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American Pastoral (The American Trilogy #1)

3.89 of 5 stars 3.89 · rating details · 20,690 ratings · 1,672 reviews

To decipher the late 1960′s through the story of Swede Levov, whose life is cast into the fires of those years, Roth calls again upon the saturnine side of his disposition. It answers to the purpose as never before. Good-looking, prosperous Swede, who has inherited his father’s glove factory in Newark, N.J., and married a former beauty queen, is not stupid, merely fulfille...more

Paperback, 423 pages

Published March 5th 1998 by Vintage (first published 1997)

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Jul 23, 2012 Caleb rated it 2 of 5 stars

You figure "hey, it's Philip Roth. All sorts of awards. Might as well read his Pulitzer Prize winner. Can't be half bad, can it? can't be that bad. He's got other good stuff. This one must be good, too."

American Pastoral defies logic with its terrible, terrible writing. This was one of the most boring, most difficult to force myself through books I've ever read. Roth has clearly become more of an old man, rambling on and on about the good ole days of Newark, America, the countryside, glovemakin...more

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Aug 22, 2011 William rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 20-ce, fiction, us

The book starts off as an homage to a man the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, looked up to as a child because of his athletic achievements in local sports: Seymour Levov, the "Swede." It also presents itself in the early going as an homage to the so-called "greatest generation." But this opening is deceptive. For the closer we come to the Swede and his family the more we see his tragic flaws of character. Perhaps his most pervasive flaw is to be a nonthinker, a man for the most part without a deep i...more The book starts off as an homage to a man the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, looked up to as a child because of his athletic achievements in local sports: Seymour Levov, the "Swede." It also presents itself in the early going as an homage to the so-called "greatest generation." But this opening is deceptive. For the closer we come to the Swede and his family the more we see his tragic flaws of character. Perhaps his most pervasive flaw is to be a nonthinker, a man for the most part without a deep intellectual life, or any intellectual life, who functioned by the many rules and prohibitions set forth by his elders which ill prepared him for a socially volatile future.

The Swede is a Jew but a "viking" in appearance. Blonde, fair-skinned, about as far away from the Der Stürmer parodies then being published in Nazi Germany as it was possible to get. The wartime stateside era is one depicted as laden with parental prohibitions but also one of astonishing possibility. The Swede is his father's son. A young man with his talent could have had a shot at the major leagues, but the Swede listens to his old man and learns the glove trade. American Pastoral, it occurs to me, is a ruminative novel. It considers matters, say, the Swede's innocence, and then reconsiders them multiple times in light of new evidence or conclusions. One is very much in Nathan Zuckerman's head going over and over matters, thus his obsessions become our obsessions. After several readings it finally occurred to me what Roth's model was for the very detailed glove manufacturing sequences: Moby Dick.

Let me say that, for me, there is nothing superfluous in the narrative. I live twenty miles from Newark, New Jersey. I used to work near the garment district, long after its heydey but nevertheless. I was alive, though quite young, during the Civil Rights Era. This was an insane and very angry time and let me tell you, Roth captures its essence beautifully. For me, on this third reading, the book really didn't start to grip until the Swede's daughter Merry's independence sets in and she begins to travel to New York to stay with her Communist friends.

Then there's Rita Cohen's absolutely--wait, here's how Roth puts it: "What was this whole sick enterprise other than angry, infantile egoism thinly disguised as identification with the oppressed." (This section reminds me very much of the decription Nein Cheng gives of the Red Guards in her Life and Death in Shanghai. Cheng watched as her daughter was tossed to her death from a highrise, and Cheng herself was imprisoned for many years as an enemy of the state because her late husband worked for Shell.) There are so many beautifully written scenes here. The Swede's reunion with Merry who, twenty years later, has become a devout Jain, will set your hair on fire. American Pastoral is a spellbinder. An astonishing novel. One of the essential books of life.(less)

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Oct 08, 2007 CK rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

OK let me just say that I am so. excited. about this book. My friend Cal recommended it to me a while back, and I finally got around to it. OH MY GOSH I've been missing out on Philip Roth! He is now my new favorite author. I know that's a rash judgment to make based on one book, but it's just that good.

