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American Pastoral (Paperback) (Paperback)
by Philip Roth
| Category:
American dream, Non-fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
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¥ 148.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Phillip Roth presents a view of American life and the typical American dream of the 1960's - with all the conflicts of social values, religion, and money during this turbulent era. |
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Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Vintage
Pub. in: February, 1998
ISBN: 0375701427
Pages: 432
Measurements: 8.1 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00833
Other information: Reprint edition
ISBN-13: 978-0375701429
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- Awards & Credential -
A winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
A National Bestseller. |
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- MSL Picks -
This is a story about the American dream and the turning point in the late 1960s when protests against the Vietnam War were escalating. And it is the story of the effect on one family when their 16-year old daughter commits a violent act of terrorism. But it is much more than this.
The very structure of the book broke a lot of rules. There are more than 80 pages from an aging narrator who sets the stage. He's in his 60s and attends a 45th reunion of his high school class of 1949. The depth of detail here introduces Newark, New Jersey, which was a Jewish neighborhood in those days. It was these children's grandparents who immigrated to America, fleeing the pogroms in Russia. Their children grew up working hard and prospering. And their children seemed to be living the American dream. Then things changed. Especially for the family of Merry Levov. The rest of the book is a bunch of recollections. Their order seems haphazard. They explore the father's thought processes. It gets deeply inside his mind and we see how he thinks. There are long passages in which no actual action happens other that the character's thoughts.
Mostly, it is the father's story. His nickname is "the Swede". He's Jewish, but never looked it and excelled in sports in high school. He did a short stint in the marines in WWII and then came home to marry Miss New Jersey, a young working-class Catholic woman. He works with his father in the glove business. The young interfaith couple buys an old stone house in an upscale area where there is enough land for the wife to raise cattle. They have a daughter named Merry who seems to be happy. Then Merry becomes an adolescent. And soon their lives are filled with sorrow.
The ending wasn't particularly punchy, but it finished well with a nice tie-up of the few threads that needed to be tied up at all. Like life, not everything ends on the point of a period, and American Pastoral reflects this. It's in this inner searching that Roth proves his mastery as a writer. A marvelous achievement.
- From quoting Linda
Target readers:
General readers
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In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union for I Married a Communist(1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife(1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received
his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 hereceived the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient." In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians Award for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004." In 2007 Roth received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.
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From the publisher
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 longer-for 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.
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The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city's old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete. The name was magical; so was the anomalous face. Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov.
The Swede starred as end in football, center in basketball, and first baseman in baseball. Only the basketball team was ever any good-twice winning the city championship while he was its leading scorer-but as long as the Swede excelled, the fate of our sports teams didn't matter much to a student body whose elders, largely undereducated and overburdened, venerated academic achievement above all else. Physical aggression, even camouflaged by athletic uniforms and official rules and intended to do no harm to Jews, was not a traditional source of pleasure in our community-advanced degrees were. Nonetheless, through the Swede, the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world, the fantasy of sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as they imagined Gentiles), our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopes. Primarily, they could forget the war.
The elevation of Swede Levov into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews can best be explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and the fears that it fostered. With the Swede indomitable on the playing field, the meaningless surface of life provided a bizarre, delusionary kind of sustenance, the happy release into a Swedian innocence, for those who lived in dread of never seeing their sons or their brothers or their husbands again.
And how did this affect him-the glorification, the sanctification, of every hook shot he sank, every pass he leaped up and caught, every line drive he rifled for a double down the left-field line? Is this what made him that staid and stone-faced boy? Or was the mature-seeming sobriety the outward manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that an entire community was ladling with love? The high school cheerleaders had a cheer for the Swede. Unlike the other cheers, meant to inspire the whole team or to galvanize the spectators, this was a rhythmic, foot-stomping tribute to the Swede alone, enthusiasm for his perfection undiluted and unabashed. The cheer rocked the gym at basketball games every time he took a rebound or scored a point, swept through our side of City Stadium at football games any time he gained a yard or intercepted a pass. Even at the sparsely attended home baseball games up at Irvington Park, where there was no cheerleading squad eagerly kneeling at the sidelines, you could hear it thinly chanted by the handful of Weequahic stalwarts in the wooden stands not only when the Swede came up to bat but when he made no more than a routine putout at first base. It was a cheer that consisted of eight syllables, three of them his name, and it went, Bah bah-bah! Bah bah bah... bah-bah! and the tempo, at football games particularly, accelerated with each repetition until, at the peak of frenzied adoration, an explosion of skirt-billowing cartwheels was ecstatically discharged and the orange gym bloomers of ten sturdy little cheerleaders flickered like fireworks before our marveling eyes... and not for love of you or me but of the wonderful Swede. "Swede Levov! It rhymes with... 'The Love'!... Swede Levov! It rhymes with... 'The Love'!... Swede Levov! It rhymes with... 'The Love'!"
