American Pastoral (Roth)

American Pastoral
Philip Roth, 1997
Knopf Doubleday
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375701429


Summary
Winner, 1998 Pulitizer Prize

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. (From the publisher.)