Cal and I love a lot of the same books for entirely different reasons, which is fun. To put it simplistically (which I hate to do), Cal gets more excited about story / character development and I...more

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Jul 17, 2007 Maya rated it 2 of 5 stars

Hmm. Well Matt and I had one of our more heated discussions about this book.

I basically don't like anything by Philip Roth.

What prompted the argument...I mean heated discussion...was one of my primary reasons for disliking the book. I will sum that up now and then give the example that led to the heated discussion.

I don't like this book because Philip Roth romanticizes the past in a particular white middle-aged man way that is kind of grating because that past was of course built on the backs of...more Hmm. Well Matt and I had one of our more heated discussions about this book.

I basically don't like anything by Philip Roth.

What prompted the argument...I mean heated discussion...was one of my primary reasons for disliking the book. I will sum that up now and then give the example that led to the heated discussion.

I don't like this book because Philip Roth romanticizes the past in a particular white middle-aged man way that is kind of grating because that past was of course built on the backs of others.

Aaron read this book during the time he lived in Newark and he lived quite close to many of the places described in the book. And now that I recall this was actually Aaron's complaint that must have slipped into my own head. So there's this whole part of the book about how after the riots people started stealing these cornices on buildings. A cornice is: the molded and projecting horizontal member that crowns an architectural composition. And as I recall there is one building Philip Roth describes as having its cornice stolen that actually still does have a cornice. And I just found that irksome. I guess I just felt in the whole cornice-being-stolen argument there was this underlying, god, [poor black] people just don't respect aesthetic beauty, their thoughts are mired in the mud.

The cornice is purely decorative, and just seems like one of those little things that people who appreciate them are probably going to be somewhat snooty about appreciating because not many people notice them.

God, they even took our cornices! Wasn't it enough that they did blah blah blah, but even the cornices.

So I didn't mean that Philip Roth has a duty to tell the truth about Newark; I just think whenever you do have some familiarity with a place and it is fictionalized you become very aware of these gaps between fiction and reality and question why would it be so important to the story to change a small detail like that. For me though the whole book is tinged with too much nostalgia and I would have this feeling with or without any knowledge of Newark. Nostalgia is retarded, a made up paradise and is only interesting in that it reveals what the person thinks they need at the present. Which they probably don't need anyway. They need to meditate.

Anyway this should all come with a caveat that I don't remember the intricacies of the plot that well and I do dislike Philip Roth very much.

So I do think this is my last goodreads update of the day. Yes, I do have work.(less)

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Sep 09, 2008 James rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Gerald Floman

American Pastoral:

This book is a rock that shatters preconceptions of self, family, morality, dreams, life, and nation - many simultaneously - and some individually.

What I felt this book had to say:

(1) No matter what a parent does, a child will have more say in who they become than anyone else.

(2) "Good people" do bad things, sick things, unspeakable things.

(3) Rich and beautiful wife's & husbands of 30 years of monogamy cheat on each other without the other knowing and have little guilt, a...more

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Jul 10, 2007 Seth rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Clearly a lot of research went into this book. I only wish Roth hadn’t been so compelled to show off every single trinket of minutiae, arcania, and esoterica (yes, I invent words when necessary) that he could acquire relating to the glove-making industry in New Jersey.

