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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.
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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.
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Summary: good in the beginning; snore by the end.
Review: At the beginning of the book I was so absorbed that I couldn't put it down, but by the middle, it was just so unrealistic and boring. The women in this book are not portrayed well, at all, and there are so many misplaced scenes. I had a lot of high hopes for this book because I couldn't stop reading it, but in the end I didn't feel sorry for any of the characters.
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Summary: American Pastoral
Review: With American Pastoral, Philip Roth came pretty damn close to writing America after WW2. While I was reading Underworld, I thought Delillo had pulled it off, but now I know better. I'll admit, at the start I wasn't hooked in, but by about page 11 I became aware that I was reading greatness. You know that tingly feeling you get when you realise that the book you are about to read is special? That's what I had. *very minor spoilers* The story is fairly straight forward, but it is told in an interesting way. It seems that the narrator (Zuckerman) had an infatuation with the school sports hero who had everything: girls, success, looks, all that jazz. Later on in life when Zuckerman is a successful author he meets up with The Swede, who wrote him a letter asking to help write a biography of his father. Zuckerman is intrigued by this, mostly because of the power his high school years had over him, so he accepts. But the Swede doesn't tell him anything, then, at a reunion a few months later, he learns that the Swede died of cancer. So, Zuckerman decided to recreate the Swede's life, find out where it went wrong and what happened. He has a few clues from the Swede's brother and from his own memories, but most of it is imagined. It is a good way for Zuckerman to meander on about how life affects you and how you affect it, what happens to people behind closed doors that we just don't know about and, touchingly, how a father can love his daughter so much when she disappoints him at every turn - and tragically at that. The ending wasn't particularly punchy, but it finished well with a nice tie-up of the few threads that needed to be tied up at all. Like life, not everything ends on the point of a period, and American Pastoral reflects this. I feel that a younger man couldn't have written this book, that it really did need the weight of years and experience to create, and I feel better for having read it. Highly recommended.
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Summary: A Jewish-American Tragedy
Review: Plodding yet powerful, this story of how the Levov family captures the American Dream in the Forties only to have it blown to bits in the Sixties, begins slowly. The reader must first wade through page after page on the intricacies of glove making and cattle raising. But Roth knows his characters: Not only the ambitious ethnics of Newark and Elizabeth, but also the blue-blooded WASPs of Morris County's horse country. Roth makes them real--nowhere more so than at the dinner party at the book's conclusion--and this makes it worth the effort of plowing through the tedium. "American Pastoral" should be read together with Updike's "In the Beauty of the Lilies." In that work, a Protestant famly that holds the American Dream as its birthright throws the dream away at a time when the Levovs are still day laborers in Newark's tanneries. Updike's book takes a longer route to its final tragedy, in which the fourth generation post-Protestant protagonist dies a fiery death along with other members of a Waco-like cult. Post-Jewish, post-Catholic Merry Levov's destruction, first by the Sixties Weathermen and ultimately by an eastern religious cult, is even more devestating--being without hope or meaning. What is Roth's message? Were the seeds of the Levov family tragedy planted when Swede Levov left the nurturing Newark Jewish community in search of an America where, unbeknownst to him, faith and the American Dream were already dying? Read the book and come to your own conclusion.
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Summary: RELENTLESS
Review: There are a number of basic themes in this book: 1 Growing from innocence to experience 2 The shattering of the American democratic ideal 3 Nature/nurture 4 Parents and children It is a very good read but Roth never gives up going over the themes in minute detail. I suppose the main theme is that human spirit is unpredictable and no matter how much love and nurturning we give it is never possible to ensure our kids grow up like us. Our love for them and care can in fact be the very thing that screw them up. I dont agree with that concept but it is there in this book. By separating the book according to Milton's "Paradise Lost" Roth is signnalling that he is dealing with some pretty big issues e.g.the fall from Grace into despair. The problem with the book is that it is relentless: it just keeps on presenting the same theme with example after example. It becomes a little bit tiresome; but Roth's writing is so superb it carries the reader along. The American Patoral is the ideal world of democracy - apple pie and happy families but Roth explains that this is just a sham, which is so easily destroyed. BUT - it never is destroyed becasue the SWEDE JUST KEEPS ON GOING. Roth seems like a man possessed; a torturer who never stops the screw from turning. I got a sense that he in fact hated the society that America has become. But I am not so sure that this is true, because its critics are so venal themselves (Merry is hardly a sympathetic or likeable character). CONCLUSION The book is extremely well written and interesting; it has an obsession with detail much of which to a non USA citizen was a bit tedious. It was extremely ambitious and succeded in discussing some pretty major areas of life and the human spirit
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Summary: Both redundant and repetitive
Review: I didn't think a book so thing could repeat itself so many, many (many) times. Roughly on page 2, you will get the point. But, foolishly, you'll stick it out, thinking, well it won all these awards, there's going to be some fine payoff later, a twist, some depth, some profound dimension. You will not be rewarded. I suppose that's the point? I wish I could say this style of writing was unusual for roth. Each individual sentence isn't so bad, even good, but taken as a whole, they amount to much, much (much) less.
