jsherry's Full Review: Philip Roth - American Pastoral
After reading Roth’s novel “The Human Stain”, I had to wonder how anything Roth wrote could be better than that one. After all, “The Human Stain” did not win the Pulitzer Prize, but “American Pastoral” did. Could this book really be so much better that it would win the highest literary prize in America. The short, uncomplicated answer is no. I don’t think that “American Pastoral” is the better novel out of the two. The longer, more complicated answer has the ultimate conclusion of: While I feel that “The Human Stain” is the better of the two novels, “American Pastoral” is an excellent novel and extremely well written. With these two novels, Philip Roth has earned his spot on my list of the great American novelists.
“American Pastoral” is another novel narrated by the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman was a couple of years behind Swede Levov in high school, and decades later Levov contacts Zuckerman. Zuckerman tells Levov’s story. Unlike “The Human Stain”, Zuckerman is not a major player in the novel but rather sets up the context for telling the story and then steps out and just writes about the Swede. The Swede was the Golden Boy in his high school. Everything he did turned out perfect. He was the star athlete and everyone wanted to emulate him, even Zuckerman. The Swede ended up marrying Miss New Jersey and seemed to live a charmed life. He did not go into professional sports as expected, but rather followed in his father’s footsteps by working in, and later taking over, his father’s glove factory.
In talking to Zuckerman, Swede lets it drop that there was a major tragedy in the family but doesn’t ever say what it was. Zuckerman assumes that Swede’s younger brother, Jerry, is gay and that it tore Mr Levov apart. But that’s not it. Instead it has to do with Swede’s daughter, Merry, and how her actions in her teenage years just broke the family apart. Swede had the perfect life, the American Dream, and that dream was shattered. “American Pastoral” is the story of that dream, and it is also the story of the harsh shadow that the American Dream can cast. We see the idealized American Dream of the 1940’s and 1950’s, and we see what happens to those who live the dream when it stretches into the 1960’s and 1970’s. “American Pastoral” is a powerful novel spanning a generation and has to be considered one of Roth’s greatest novels (despite what I said about “The Human Stain”). I’m usually disappointed by Pulitzer Prize Winning Novels, but not this one. It is slow moving and methodical, but always interesting.
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
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2008 Shopping.com, Inc.