Yes, everywhere he looked, people were in love with him. The candy store owners we boys pestered called the rest of us "Hey-you-no!" or "Kid-cut-it-out!"; him they called, respectfully, "Swede. Parents smiled and benignly addressed him as "Seymour. The chattering girls he passed on the street would ostentatiously swoon, and the bravest would holler after him, "Come back, come back, Levov of my life!" And he let it happen, walked about the neighborhood in possession of all that love, looking as though he didn't feel a thing. Contrary to whatever daydreams the rest of us may have had about the enhancing effect on ourselves of total, uncritical, idolatrous adulation, the love thrust upon the Swede seemed actually to deprive him of feeling. In this boy embraced as a symbol of hope by so many-as the embodiment of the strength, the resolve, the emboldened valor that would prevail to return our high school's servicemen home unscathed from Midway, Salerno, Cherbourg, the Solomons, the Aleutians, Tarawa-there appeared to be not a drop of wit or irony to interfere with his golden gift for responsibility.
But wit or irony is like a hitch in his swing for a kid like the Swede, irony being a human consolation and beside the point if you're getting your way as a god. Either there was a whole side to his personality that he was suppressing or that was as yet asleep or, more likely, there wasn't. His aloofness, his seeming passivity as the desired object of all this asexual lovemaking, made him appear, if not divine, a distinguished cut above the more primordial humanity of just about everybody else at the school. He was fettered to history, an instrument of history, esteemed with a passion that might never have been if he'd broken the Weequahic basketball record-by scoring twenty-seven points against Barringer-on a day other than the sad, sad day in 1943 when fifty-eight Flying Fortresses were shot down by Luftwaffe fighter planes, two fell victim to flak, and five more crashed after crossing the English coast on their way back from bombing Germany.
The Swede's younger brother was my classmate, Jerry Levov, a scrawny, small-headed, oddly overflexible boy built along the lines of a licorice stick, something of a mathematical wizard, and the January 1950 valedictorian. Though Jerry never really had a friendship with anyone, in his imperious, irascible way, he took an interest in me over the years, and that was how I wound up, from the age of ten, regularly getting beaten by him at Ping-Pong in the finished basement of the Levovs' one-family house, on the corner of Wyndmoor and Keer-the word "finished" indicating that it was paneled in knotty pine, domesticated, and not, as Jerry seemed to think, that the basement was the perfect place for finishing off another kid.
The explosiveness of Jerry's aggression at a Ping-Pong table exceeded his brother's in any sport. A Ping-Pong ball is, brilliantly, sized and shaped so that it cannot take out your eye. I would not otherwise have played in Jerry Levov's basement. If it weren't for the opportunity to tell people that I knew my way around Swede Levov's house, nobody could have got me down into that basement, defenseless but for a small wooden paddle. Nothing that weighs as little as a Ping-Pong ball can be lethal, yet when Jerry whacked that thing murder couldn't have been far from his mind. It never occurred to me that this violent display might have something to do with what it was like for him to be the kid brother of Swede Levov. Since I couldn't imagine anything better than being the Swede's brother-short of being the Swede himself-I failed to understand that for Jerry it might be difficult to imagine anything worse.
The Swede's bedroom-which I never dared enter but would pause to gaze into when I used the toilet outside Jerry's room-was tucked under the eaves at the back of the house. With its slanted ceiling and dormer windows and Weequahic pennants on the walls, it looked like what I thought of as a real boy's room. From the two windows that opened out over the back lawn you could see the roof of the Levovs' garage, where the Swede as a grade school kid practiced hitting in the wintertime by swinging at a baseball taped to a cord hung from a rafter-an idea he might have got from a baseball novel by John R. Tunis called The Kid from Tomkinsville. I came to that book and to other of Tunis's baseball books-Iron Duke, The Duke Decides, Champion's Choice, Keystone Kids, Rookie of the Year-by spotting them on the built-in shelf beside the Swede's bed, all lined up alphabetically between two solid bronze bookends that had been a bar mitzvah gift, miniaturized replicas of Rodin's "The Thinker." Immediately I went to the library to borrow all the Tunis books I could find and started with The Kid from Tomkinsville, a grim, gripping book to a boy, simply written, stiff in places but direct and dignified, about the Kid, Roy Tucker, a clean-cut young pitcher from the rural Connecticut hills whose father dies when he is four and whose mother dies when he is sixteen and who helps his grandmother make ends meet by working the family farm during the day and working at night in town at "MacKenzie's drugstore on the corner of South Main.'
