2018-05-25

Amazon.com: Customer reviews: American Pastoral

Amazon.com: Customer reviews: American Pastoral

American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall - of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. Seymour "Swede" Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even the most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. With vigorous realism, Roth takes us back to the conflicts and violent transitions of the 1960s. This is a book about loving - and hating - America. It's a book about wanting to belong - and refusing to belong - to America. It sets the desire for an American pastoral - a respectable life of space, calm, order, optimism, and achievement - against the indigenous American Berserk.



VINE VOICEon July 20, 2015
Okay, let me just say I was dumfounded. An acquaintance, a lit professor (contemporary Jewish fiction: Roth, Bellow, Singer, etc.), says “American Pastoral” is arguably Roth’s best novel.

In my first read, the book seemed static; abrupt in changing its point of view. As opera, it would have plenty of passion but remain earthbound nevertheless. Its narrative is flimsy, doing little more than connecting the dots that map out the story.

The nut of this story is a single horrible act of 1960s domestic terrorism and its aftermath that becomes the fulcrum around which everything spins. The narrative, circles but ends up going nowhere. The “Swede,” who is the main voice, keeps churning the story by referring again and again to the horrible event and the consequences. The story is recounted, told and retold.

To me the book becomes the Swede’s internal, desperate rant, a “cri de Coeur,” of a man of privilege, a Jew, a blond golden boy, ultimately brought to ground by the turbulent, explosive 1960s and the events that swept society and the Swede along with it – into the “fury, violence and desperation of the counterpastoral, into the indigenous American berserk.”

When I finished the book, I brooded and then moved on. Then in an act of compulsion, I re-read it. My read-through this time was an attempt to channel the Swede, to burrow into his head and feel what he’s feeling. And the thing of it is, when I did that, the book became disquieting, disturbing – almost haunting – in the fierceness and anguish of its emotion. It’s simply incredible how Roth manages to get your brain roiling with empathy. The novel is burdened with the Swede’s unbridled internal feeling of rage, which is portrayed in a way and to an extent that my reassessment makes “American Pastoral” among the most wrenching books I’ve read.

Roth calls upon Nathan Zuckerman to narrate the first third of the book. It’s in this section we learn most about Seymour Levov’s – The Swede’s – history. Then poof, Zuckerman disappears, inexplicably and the world in the 1960s is portrayed through the lens of the Swede’s unhinged sensibilities.

Roth gives us a character study of a decent man who comes of age in postwar America and falls to the grip of his times. This is foremost a story of America –its immigrants, its industry and its promise of a good, orderly life. Isn’t it ironic that the Swede’s wife was a runner-up for the Miss America crown.

The Swede’s prosperity derives from a successful glove business started by his father. The business of making and marketing fashion gloves becomes a fascinating case study of what it takes to succeed, what it’s like to be stalked by the threat of failure, what it’s like to feel powerless to stem defeat.

Ultimately “American Pastoral” earns lasting distinction because it transcends. More than the story of an individual crushed by the forces of history, the novel rises to become a sweeping portrait of America at its most fractious. If Roth is ever presented with the Nobel Prize he deserves, he will have entered the pantheon because of writing this compelling.

In a word: Transcendent
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How do you write a review for a book that took almost a decade to read? As an English grad student, all I ever heard were allusions to two major pieces of literature: The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot and American Pastoral by Philip Roth. I had the chance to study the first, but never had to read the second. I've long wondered what all the fuss was about, so ten years on, I finally tackled this book on my own.

To say that it's dense with a million points and discussions is putting it mildly. Making strong connections to the American Dream, Roth challenges our high ideals by calling into question the discordancy between people's moral smugness and the secret immorality that is many's reality. To be honest, I found his ideas slightly refreshing, as it does seem that there is hypocrisy in being offended by a million little things in society and yet quietly falling apart behind the scenes and not owning it. At some point, it seems that we need to find a way to have the courage of our convictions to own our weaknesses, to be humble enough to use life's lessons as a learning curve and not an end point of judgment.

This story of Swede Levov and his family echoes with many of the elements of the quintessential American Dream, until we peel back the cover just a bit. What seems to be a charmed, self-made story of American success turns sour when Swede's troubled daughter becomes involved with anarchist activities surrounding protests over the Vietnam War. Woven with complex themes of marriage, child rearing, politics, sexuality, and social class, this novel packs a big punch--one that often lands squarely between your eyes.

