American Pastoral (American Trilogy #1) by Philip Roth

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER ? NATIONAL BESTSELLER ? From one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century--a compulsively readable elegy for America's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss, and one of Roth's most powerful novels ever (The New York Times). Here is Philip Roth's masterpiece, featuring Nathan Zuckerman and the story of Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him. For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager--a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of domestic terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, American Pastoral gives us Philip Roth at the height of his powers. Editorial Reviews A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME One of Roth's most powerful novels ever ... moving, generous and ambitious ... a fiercely affecting work of art. --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Dazzling ... a wrenching, compassionate, intelligent novel ... gorgeous. --The Boston Globe At once expansive and painstakingly detailed.... The pages of American Pastoral crackle with the electricity and zest of a first-rate mind at work. --San Francisco Chronicle Never before has Roth written with such clear conviction. Never before has he assembled so many fully formed characters. --Time An incandescent fiction.... American Pastoral scintillates with more Rothian wit, paradox, eloquent tantrums and absurd pratfalls placed at the exit of each irresistible argument that can be counted.... He strikes a vivid blaze. --Los Angeles Times Book Review Roth has beaten pain and rage into a beautiful shape. American Pastoral is elaborately patterned and layered, ingeniously crafted to contain, even as it amplifies, a cathartic, barbaric yawp. --New York Observer Wrenching, skillfully told...a novel not to be missed. --St. Louis Post-Dispatch Deeply moving.... Roth achieves a masterpiece...a literary triumph. --Playboy A gripping, emotionally charged novel. --People - From the Publisher Because in this, my one life, I can only spend so much time meditating upon Philip Roth's sexual hang-ups and identity issues, I've approached that ongoing self-obsession, which he regularly parses into novel-sized chunks, with wariness. Now along comes American Pastoral, a novel about three generations of family life and, in particular, the rupture between a father and daughter that embodies the social upheaval of the '60s. A big-picture book, it aspires to naturalist traditions that pit irresistible social forces against hapless souls. Clearly, this time around Roth wants to dodge the much-leveled charge of navel gazing. At least as much as he can. American Pastoral successfully shoulders its weighty public theme of American optimism undone by a propensity for the extreme. It also rounds up Roth's usual subjects -- Jewish assimilation, bourgeois pretension and the shiksa's fatal allure. His perennial alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, can't help but make an appearance at his high school reunion. It was in high school during the 1940s that Zuckerman got to know Seymour Levov, a blond, supremely confidant athletic hero nicknamed the Swede, upon whom the Jews of Newark heaped adoration. In his physical prowess and simple ease of being -- no striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness -- the Swede represented a oneness with America for these first- and second-generation immigrants. After learning of Seymour's death at the reunion, Zuckerman decides to write about him. The golden boy of Weequahic took over his father's profitable business, married an Irish Catholic former Miss New Jersey and moved to a posh 100-acre spread far from decaying Newark. It's the postwar American dream, until he slams smack up against another pure product of America: To protest the Vietnam War, the Swede's teenage daughter blows up a small-town post-office, accidentally killing a popular local doctor. She goes into hiding for 25 years, during which time the Swede is tortured, first by not knowing how she is, and then by knowing all too well the madness that has consumed her life. Roth's faithful, often piercing apprehension of the jagged emotional transactions between parent and child form this book's true achievement. (Perhaps, since it was revealed in Claire Bloom's recent memoir that Roth ordered her teenage daughter out of the house, the childless Roth wants to prove he knows from parenthood.) Sadly though, this is another novel by a marquee author that suffers from intimidated or inactive editors. There are long sections of conversation (one features the Swede's bulldog of a father interrogating his Catholic future daughter-in-law about anti-Semitism), that just go on and on. Structurally, the book is poorly shaped. Roth doesn't circle back to the 90-page preamble featuring Zuckerman, the ending feels arbitrary and the gratifying if bracing payoff