The book is unquestionably too long, and the political allegory can feel a bit oppressive as one strives to believe in characters that remain just short of plausible (excepting a few bit players, such as the bullying heart surgeon...more

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Mar 17, 2010 Reese rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: best-of-the-best

Consider Einstein's definition of "insanity," selected by 12,209 Goodreads readers as one of their favorite quotations: "Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Chutzpah: Pointing out the incompleteness of a genius's definition. Nevertheless, I'm proposing the inclusion of the words "in a laboratory." Yes, we often get nowhere by repeatedly doing what doesn't work. Meet Roth's (or Nate Zuckerman's) Seymour Levov, who desperately wants recollection and...more

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Jan 20, 2008 brain rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: David Koresh, Roger Clemens, my asshole neighbor

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Representative sentence, from the book's non-conclusion:

"However, while he had been at the table formulating no solution, she had been nowhere near the underpass but--he all at once envisioned it--already back in the countryside, here in the lovely Morris County countryside that had been tamed over the centuries by ten American generations, back walking the hill roads that were edged now, in September, with the red and burnt orange of devil's paintbrush, with a matted profusion of asters and gol...more Representative sentence, from the book's non-conclusion:

"However, while he had been at the table formulating no solution, she had been nowhere near the underpass but--he all at once envisioned it--already back in the countryside, here in the lovely Morris County countryside that had been tamed over the centuries by ten American generations, back walking the hill roads that were edged now, in September, with the red and burnt orange of devil's paintbrush, with a matted profusion of asters and goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace, an entangled bumper crop of white and blue and pink and wine-colored flowers artistically topping their workday stems, all the flowers she had learned to identify and classify as a 4-H Club project and then on their walks together had taught him, a city boy, to recognize--"See, Dad, how there's an n-notch at the tip of the petal?"--chicory, cinquefoil, pasture thistle, wild pinks, joe-pye weed, the last vestiges of yellow-colored wild mustard sturdily spilling over the fields, clover, yarrow, wild sunflowers, stringy alfalfa escaped from an adjacent farm and sporting its simple lavender blossom, the bladder campion with its clusters of white-petaled flowers and the distended little sac back of the petals that she loved to pop loudly in the palm of her hand, the erect mullein whose tonguelike velvety leaves she plucked and wore inside her sneakers--so as to be like the first settlers, who, according to her history teacher, used mullein leaves for insoles--the milkweed whose exquisitely made pods she would carefully tear open as a kid so she could blow into the air the silky seed-bearing down, thus feeling herself at one with nature, imagining that she was the everlasting wind."

I see that I now only have a little over 2200 characters left to finish this review. I once wrote in a paper in college something like, "Dostoyevsky never hesitates to say in fifty words what could be said in fifteen." Roth, apparently, never hesitates to say in 400 leaden pages what could be said in 50. Here, then, is the plot of the book. I went ahead and lopped off the superfluous 113-page first act (think frame story with no end frame).
Swede Levov is a Jewish kid in New Jersey in the 40s and he is good at football. He becomes a marine, eventually marries Miss New Jersey (a Catholic), inherits his father's glove factory, becomes rich. Swede has a daughter who stutters and eventually blows up a general store as a means of protesting the Viet Nam war, killing one person and later killing three others in a separate explosion. The daughter then becomes a Jain and wears a mask over her face and lives in filth. Later on, some new characters are introduced into the story and we find out Swede's wife is cheating on him, that he had an affair, et cetera. Therefore, the concept of the American Pastoral is a myth. The end.

Seriously, fuck this book. It's everything I hate about literature and nothing I like about it. That this book won the Pulitzer prize boggles the mind. That it won the Pulitzer prize when contemporary winners include works such as The Hours, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Empire Falls, and most recently, The Road makes me wonder just who Philip Roth has nude photos of.(less)

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Apr 23, 2008 Yulia rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I found this an impossible read because the central character, Swede Levov, was utterly implausible. He was too handsome, too kind, too modest, too tortured, too innocent(!), but what he was not was real. He was a fantasy. And to all who say they've known a Swede in their lives I'd guess they didn't know that person very well at all. They were too busy gazing from afar at their gorgeous marble idol with its beautiful tears.