Although a pretty hard novel to work through, with all of its deeper discussions on life and culture, it was well worth picking up. Roth has a certain cynicism that I'm not sure I'm ready to wander back to in the near future, but after picking up the pieces of all that I read here, I can see myself reading another novel by Roth down the road.
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on December 29, 2016
This was a difficult book to get into. Indeed, throughout Roth uses repetition as a tool -- it starts out as annoying but becomes highly effective as the book moves along. Some may not like the narrative flow, as there are many unresolved plot point. But the book is not about plot, it is about life,human experience and human consciousness. It is one of those works that requires you to rethink your own life -- who are you and what do you believe? It is emotionally wrenching and altogether wonderful.
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on November 1, 2016
Phillip Roth is always on the short list of greatest American writers. This superb book won a Pulizer - well deserved. That said - this is a tragedy. A tragedy of a man and a time and place. But even as the tragedy unfolds Roth makes us laugh. This is an important book about a period in American history - one that changed forever America, and the American dream.
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on January 29, 2017
This was a very intense novel. Having lived through the 60's and now being a parent and a grandparent, it certainly struck some tender chords. At times the novel was emotionally difficult to read, but it is one I continue to think about now that I have completed it.
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on July 26, 2014
I was very keen to read this novel, often described as a classic story about American middle class life. The story is that of an immigrant who comes to America and starts up a tannery business in the industrial area of New Jersey. This is dirty smelly unpleasant work be he prospers. There are two sons - the elder a handsome sporting hearing at the Jewish school, a the younger son who is quiet and thoughtful and ambitious to excel in a profession and becomes a specialist physician. The elder son decides to take over the family tanning business, and becomes successful, changing it to be a processor of fine leather which he makes into expensive gloves. He marries a glamorous Miss New Jersey. However she is from a Catholic family who oppose the marriage to no avail. However the comfortable life of a wealthy business man is shattered when his eldest daughter becomes involved in a fanatical sect in her teenage years. She bombs the local post office, kills the local doctor who was accidently nearby then disappears. The father then hears that she is in New York with the sect and eventually is tracked down and found. However the reunion was very fragile and the novel finishes with a dramatic finish.
The novel is well written with a strong narrative, but I felt that there was too much rambling on about seemingly irrelevant detail about the social life of the community and the group of families with which they associated. There was also a lot of tedious description of the rather dreary suburbs where they lived. However well worth the read.
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on January 17, 2013
I have always enjoyed Roth even if his books sometimes get a little too ethnic. This one is his masterpiece. It is one of the great books of the last century. It is a story about the perception and reality of happiness and success.

The hero, Seymour Levov, is the son of a successful glove maker in Newark, New Jersey. It starts at the end of the 2nd World War. Seymour is fair haired and blue eyed, the greatest athlete in the history of his high school. Nicknamed "The Swede" he is a legend in his community. He is almost too perfect to be true. He sets every record, joins the marines and, when he is discharged, marries the stunningly beautiful Miss New Jersey. He goes on to take over the management of his father’s business, makes a fortune, buys an historic home in the country, and hobnobs with the Yankee bluebloods of New Jersey.

Our narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, was friends with the Swede’s brother. He meets the brother at their 45th high school reunion and mentions that he had lunch with the Swede. Zuckerman goes on to tell the brother that the Swede was everyone’s idol. The brother just laughs. “I’m here because I just came from my brother’s funeral. He had a horrible life."

Thus starts the tale.

At the age of 16 The Swede’s incredibly obnoxious teenage daughter, Merry, blows up a post office in their small town as a protest to the war in Viet Nam. The explosion kills a small shop owner. Merry goes underground and continues her terrorist ways, setting off three other bombs and killing a total of four people. But appearance have to be maintained. How does a perfect family deal with this? How do they explain to their own families and friends that it is not their fault? How do they reconcile the fact that their daughter has insisted for years that her parents and the values they represent are the root cause of all the suffering in the world? Why is it wrong to work hard, to succeed and prosper, and then try to make the world a better place?

The factory falls into disrepair because The Swede cannot get or keep the skilled craftsmen he needs. Newark becomes a violent, lawless husk. His marriage falls apart. At the end of the book the Swede discovers that his perfect wife is having an affair with one of the local WASPs. The daughter returns. She has embraced some manic eastern religion whereby it is forbidden to eat or bath. The family is destroyed.

This perfect man is vilified by his daughter and her proxy, Rita Cohen. These are easily two of the most obnoxious characters in fiction. The lovely Rita toys with the Swede saying that she will arrange meetings between himself and Merry if only he gives her money or sex. And through it all she viciously mocks everything the Swede stands for.

What the Swede stands for is the question. Is it wrong to work hard, to be successful, and to want those things that we believe will make us happy?

It is a story of the fifties and the sixties. The rhetoric is shrill but insistent. I found it a tough book to read because the Swede’s questions are, in many ways, my questions.
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on May 1, 2014
I'm an American-German dual national about to return to my native Germany after 21 years in the United States. During my last couple of months in the U.S., I wanted to read a novel that somehow captured the essence of America and was truly "about" America. So, naturally, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Roth novel called "American Pastoral" came to mind. And I was not disappointed--this novel felt incredibly authentic, and it expressed with poetic intensity and narrative drama something very real and palpable about what this nation is and what became of it between 1945 and 1975 (endpoint of the main narrative) and 1997 (narrative present from which the main narrative is told).

