S.J. Parris
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Adam Haslett
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American Pastoral: Summary and book reviews of American Pastoral by Philip Roth, plus links to an excerpt from American Pastoral and a biography of Philip Roth.
American Pastoral
by
Philip Roth
Hardcover: Jun 1997,
423 pages.
Paperback: Feb 1998,
423 pages.
As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is 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 political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the
American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.
Winner - Pulitzer Prize.
Book Reviews
Booklist - Ted Leventhal Pastoral, like Roth's 21 previous works, is well crafted with vivid, crisp prose, but unlike the others, it's empty....Roth vents his bitterness with America and himself. Once again, no one escapes the misery that personifies modern America.
Publishers Weekly
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.
Kirkus Reviews
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). 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.
Library Journal - Barbara Hoffert
In his latest novel, Roth shows his age. Not that his writing is any less vigorous and supple. But in this autumnal tome, he is definitely in a reflective mood, looking backward. .... In the end, the book positively resonates with the anguish of a father who has utterly lost his daughter. Highly recommended.
Salon - Albert Mobilio
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.
The Atlantic Monthly, Ralph Lombreglia
.... an allegory seemingly conceived in an abstracted realm of big notions and fixed ideas. American Pastoral is a relentlessly mental book, full of inconclusive rumination on material often left strangely undramatized. And that, along with the book's mystifyingly haphazard structure, prevents it from becoming a "genuine imaginative event."
The New York Times Book Review, Michael Wood American Pastoral is a little slow--as befits its crumbling subject, but unmistakably slow all the same--and I must say I miss Zuckerman's manic energies. But the mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable, and you have only to pause over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated, to see that Mr. Roth didn't entirely abandon Henry James after all. A sentence beginning "Only after strudel and coffee," for instance, lasts almost a full page and evokes a whole shaky generation, without once losing its rhythm or its comic and melancholy logic, until it arrives, with a flick of the conjuror's hand, at a revelation none of us can have been waiting
for.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
One of Roth's most powerful novels ever...moving, generous and ambitious...a fiercely affecting work of
art.
Boston Globe
Dazzling...a wrenching, compassionate, intelligent novel...gorgeous.
San Francisco Chronicle
At once expansive and painstakingly detailed.... The pages of American Pastoral
crackle with the electricity and zest of a first-rate mind at work.
Kostova's masterful new novel travels from American cities to the coast of Normandy, from the late 19th century to the late 20th, from young love to last love. The Swan Thieves is a story of obsession, history's losses, and the power of art to preserve human hope.
What drives a man to stay in a marriage, in a job? What forces him away? Is love or conscience enough to overcome the darker, stronger urges of the natural world? The Unnamed is a deeply felt, luminous novel about modern life, ancient yearnings, and the power of human understanding.
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I can't quite understand the one bad review, as this is absolutely one of the best books I've read lately...and I've read plenty of good books. The ...
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Greetings everyone who goes on this website.
This book was AMAZING. And I ain't no fluent reader nor spelling and writer for heaven sake I'm a ...
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American Pastoral
Booklist - Ted Leventhal
Kirkus Reviews
Library Journal - Barbara Hoffert
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