that American Pastoral vigorously promises throughout is denied. But, if you want a Philip Roth book that isn't just another bulletin from his life, this one is that and more. -- Salon - Albert Mobilio The protagonist of Roth's new novel, a magnificent meditation on a pivotal decade in our nation's history, is in every way different from the profane and sclerotic antihero of Sabbath's Theater (for which Roth won the National Book Award in 1995). It's as though, having vented his spleen and his libido in Mickey Sabbath, Roth was then free to contemplate the life of a man who is Sabbath's complete opposite. He relates the story of Seymour Swede Levov with few sex scenes and no scatological sideshows; the deviant behavior demonstrated here was common to a generation, and the shocks Roth delivers are part of our national trauma. This is Roth's most mature novel, powerful and universally resonant. Swede Levov's life has been charmed from the time he was an all-star athlete at Newark's Weequahic high school. As handsome, modest, generous and kind as he is gifted, Swede takes pains to acknowledge the blessings for which he is perceived as the most fortunate of men. He is patriotic and civically responsible, maritally faithful, morally upstanding, a mensch. He successfully runs his father's glove factory, refusing to be cowed by the race riots that rock Newark, marries a shiksa beauty-pageant queen, who is smart and ambitious, buys a 100-acre farm in a classy suburb-the epitome of serene, innocent, pastoral existence-and dotes on his daughter, Merry. But when Merry becomes radicalized during the Vietnam War, plants a bomb that kills an innocent man and goes underground for five years, Swede endures a torment that becomes increasingly unbearable as he learns more about Merry's monstrous life. In depicting Merry, Roth expresses palpable fury at the privileged, well-educated, self-centered children of the 1960s, who in their militant idealism demonstrated ferocious hatred for a country that had offered their families opportunity and freedom. After three generations of upward striving and success, Swede and his family are flung out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy-into the fury, the violence and the desperation of the counterpastoral-into the American berserk. Roth's pace is measured. The first two sections of the book are richly textured with background detail. The last third, however, is full of shocking surprises and a message of existential chaos. The Swede found out that we are all in the power of something demented,'' Roth writes. And again: He had learned the worst lesson that life could teach-that it makes no sense. In the end, his dream and his life destroyed by his daughter and the decade, Swede finally understands that he is living through the moral breakdown of American society. The picture is chilling. - Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly Roth's elegiac and affecting new novel, his 18th, displays a striking reversal of form-and content-from his most recent critical success, the Portnoyan Sabbath's Theater (1995). Its narrator, however, is a familiar Rothian figure: writer Nathan Zuckerman (of The Ghost Writer, et al.)-and in case you're wondering whether he still seems to be his author's alter ego, Nathan is now in his early 60s, recovering from both cancer surgery and a longtime affair with an English actress. Essentially retired, Nathan is approached by a high-school classmate's older brother-and the well-remembered hero of his youth: Seymour Swede Levov, once a blue-eyed athletic and moral paragon who strode through life with ridiculous ease, now nearing 70 and crushed by outrageous misfortunes. Swede asks his help writing a tribute to his late father, and soon thereafter dies himself. Piqued by the enigma of a seemingly perfect life (superb health, a successful family business, marriage to a former beauty queen) inexplicably gone wrong, Zuckerman dream[s] a realistic chronicle that reconstructs Swede's life-compounded of information gleaned from others who knew him, and centering in the 1960s when Swede's life began to unravel. His only daughter Meredith (Merry) had rebelled against her parents' and her culture's complacency, protested against the war in Vietnam, claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing in which innocent people were killed, and gone underground as a fugitive. Most of the scenes Zuckerman/Roth imagines, therefore, are intensely emotional conversations in which the conflicting claims of social solidarity and individual integrity are debated with pained immediacy. Here, and in more conventionally expository authorial passages, meditativeness and discursiveness predominate over drama. Nevertheless, passion seethes through the novel's pages. Some of the best pure writing Roth has done. And Swede Levov's anguished cry What the hell is wrong with doing things right? may be remembered as one of the classic utterances in American fiction. - Kirkus Reviews