Should I blame the fictional Nathan Zuckerman and not the actual Philip...more

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Mar 11, 2011 Tuckova rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: pulitzer

I didn't finish it. I realized that life is probably too short, and certainly I read too slowly, to spend another minute with Philip Roth. He's Jewish, did you know? JEWISH. Also, he is a man. Men have penises, did you know? PENISES! that are very important and special self-starting things, and when they don't work it is an AMERICAN TRAGEDY, and when they do, well they just do stuff and we observe all of that with some very pretty sentences that almost distract a person from how we're basically...more

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Jul 23, 2008 Chak rated it 1 of 5 stars

Recommended to Chak by: Lorrie Kwest?

Shelves: fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I disliked this book so much that I got mad at the author.

I found this book in a cab in 2007. It was in this little pink bag, like it was specifically left for someone to find. It had a card in it that said something about it being the person's (who wrote the card) favorite book of some past year and she signed it "Lorrie Kwest." I asked the driver if he wanted to keep it to turn into lost and found, but he told me to just take it. I felt like I could find this Lorrie Kwest and at least ask her...more I disliked this book so much that I got mad at the author.

I found this book in a cab in 2007. It was in this little pink bag, like it was specifically left for someone to find. It had a card in it that said something about it being the person's (who wrote the card) favorite book of some past year and she signed it "Lorrie Kwest." I asked the driver if he wanted to keep it to turn into lost and found, but he told me to just take it. I felt like I could find this Lorrie Kwest and at least ask her who she just gave the book to. That name seemed so googleable to me. Nothing, not even a white pages search, turned up anything.

After I told a good friend this story, she convinced me that "Lorrie Kwest" was not a real person and it was some sort of karmic code to get the book into my hands, so I ended up reading the book, with the internal promise made to return the book from whence it came.

Here is an excerpt from what I wrote to friends shortly after finishing the book:

"...the book went into so much detail about this one, mysterious character. She appeared over and over again and was constantly on the main guy's mind because he felt she was trying to destroy his life. He questioned himself so many
times about her. Then, the book just ended on a stupid, unsatisfying note and nothing was ever said about this mystery woman. And, no more was said about the guy's daughter who was a very pivotal person in the story. Nothing. It was just chopped off senselessly at the end. Oh, I can't believe I got so into the book and then just totally disappointed at the end. I mean, I know he was trying to say
there were no answers, but c'mon - maybe there were no answers as to why his daughter turned out so bad and how that paralleled Newark/America turning out so bad, but that mystery girl - Rita Cohen - he should have given answers on that. The reader deserved that much!!! Now, I HATE Philip Roth. I'll probably never read another one of his books. Bastard."

I did leave the book (with the original card in it) in the same pink bag in a taxi for some other unsuspecting New Yorker to find. However, I did add a little post-it note explaining that I meant to do that, so that the next person wouldn't go crazy trying to find the owner like I did.
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Jun 19, 2007 Eric Althoff rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Seymour "Swede" Levov has it made--a beautiful wife, the family glove business in his capable hands, wealth, a house in suburbia. He was his high school's football star in Newark, New Jersey, makes friends wherever he goes, and spent a brief yet heralded stint in the armed forces, his unit set to ship out only days before World War II came to an end. He enjoys success beyond anything his Russian Jewish immigrant grandparents could ever have even dared hope. By any and all measures, the Swede has...more

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Jul 24, 2007 Sarah rated it 3 of 5 stars

American Pastoral means "a story about America's Golden Age." And so I guess it is, in some ways, the story of the early 20th century American Jewish immigrant family and in its romantic interpretation they're rich, they're whiter than the white folk and they still fall prey to the adultery, lawlessness and immorality that embraces American culture.

I'm completely flumoxed by this book. I started out enjoying it enormously, especially Roth's editorials about high school reunions and misjudging p...more

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Jan 25, 2011 Rike rated it 1 of 5 stars

On the book cover, the Guardian recommends Roth's novel as "raging and elegiac". Indeed? Well, in the end it was I who felt raging and elegiac every time I picked up this book.