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Summary: Unpopular kid gets to take apart the football star
Review: This book is about Swede Levov, the star of a high school in Newark. The first 125 pages is an excellent book, as Swede contacts the author for a meeting, and our narrator offers observations and speculates about Swede's life. Fine and good, maybe no Pulitzer, but a nice read. Then many bad things happen to Swede, far out of any real relation to reality, and we realize the author's agenda. In real life, he would be afraid of the Swede, a big, imposing guy. In this book as an author, he controls the character, and has the ability to inflict great cruelties upon him, and the book takes on an unreal aura midway through the book. Swede's daughter, a hippie, takes upon an unreal persona too. Books like a delicate balance deserve these prizes, this is a good book which deteriorates.
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Summary: I've ordered all of Mr. Roth's books after reading this.
Review: I am not a writer, I am a reader. When I find a book as grand as 'American Pastoral', I am truly grateful. Having come of age in the sixties I can appreciate the right on characterizations, cultural milieu, and the east coast at that time. I'm not from Newark but I am from Queens and somehow they're very connected in my mind. I hadn't read Mr. Roth's books in decades and I thought of him as 'the guy who wrote Portnoy's Complaint'. Yes, he is that guy but he has matured in his writing just as his characters have grown, wizened and given life to themselves. Both Zuckerman and Roth have experienced more over the years. Life is like that. A good book is a true find for me. This is a good book and a great read.
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Summary: Not the Sixties, far more timeless
Review: My initial reaction to AMERICAN PASTORAL was that it was a search to understand a life characterized by a shell of outward perfection hiding unimaginable family horror, one which mirrored America's own wrenching progress from liking Ike to dissing Dick. I loved the rhythm of the probing, uncertain prose, but like a lot of readers (apparently), felt it rambled at times. Then, on the advice of a friend who had read the book a second time, I went back to the section on Zuckerman's high school reunion, the conversation with Jerry Levov about his brother the Swede and, in particular, Zuckerman's own thoughts about sharing the book he had written about the Swede with Jerry before submitting it for publication (chronologically, the end of the book). Doing that completely threw my original opinion for one big loop, as I realized the Swede's story was in fact the product of Zuckerman's imagination and not the imparted truth of an omniscient narrator, as I had somehow managed to lull myself into believing. Instead, AMERICAN PASTORAL became the story of a literally gutted writer (he's had his prostate'and many might say, for Zuckerman, his Muse--removed) paying homage to his craft. Except for the general fact that his daughter Merry bombed a local post office, the Swede's whole story in Book 2 is a fabrication, ultimately saying more about the writer's power to move, shock and tell a damn good story than it does about Seymour Levov and America in the Sixties. In that regard, the book's two most powerful conceits are the passionate kiss during Merry's 11th summer and the Swede's encounters with Rita Cohen. Both are charged with sexual grotesquery, and both are so at odds with anything we actually do know about the Swede that you have to wonder if they are only the product of Zuckerman's musings. But why would Zuckerman fabricate such shocking scenes about one of the nicest guys you'll ever find in modern literature? That's what I could not figure out. And I concluded it's because they're not for figuring out, just as great stories and the art of great storytelling are not for figuring out, but for stirring emotion and provoking thought. And, in the case of AMERICAN PASTORAL, not on such relative ephemera as the dysfunction of Sixties America, but on timeless subjects of fate, shifting fortune, family and loss that are more the province of Greek or Shakespearean or Biblical tragedy. As I was reading AP, Merry's quick unravelling unnerved me no end, both because of the idea that it could happen to any family, and because I have my own daughter, making even the slightest analogies to Merry all the scarier. But as I finished the book, and especially after I'd re-read the reunion episode, the character I kept thinking about was Lou, who Zuckerman portrays as a kind of loveable, old-world, avuncular character when he is no doubt (as Zuckerman's imagined conversation with Jerry about Lou's portrayal suggests) a ... of an employer, husband and father. The other character that forced me to re-think the book was Rita Cohen, one of the most gut-churning characters I've ever come across. She is so pernicious, so unremittingly cruel, that she can only be digested as an abstraction: part Macbeth witch, part Greek chorus and part Hamlet's ghost, always there to stir up the Swede's pot and propel his fate. (I also wonder if she isn't a wry jab by Roth at those who call him a misogynist, as if he's saying, You think my female characters are bad role models? Try this one on for size.) Viewing the story as an abstraction also made me appreciate Roth's style of poking around the edges of issues, trying to find the heart of many weighty matters. What at first seemed 'rambling' instead became lyrical, and, in the end, made every word feel vital.
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