What made the novel particularly moving for me was the rich realism: so many details resonated with me. E.g., one of the forlorn streets of 1970s Newark, where two lonely London plane-trees have survived from the days when these typical old-fashioned shade trees were cared for and treasured , when they sheltered pedestrians from the sun in an age when people would still walk the streets of their town. This image of the lone surviving plane-trees captures the death of pedestrian culture as well as the death of the kind of caring, stewardship, and craftsmanship that once pervaded every aspect of American life. I was reminded of the streets of Saint Louis, Missouri, where the sight of a few towering old plane-trees on an otherwise blighted block would sometimes speak to me eloquently of a beauty that has been lost.

Or there's the high school athletics and the culture of school pride and the dime novels about baseball heroes, the chicken cacciatore, the Polish, Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrant families with their different traditions and cuisines, the Old World Catholicism gradually watering down from one generation to the next, the sterility of a faux-rural atmosphere in an exurban area increasingly dominated by all-American car and television culture, a "countryside" where the old genuine folkways are lost forever, the culture of beauty pageants, the obsessive consumption of news, the noise and din and workings of a traditional factory in pre-Rust Belt America, the devastating pressures of globalization, and more. All of it deeply familiar to me, from the tales my American grandparents would tell me about their own factory days, or even from my own experience, and from my wanderings through the old declining cities of the Midwest, whcih I so love (and which, in some ways, have a lot in common with the declining New Jersey towns depicted in this novel).

I was hoping this novel would not wallow in cliches about the supposedly brainlessly conformist 1940s and '50s, and it didn't--the era is not represented as particularly repressed, and its optimism, cultural coherence and relative "innocence" are explored with complex subtlety and with an awareness that the seismic shifts of change were already under way even then. The novel is a frank, honest, sincere, unsentimental elegy for the loss of American hopes and dreams, for an emerging American culture that disintegrated before it fully came into its own, and for all of those formerly proud industrial cities and formerly quaint rural towns that lost their souls and character in the course of the 20th century.

The language is poetic and ravishing and carries you along with its vibrant rhythm, sweep and intensity. It is less lavish than, e.g. the poetic langauge of Updike, but that is not a defect--in fact, Roth feels more grounded, more precise, in some ways. And he never appears to ramble--despite its length of over 400 pages, the novel feels tightly and purposefully constructed, unlike the self-indulgently rambling Updike novel "Rabbit is Rich," for example.

The 1960s are seen very critically--and, quite frankly, it is refreshing to see the revolutionary spirit of the era not being idealized. And yet, the novel does not come across as reactionary--in some ways, the novel does not let the preceding era off the hook for causing the explosiveness of the 1960s...

Incredible novel! One of the truly memorable ones of the late 20th century, I would say. If time chooses wisely, this novel will be among the surviving texts we still read in 150 years...
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on August 18, 2007
Few US writers nowadays take on the subject of America in their writing and make it work. Roth is clearly at the tail end of the generation of the Great American Novelist, a writer who writes as much about the character of the United States of America as he writes about the characters in his books. Don DeLillo (Falling Man: A Novel,Underworld: A Novel and White Noise) is something of this, but DeLillo's concerns are more of the intellectual background of the US rather than its character.

But this book takes on the evolution of America full force--Swede seemed to be an idyllic American. The son of a glovemaker, he was a Varsity letterman and an idol in high school who married Miss New Jersey and seemed destined to be the center of idolatry.

But of course, Swede has to fall, and his fall is as much about the evolution of America as it is the exploitation of his fall. His daughter goes from daddy's little girl to a terrorist/activist responsible for four murders. And from there, Swede's life starts to fall apart, and I mean in every way imaginable. This seems almost expected, but Roth takes this crumbling to some of its deepest psychological and emotional levels. Unlike Yates' Revolutionary Road, Roth makes you care about Swede not only through the explosion of the storybook Middle America into the Turbulent with Knowledge of Inequality 60's and onward, but because his fall is so hard. Emotionally, he is to be left with nothing, and Roth takes us there with immediate prose that grounds like broken glass into the pores of every moment. He is challenging and disturbing and spares no detail, but Roth's work is worth the wait for the depth of pathos and character he conveys. The book seems to end a little lopsidedly, and I found the main drive of The Human Stain a little more compelling than this one, but Roth is certainly a writer we cannot live without. If we want to know what America has become, don't listen to the idiotic pundits on the air (on either side of the fence) think (if you can call it that)--instead, read Roth, and you will see what we have become and who we need to be. While we have entered the era of Controversial Nonfiction, Roth reminds us that the REAL news is in fiction.
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on January 3, 2015
This book wont be for everyone but I loved it. The characters were fantastic and it really made you think about parenting and mental illness in a different way. Whilst this is a long book with a lot happening, I find it hard to describe to people as the real quality of the book is in the prose, the characters and a very believable but bizarre storyline.

The ending might disappoint some but I found it perfect. You can feel the madness in the writing so the abrupt ending becomes part of the story.

This is a book you wont forget. Highly recommended for those who love literature.
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