I must admit I was somewhat wary of the novel before I bought it because I had already disliked "Everyman" - but I convinced myself that "American Pastoral" couldn't be so bad. After all, it had won the Pulitzer Prize for its portrait of a seemingly perfect man, the "Swede", who loses the peace and happyness he once had wh...more

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Jul 20, 2012 Jonathan Peto rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels

Twenty years ago Bill C. in my friends list suggested I read Philip Roth. I don't know why it took me so long to get around to it, Bill. A lot amazed me here. A lot. I read a Philip Roth quote somewhere in which Roth praised Jonathan Franzen. I can see that. From what I've read, both of them write ambitious books that attempt to say something about our/their times, the Great American Novel genre. One reason this story interested me is because Roth is older and I enjoyed learning about an earlier...more Twenty years ago Bill C. in my friends list suggested I read Philip Roth. I don't know why it took me so long to get around to it, Bill. A lot amazed me here. A lot. I read a Philip Roth quote somewhere in which Roth praised Jonathan Franzen. I can see that. From what I've read, both of them write ambitious books that attempt to say something about our/their times, the Great American Novel genre. One reason this story interested me is because Roth is older and I enjoyed learning about an earlier time (the 40s and 60s) and place (New Jersey) and Roth's perspective on it, especially because he sees things differently I think than those contemporaries of his who I know personally.

As often happens in a great book, I had a great time thinking about how people haven't really changed over the years, though circumstances and situations do make a difference and maybe I learned a little bit about why. There were a few digressions about glove making that did not bother me at all. I loved those details. I also loved the non-linear way the story was told. Roth inserts a 60-something writer narrator into the story who bumps into a man, Swede, who had been a star athlete at his high school. The author/narrator is part of the story at the beginning. Later he disappears as he shares what he learns and what he seems to speculate about Swede's life, mainly Swede's first marriage and what happens to it after his daughter, Merry, becomes a teenager who decides to blow up a post office in protest of the Vietnam War.

Roth can write pages of engrossing exposition and "scenes" that contains flashbacks that result in the story returning to an event or situation that got started pages earlier, all without causing any confusion or loss of interest. For me, this book was a page turner. I was completely caught up in the Swede's predicament and Roth's presentation of America at a time when white Catholics and white Protestants considered each other the other. That's one reason I ended up giving it four stars instead of five. After a lot of build-up, the literary ending disappointed me.

Maybe I've been reading too much genre fiction lately...(less)

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Dec 10, 2008 Ben rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a tough novel to get through in some senses and one many women find laughably misogynist. I'd argue that while, not unproblematic, the book's treatment of women is very much an effect of the fact that it is a story about men and in particular the anxieties of the sort of men who with some good reason saw themselves as the embodiment of the immigrant's American dream. Naturally these historically important, good-hearted dudes had a somewhat inflated sense of importance and a low opinion o...more

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Dec 06, 2008 Aaron rated it 5 of 5 stars

In its way, “American Pastoral” (and the entire America Trilogy) is Roth’s true Bellow novel, an old left response to “Mr. Sammler’s Planet.” “Pastoral” is also the best novel about terrorism written by an American novelist, but one concerned with the human ramifications, not the ideology of motivation. Properly speaking, it is not really political at all, it is social, but a society at its most basic unit. This is not “The Wire,” there is no nihilistic attack on the system. Instead, it is peopl...more

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Nov 09, 2011 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Brian by: Mary-Beth

(4.0) A lot to get out of the way before one of the best scenes I've ever read

So there's a lot of messing around with Nathan Zuckerman before we get to the meat of the novel. Not actually sure what function this prelude serves other than suggesting that what follows is in fact fiction-within-fiction (of which I'm tiring a bit) written by Zuckerman about one of his high schoolmates: the real novel, about Swede Levov.

We then diddle about for a while filling in tons of background on Swede. This act...more

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Dec 17, 2012 Jason added it

Shelves: read-2009

I was near tears for so much of this book. It begins innocuously enough, the author Zuckerman recounting his remembrances of the Swede, a high school hero, some chance encounters and a conversation with the Swedes brother that destroys his idol status a little bit.

