American Pastoral (Roth)

Book Reviews
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.
Michael Wood - New York Times Book Review

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." ... It never ceases to feel arbitrary, trumped up, forced upon the poor Swede. This is mostly because the notion seems to have little reality for the author, leaving him to summarize and philosophize rather than dramatize the concrete.... Roth is a masterly prose stylist, of course, and there are many passages of fine language in American Pastoral. ... But these strengths are indulged in a way that becomes the book's weakness. The abstracted treatment of ideas, the weighty, morally serious exposition, result in a novel that holds its material at arm's length from the reader.... A story has to work as a story before it can work as an allegory.
Ralph Lombreglia - Atlantic Monthly


Because in this, my one life, I can only spend so much time meditating upon Philip Roth's sexual hang-ups and identity issues, I've approached that ongoing self-obsession, which he regularly parses into novel-sized chunks, with wariness. Now along comes American Pastoral, a novel about three generations of family life and, in particular, the rupture between a father and daughter that embodies the social upheaval of the '60s. A big-picture book, it aspires to naturalist traditions that pit irresistible social forces against hapless souls. Clearly, this time around Roth wants to dodge the much-leveled charge of navel gazing.

At least as much as he can. American Pastoral successfully shoulders its weighty public theme of American optimism undone by a propensity for the extreme. It also rounds up Roth's usual subjects—Jewish assimilation, bourgeois pretension and the shiksa's fatal allure. His perennial alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, can't help but make an appearance at his high school reunion. It was in high school during the 1940s that Zuckerman got to know Seymour Levov, a blond, supremely confidant athletic hero nicknamed "the Swede," upon whom the Jews of Newark heaped adoration. In his physical prowess and simple ease of being—"no striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness"—the Swede represented "a oneness with America" for these first- and second-generation immigrants.

After learning of Seymour's death at the reunion, Zuckerman decides to write about him. The golden boy of Weequahic took over his father's profitable business, married an Irish Catholic former Miss New Jersey and moved to a posh 100-acre spread far from decaying Newark. It's the postwar American dream, until he slams smack up against another pure product of America: To protest the Vietnam War, the Swede's teenage daughter blows up a small-town post-office, accidentally killing a popular local doctor. She goes into hiding for 25 years, during which time the Swede is tortured, first by not knowing how she is, and then by knowing all too well the madness that has consumed her life.

Roth's faithful, often piercing apprehension of the jagged emotional transactions between parent and child form this book's true achievement. (Perhaps, since it was revealed in Claire Bloom's recent memoir that Roth ordered her teenage daughter out of the house, the childless Roth wants to prove he knows from parenthood.) Sadly though, this is another novel by a marquee author that suffers from intimidated or inactive editors. There are long sections of conversation (one features the Swede's bulldog of a father interrogating his Catholic future daughter-in-law about anti-Semitism), that just go on and on. 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.
Alabert Mobilio - Salon


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 (for which Roth won the National Book Award in 1995). It's as though, having vented his spleen and his libido in Mickey Sabbath, Roth was then free to contemplate the life of a man who is Sabbath's complete opposite. He relates the story of Seymour "Swede" Levov with few sex scenes and no scatological sideshows; the deviant behavior demonstrated here was common to a generation, and the shocks Roth delivers are part of our national trauma. This is Roth's most mature novel, powerful and universally resonant. Swede Levov's life has been charmed from the time he was an all-star athlete at Newark's Weequahic high school. As handsome, modest, generous and kind as he is gifted, Swede takes pains to acknowledge the blessings for which he is perceived as the most fortunate of men. He is patriotic and civically respon-sible, maritally faithful, morally upstanding, a mensch. He successfully runs his father's glove factory, refusing to be cowed by the race riots that rock Newark, marries a shiksa beauty-pageant queen, who is smart and ambitious, buys a 100-acre farm in a classy suburb-the epitome of serene, innocent, pastoral existence-and dotes on his daughter, Merry. But when Merry becomes radicalized during the Vietnam War, plants a bomb that kills an innocent man and goes under-ground for five years, Swede endures a torment that becomes increasingly unbearable as he learns more about Merry's monstrous life. In depicting Merry, Roth expresses palpable fury at the privileged, well-educated, self-centered children of the 1960s, who in their militant idealism demonstrated ferocious hatred for a country that had offered their families opportunity and freedom. After three generations of upward striving and success, Swede and his family are flung "out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy-into the fury, the violence and the desperation of the counterpastoral-into the American berserk." Roth's pace is measured. The first two sections of the book are richly textured with background detail. The last third, however, is full of shocking surprises and a message of existential chaos. "The Swede found out that we are all in the power of something demented,'' Roth writes. And again: "He had learned the worst lesson that life could teach-that it makes no sense." In the end, his dream and his life destroyed by his daughter and the decade, Swede finally understands that he is living through the moral breakdown of American society. The picture is chilling.
Publishers Weekly


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. As the book opens, Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, recalls an innocent time when golden boy Seymour "the Swede" Levov was the pride of his Jewish neighborhood. Then, in precise, painful, perfectly rendered detail, he shows how the Swede's life did not turn out as gloriously as expected, how it was, in fact, devastated by a child's violent act. When Merry Levov blew up her quaint little town's post office to protest the Viet Nam war, she didn't just kill passing physician Fred Conlon, she shattered the ties that bound her to her worshipful father. Merry disappears, then eventually reappears as a stick-thin Jain living in sacred povery in Newark, having killed three more people for the cause. Roth doesn't tell the whole story blow by blow but gives us the essentials in luminous, overlapping bits. In the end, the book positively resonates with the anguish of a father who has utterly lost his daughter. Highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


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). Its narrator, however, is a familiar Rothian figure: writer Nathan Zuckerman (of The Ghost Writer, et al.)—and in case you're wondering whether he still seems to be his author's alter ego, Nathan is now in his early 60s, recovering from both cancer surgery and a longtime affair with an English actress. Essentially retired, Nathan is approached by a high-school classmate's older brother—and the well-remembered hero of his youth: Seymour "Swede" Levov, once a blue-eyed athletic and moral paragon who strode through life with ridiculous ease, now nearing 70 and crushed by outrageous misfortunes. Swede asks his help writing a tribute to his late father, and soon thereafter dies himself. Piqued by the enigma of a seemingly perfect life (superb health, a successful family business, marriage to a former beauty queen) inexplicably gone wrong, Zuckerman "dream[s] a realistic chronicle" that reconstructs Swede's life—compounded of information gleaned from others who knew him, and centering in the 1960s when Swede's life began to unravel. His only daughter Meredith ("Merry") had rebelled against her parents' and her culture's complacency, protested against the war in Vietnam, claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing in which innocent people were killed, and gone "underground" as a fugitive. Most of the scenes Zuckerman/Roth imagines, therefore, are intensely emotional conversations in which the conflicting claims of social solidarity and individual integrity are debated with pained immediacy. 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.
Kirkus Reviews