kevlog's Full Review: Philip Roth - American Pastoral
I read American Pastoral not long after my daughter was born and I think that had an affect on how I perceived it. Swede Levov has a great life...he's married to a former Miss New Jersey, has a nice home, wonderful daughter who is the 'apple of his eye.'
"Swede Levov's life, for all I knew, had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore just great, right in the American grain."
But it's the 60's in America and Swede's lovely daughter grows up to be a radical who finds herself involved in blowing up the local post office...obviously devastating poor Swede.
This is a great book covering many issues from the sixties, American manufacturing leaving for cheaper locales overseas, race riots, the war in Vietnam, etc., and it's classic Philip Roth. It won a well deserved Pulitzer and takes the reader on a fascinating journey through Swede's early glory days as an amazing athlete, his continued success as he becomes a family man, and finally his torment at dealing with his daughter's rebellion and radical tendencies.
The book moves right along throughout with the exception of some descriptions of glove-making in the tannery where Swede is boss. I thought parts were a bit drawn out but you are left with a good feeling for his work ethic and the work ethics of his workers.
"He's only been forty-one years with Newark Maid but he works at it. The cutter has to visualize how the skin is going to realize itself into the maximum number of gloves. Then he has to cut it. Takes great skill to cut a glove right. Table cutting is an art. No two skins are alike."
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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