What follows is an account of one of the best men that has ever lived. He is flawed, he takes for granted, he is not faithful, he is slow to act, but he is good. He is the last of an older generation, even if he has been tainted, and...more

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Jan 15, 2009 James rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, lincoln-park-group, pulitzer-prize

I read this with the Thursday night group in Lincoln Park. The story tells of Swede Levov, whose life is cast into the fires of the nineteen-sixties. Roth calls again upon the saturnine side of his disposition and it serves him well enough. Good-looking, prosperous Swede, who has inherited his father's glove factory in Newark, N.J., and married a former beauty queen, is not stupid, merely fulfilled. The glove factory almost did me in as I had an overwhelming desire to never read another sentence...more

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Dec 03, 2008 sdw rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I read this book because I thought I ought to read something by Philip Roth. I read this Roth book in particular because of its title. I am interested in pastoral and counter-pastoral modes in an America context. I read this book because I was feeling sick and I needed an excuse to lay in bed sipping tea and reading a novel while feeling like I was making progress on my dissertation and preparing for my future.

What I did not realize until I was thoroughly pulled into the book was that this nove...more I read this book because I thought I ought to read something by Philip Roth. I read this Roth book in particular because of its title. I am interested in pastoral and counter-pastoral modes in an America context. I read this book because I was feeling sick and I needed an excuse to lay in bed sipping tea and reading a novel while feeling like I was making progress on my dissertation and preparing for my future.

What I did not realize until I was thoroughly pulled into the book was that this novel is (on a shallow level) about political violence. I realized I knew all about this Philip Roth book. I simply had not associated the plot summary and analysis I encountered previously with the title. At the heart of this book is Merry Levov who at age 16 in 1968 blows up her small town post-office as a protest against the Vietnam War, accidentally murdering the beloved town doctor (as he drops off mail on his way to work). She then disappears, and her perfect American family deals with the emotional consequences.

Although the mystery of Merry is at the center of this book, it really has nothing to do with her. It is through the imagination of Roth’s alter-ego Zuckerman as he imagines the life of his childhood neighborhood hero Swede Levov. The book is full of nostalgia for a long lost impoverished jewish youth full of dreams and optimism in Newark New Jersey. The fantasies of the characters are shattered by the Newark riots of 1967, and the violence of youth protest against the Vietnam War. Levov moves his glove factory out of Newark and to Puerto Rico.

What interests me most about the book is its form – the questions it raises about authorship and imagination, the pastoral form, and the counterpastoral. What is the pastoral in a 20th C American context? What is the counterpastoral? The book echoes Paradise Lost – with sections labeled “Paradise Revealed”,”The Fall” and “Paradise Lost.”

I would probably teach this book, but it certainly wasn’t my favorite and I don’t feel like it dealt at all with questions surrounding political violence but rather used Merry Levov (and her strange path in the underground) as a device to talk about the loss of American innocence, the pathway of immigrant children in the post-war era, nostalgia, memory, death, and dreams.
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Oct 09, 2008 Donitello rated it 5 of 5 stars

I recently finished an outstandingly beautiful novel (THE MASTER PLANETS), and immediately went into one of those "I'll-Never-Find-Anything-As-Good-Again" funks. Then I found this book, which is not only a brilliant piece of literature (it's by Roth, after all), but also deals with some fascinating issues similar to those in PLANETS--issues I wanted to read more about.

As just one example: I am not Jewish, but have noticed in certain writings something uniquely poignant in the Jewish love for Am...more I recently finished an outstandingly beautiful novel (THE MASTER PLANETS), and immediately went into one of those "I'll-Never-Find-Anything-As-Good-Again" funks. Then I found this book, which is not only a brilliant piece of literature (it's by Roth, after all), but also deals with some fascinating issues similar to those in PLANETS--issues I wanted to read more about.

