aspivack's Full Review: Philip Roth - American Pastoral
Not many people seem to know about this powerful and profound novel, but Philip Roth's twenty-second book, published in 1997, won the Pulitzer Prize and rightfully so.
So you will trust this review, here is a bit of background. I am a recent graduate of Wesleyan University, where I wrote my senior thesis on the prolific and controversial work of Philip Roth, so I am very familiar with his style, subject matter, and flowing prose.
One of my favorite passages of his is from his 1995 National Book Award Winner, Sabbath's Theater, where the main character is left to finish the narrative of the novel in: "...the pudding of the springtime mud..."
So, trust me on this novel: it is a must read.
American Pastoral has three sections: Paradise remembered, The Fall, and Paradise Lost, and the narrative follows one man--and his country--from the post-World War II period to the present. The story centers around Seymour "the Swede" Levov, a seemingly perfectly-assimilated American Jew whose life crumbles when his only daughter, the stuttering Merry Levov, grows rebellious and contentious in her teenage years, and at the height of the Vietnam conflict, sets off a bomb in the the family's hometown of Old Rimrock, New Jersey, killing the local doctor. Merry runs away and the Swede must somehow attempt to live his life with the outward appearance of perfection while he disintegrates as a father, husband, son, and man.
This is a much-too-brief description of the book, in which Roth longs for the past, the elegiac golden years of the 50s and 60s. He says that the America of today is like the decaying Newark, the Swede's and Roth's birthplace.
Roth explores many issues, including one's self-proclaimed duties to his family and country, tradition, ethnic community, and betrayal. The novel succeeds because Roth's voice is a tragic one, and through the book Roth himself seems to be looking back over the last four decades of American history and witnessing the tragedy: Vietnam, the failure of liberalism, the increase of crime, and the overwhelming betrayals that have taken place, both on the micro and macro scales--from cheating wives to dishonest presidents.
This story actually sets a precedent for the future, for as we as Americans approach the new millenium and look back over the past century, the era that continually seems to be worth analyzing is the late 60s, and the ways the country tried to recover and continue from Vietnam and Watergate until now.
And in my mind (as well as Roth's), we are still trying and still looking for answers.
Symbolic of turbulent times of the 1960s, the explosion of a bomb in his own bucolic backyard sweeps away the innocence of Swede Levov, along with eve...More at Barnes & Noble.com
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