a transcendent compassionate Jain? Hmmm...I', left mesmerized by the mediocrity... "Jesse Orcutt, let's go have a drink - Scotch on the rocks, my treat!" Philip Roth certainly didn't feed me with a treat in reading this novel.

Rating:
Summary: not Roth's best
Review: You can tell which of the reviewers here never got past their high school lessons in what makes a book good, who only read _American Pastoral_ because of the Pulitzer and, especially, its place on bestseller lists. They call wonderfully crafted prose "stream-of-consiousness drivel" -- because they can't quite keep up with it-- and complain about the lack of a resolution, as if real literature must follow the standard plot structure of murder mysteries and spy novels. (And then there are the humourous complaints that one is not sure whether the narrative of the Swede "really happened," or whether it was all in Zuckerman's imagination.) _American Pastoral_ is a novel of characters and ideas, a meditation on the very foundations of what it means to be an American, set in the drama of Swede Levov, nothing more or less.

Of course, this is not Roth's best novel by any means, either. As "allegory" it does not really work, and the ruminations are just not as insightful as they might be. The prose, of course, is masterfully written. On the other hand, the characters do not really stand out -- they're a bit flat, and become a bit too much of a backdrop for Roth's ideas. Overall, a flawed book, and a bit ironic that recent masterpieces like _Operation Shylock_ didn't win the Pulitzer instead of this one.

Rating:
Summary: Talk about what *is* there
Review: Seems to me, most of you who are writing in criticizing this book are angry because of what you didn't find: hints as to where the story is going, a standard structure, Swede not being "heroic" enough. To all of those readers, I think if you read it again with a more open mind, you'll find you missed the point. What Roth is saying is that *nothing* is as simple or as comprehendable as it originally seems. Not the Swede, who's life initially seems so perfect, and who as a man seems so good from Zuckerman's outside perspective; not his wife, who was a beauty contestant, and wary of the title and all that came with it, and not Merry, who is neither a monster nor the beautiful little girl of Swede's dreams.

Similarly, the novel is none of those trite categories you might initially want it to be, but much much more.

Rating:
Summary: Absolute Redundant Torture
Review: I've always been slightly sceptical about Philip Roth, but now I am outright repulsed by him. Every book he writes reiterates the same old cliched themes, and "American Pastoral" does this with particularly annoying aplomb. While reading this book, not only do you not give a fig about Swede Levov, you almost want to follow the example of his radical daughter, Merry, and blow off a bomb just to wake yourself up. If you need to read a Roth, try Henry instead.

Rating:
Summary: Clever, absorbing portrayal of ethnic groups assimilating
Review: The book accurately depicts the assimilation of second/third generation Jews/Irish into the WASP culture. There is a lot of humor and very clever use of language in describing the lives of the characters. Although "types," the characters are complex, interesting people. The descriptions of New Jersey life and the move from Newark to the suburbs to the "exburbs" are wonderful. There are structural problems: Zuckerman only appears in the first part of the book and there are subplots related to his high school reunion that are never concluded and we never learn Swede's full life story. (Does Roth plan a future book?)