As just one example: I am not Jewish, but have noticed in certain writings something uniquely poignant in the Jewish love for America immediately after World War II. This was the country that had taken in many Jews' parents and grandparents in a way never before experienced, I believe. For the first time they were not outsiders, but simply immigrants in a land full of immigrants. And for the first time, every opportunity--in this nation of bounteous opportunities--was open to them. It is not surprising that the name "America" would become almost a hymn on the lips of many American Jews in this period, that they would develop an unparalleled love for their country. As all of America basked in a cornucopian economy and the righteous sense that our own good works had entitled us to it, American Jews were, perhaps, "Ultimate Americans." So it is also not surprising that, like everyone else, they also gave little thought to the idea that the richness of life here was too well fed by our military industrial complex and exploitation of Third World nations.

The protagonist, Seymour "Swede" Levov, certainly does not think about these things, and therein lies his downfall. As Amazon reviewer Ian Muldoon so aptly notes, the central question of the book is whether it is acceptable for Levov to to accept that he is one of the lucky ones and simply enjoy his place in time and history, or whether his good luck also carries an obligation. An inherently decent man, Levov does not look beyond his own life to wonder if it impinges on the lives of others. But his daughter cannot feel so sanguine. Merry has not had the good fortune of Seymour and his wife to be thought "perfect": She grew up with a terrible stutter, over which her beautiful parents agonized. Is this what gave her the ability (willingness? determination?) to see the fissures in the edifice they revere? In any event, she sees the fissures yawning, and her answer is to place sticks of dynamite in them. And later to withdraw so far from the world that she scarcely eats so as not to "destroy plant life," and will not even wash for fear of "harming the water." She has started by demolishing the world around her, and is now obliterating herself. Miraculously, the stutter that at one time "terrified" Levov is gone... as she herself soon will be.

AMERICAN PASTORAL is the story of a beautiful nation that, about 40 years ago, let some part of its best self slip away. As the "Ultimate American," Levov is the perfect symbol. As he thinks, so thought we.(less)

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Aug 04, 2008 Lisa rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Basically this book is an etiology. "Etiology" is a word I learned from the author, Philip Roth, who likes to use big words. Etiology is the study of the causes of disease. In American Pastoral, Swede Levov expends his life trying to determine the cause of the disease that claimed his daughter, made her a murderer and turned her into a nut, and this becomes an allegory for whatever it is that undermines the American promises of prosperity, civic order and domestic bliss.

Maybe that sounds boring...more

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Apr 26, 2012 Stephanie Sun rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: dead-tree, yummy-broccoli, clinton, sad-daddies, size-matters

There were so many times that I thought that Roth was phoning it in in this book - reiterating his major points over and over again in a way that is just not that fun to read.

But then he'll do these things with character and dialogue and scene and individual sentences (not even all the beautiful New Jersey riffing, although that certainly sweetens the deal) that nobody could stumble on by accident. It's certainly not as refined as top-shelf McEwan, but my god.

And then the ending, the last 3 pag...more

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Jun 16, 2008 Brian rated it 5 of 5 stars