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Frost (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-11 00:00>
"American Pastoral" is indeed a special book. It displays none of the often unsettling preoccupation with sex that some of Roth's other books do. This novel examines the rise and fall of a man with a life that all his acquaintances thought was blessed-a start athlete and war hero, who goes on successfully to run his father's glove factory. A non-religious Jew, he marries a pretty Catholic girl (the former Miss New Jersey!), lives in a nice house, and has a pretty daughter, Merry-slips comfortably, in other words, into mainstream America.
Merry grows up, though, to be a sociopath, a fanatic, who as part of the general 60's counterculture movement, commits a terrible act of violence, and has to go into hiding... for the rest of her life. Her act destroys the foundations of Swede's world. We watch him and those close to him slowly disintegrate, emotionally and spiritually. Their decline is not a decline in material fortunes, but it is slow and gruelling nevertheless.
Roth writes like an angel. Much of this book is expository, written in precise, evocative, sometimes Faulkneresque, sometimes academic prose. The characters are vivid, immediate, and believable. This is also an idea book, though, and often the ideas are left abstract... which isn't bad. Roth doesn't try to force answers where perhaps none exist.
This book is truly a treat. |
Witte (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-11 00:00>
This is such a great book, and yet it is so hard to read. From a purely technical standpoint it is brilliantly executed - as are all of Roth's books - setting up conflict after conflict, crisis afer crisis, with a complete (and refreshing) lack of real resolution. Nothing trite here. But even the most technical and literate of readers will invariably get caught up in the complex, heartbreaking pathos of this book, exploring as it does the undoing of a family that, on its surface, would seem to define the truest essence of what it means to be American. The turbulence of late 1960s America serves as both a thematic foundation and a plot accelerant, and I have to say that I feel Roth deftly captured the spirit of the times: the anger, the naivete, the mindless adherence to shallow ideals (on all sides) and the radical and painful transformation of our mercurial culture. The examination of a life being gradually and irreversibly destroyed (that of the main character, Seymour Levov), and those around him who help to destroy it (principally his daughter, Merry, but also his wife, his "friends," and some mysterious secondary characters), is portrayed so expertly that I periodically had to put the book down because it was almost too much to bear. Nevertheless, this book is truly an epic piece of contemporary American literature, and absolutely deserving of the Pulitzer. |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-11 00:00>
Plodding yet powerful, this story of how the Levov family captures the American Dream in the Forties only to have it blown to bits in the Sixties, begins slowly. The reader must first wade through page after page on the intricacies of glove making and cattle raising. But Roth knows his characters: Not only the ambitious ethnics of Newark and Elizabeth, but also the blue-blooded WASPs of Morris County's horse country. Roth makes them real--nowhere more so than at the dinner party at the book's conclusion - and this makes it worth the effort of plowing through the tedium.
"American Pastoral" should be read together with Updike's "In the Beauty of the Lilies." In that work, a Protestant famly that holds the American Dream as its birthright throws the dream away at a time when the Levovs are still day laborers in Newark's tanneries. Updike's book takes a longer route to its final tragedy, in which the fourth generation post-Protestant protagonist dies a fiery death along with other members of a Waco-like cult. Post-Jewish, post-Catholic Merry Levov's destruction, first by the Sixties Weathermen and ultimately by an eastern religious cult, is even more devestating - being without hope or meaning.
What is Roth's message? Were the seeds of the Levov family tragedy planted when Swede Levov left the nurturing Newark Jewish community in search of an America where, unbeknownst to him, faith and the American Dream were already dying? Read the book and come to your own conclusion. |
Leon (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-11 00:00>
While reading several of Roth's other books, I became amazed at his ability to put into prose, some of my deepest thoughts about various life situations that I found my self in at one time or another. We are about the same age and of the same cultural background. He grew up in Newark, I grew up in Brooklyn. In "Portnoy's Complaint", he referred to his cousins, Leon and Sidney. My name is Leon and my brother is Sidney. In "American Pastoral" as in "I Married a Communist", Zuckerman's father was a podiatrist who had office hours in his apartment. My father was a podiatrist who had office hours in the apartment. I also worked in Newark during the time that "American Pastoral" takes place and can relate to almost every detail of Roth's descriptions of the streets, the ruins, the underpass in Ironbound next to the destroyed house that Merry was in. The emotional turmoil of the characters, described in so much detail is indicitive of Roth's ability to touch every fiber of the human psyche and burn an image into the reader like no other author. Roth writes like he was a fly inside my brain. It was frightening to see so much of my own feelings written in such eloquent terms. Needless to say, I loved the book. |
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