America is its ideals. This is the point Philip Roth steps around and returns to throughout the layered meander of American Pastoral. The author lays out this message by invoking a series of narrative dialectics about American life: country versus city, past versus present, private versus public, peace versus war, order versus chaos, and, on a most basic level, serenity versus insanity. Swede Levov has an American dream—to rise through the ranks of society by contending and winning, to work har...more America is its ideals. This is the point Philip Roth steps around and returns to throughout the layered meander of American Pastoral. The author lays out this message by invoking a series of narrative dialectics about American life: country versus city, past versus present, private versus public, peace versus war, order versus chaos, and, on a most basic level, serenity versus insanity. Swede Levov has an American dream—to rise through the ranks of society by contending and winning, to work hard at his father’s glove factory, to marry a beautiful wife and raise their only daughter in the good life of an idyllic rural landscape. And, confronted with the country’s personal and political injustices, his daughter, Merry, also has an American dream, one that she delves so far into she is driven to commit an unforgivable act of violent extremism.
The novel is anchored as the late sixties fade into the seventies, as the sense that something new, violent, and revolutionary was happening that could destroy America shifts into the realization that what seemed new and jarring was a part of America all along. And it is told from a perspective a quarter century later, a point when this turbulent moment has become another wound of history. Terrible, unimaginable horrors happen, and America goes on. It is not another story of the perversity that lurks beneath suburban privilege. Rather, it is a story of how one family is affected by, and affects, the world around it. The madness is not subterranean; it is all around.
The narrative is problematic: thanks to a framing device that disappears before the hundredth page, the audience can never be quite sure how much is truth within the story’s world and how much is imagined. As in a dream, certain characters remain mysterious and certain puzzles remain unsolved; like the real world, the novel promises some payoffs it refuses to deliver. But for all that is left unknown, the ending somehow fits. And in a story about the American experience, the dream matters as much as the reality.
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Feb 23, 2008 Madhuri rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: america, pulitzer

The only thing I have read from Philip Roth before this was Goodbye Columbus. That was one book that I had liked for its genuineness and for its stories that depicted the life of a community, its place in the rest of the world, the fears and the anxiety and a need for assertion.
American Pastoral came heavily recommended from all Critics lists, and I read it with some amount of expectation. Sadly, I was a little disappointed in it. I found it slow, replete with inconsistent characters, and final...more

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Aug 23, 2009 Beth rated it 5 of 5 stars

I would recommend listening to this-- the narrator is great, and sounds just like Nathan Zuckerman, (Roth's alter ego) who himself is telling the story of The Swede (Seymour Irving Lvov) -- tall, blond, athletic; a high school basketball, baseball, football star, who married Miss New Jersey, and moved to "Old Rimrock". His charmed life is tragically marred by events of the 60"s. Great writing. Multiple themes-- Jewish immigrants and their American born children, family, span of the decades from...more

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Jul 28, 2012 R. rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012

Note: Philip Roth's naughty sockpuppet, nerdy stand-in and somewhat nihilist surrogate Nathan Zuckerman - the author of the controversial Carnovsky (which you may or may not have read in Our Mutual Universe as Portnoy's Complaint) - pieces together the Life and Rise and Fall and Times of Swede Levov, a local Jersey boy who made good but whose daughter may have made heap big boom. But a warning: since it's Zuckerman, there is some vocabulary that is pulled straight from a sailor's swearjar's swea...more

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Mar 10, 2009 Wynne rated it 1 of 5 stars

This is the most self-indulgent, pointless book I have ever read. I would string together a series of poorly crafted run-on sentences to attempt to describe this terrible work, but then I would be simply imitating Roth.

I wish that I had the hours that it took me to read this book back. I also wish that Roth's editor would come to my apartment so that I could punch her/him in the face. An utterly pointless story coupled with, as aforementioned, ridiculously self-indulgent and dense prose, made t...more

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Dec 12, 2011 Brown.carolyn rated it 4 of 5 stars

I think this book is one of the best that I have ever read. Yes, I was put off by the details, the pages that were filled with what seemed like unimportant things, the tangents. But I think a lot of people missed out on what this book is really about. This book isn't about the characters (who Roth made me care about), or the town, or the country. The characters could be anyone, the town anywhere, the country and country. Well, no, actually, it was decidedly American. What this book was about was...more

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About Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained early literary fame with the 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus (winner of 1960's National Book Award), cemented it with his 1969 bestseller Portnoy's Complaint, and has continued to write critically-acclaimed works, many of which feature his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. The Zuckerman novels began with The Ghost Writer in 1979, and inc...more

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Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories

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Quotes from American Pastoral

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.” — 212 people liked it

“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.” — 141 people liked it

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American Pastoral (The American Trilogy #1)

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