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3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
At times I found myself thinking that this was a brilliant novel and at other times I just wished that Roth would stop his rambling. I could read a stretch of dozens of pages then realize that what I was reading may not have actually happened but was a possible reality. There were sections where this worked quite well and led to all kinds of fascinating questions about our protagonist, but by the end I would say I found it more grueling than enjoyable. This earns 3 stars for me due to reaching impressive heights at times, but I wouldn't want to read other Roth works that follow the same formula for the same length.
A meditation on "bullshit-nostalgia" and myth-making, a deep inquiry into the surface and the depth of American heroes both as humans and as metonymies for America. The book employs a framing structure, with frequent Roth alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman attending his 45th high school reunion after reconnecting with his childhood idol, Seymour "The Swede" Levov. Zuckerman "dream[s] a realistic chronicle" of "the Swedes" inner life, inhabiting him like a glove, the metaphor serving double duty as both a physical covering and as the central proving ground for masculinity in the family Levov's world in the glove factory.
The glove factory, like everything in the Swede's imagined life, is held onto dearly beyond the point of sensibility. The Swede weathers the 1967 Newark riots, endures the mass exodus of the glove industry to the Philippines, continuing in spite of his father's protestations to take the glove empire overseas. Everything in the Levov family tragedy is clung to, as if foolishly embracing what you love will stop it from leaving you. But who is grasping at what was lost? The Swede, or Nathan Zuckerman cum the Swede? This _Triple Self Portrait_ narrative structure in fact forms the dramatic thrust of the novel. The artifice is the art, the medium is the message. This isn't just a family novel of disintegration, there is the loss of masculinity of Nathan Zuckerman, rendered incontinent by prostate cancer, and of the historically fashioned American man, brought down equal by the tides of equality, and of a generation, silent in name but booming in presence. It is no longer just a novel about the dissolution of the American pastoral "into everything its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral-- into the indigenous American berserk", but the betrayal of a generation's promise to their children that things really were as simple and defined as they were when they were growing up, the Swede and Nathan Zuckerman and their entire generation modern refugees to the rising tides of postmodernism.
The 60s launched a broadside to American patriarchy, and so it is doubly effective that not only Seymour's daughter but his wife have embraced a more operative form of the nihilism of the time; his daughter cum domestic terrorist finding solace with the Weather Underground, his wife running to the arms of the "Wasp blandness" of "Mr. America", William Orthcutt III. The collapse of Nathan "Skip" Zuckerman and Seymour "The Swede" Levov a fall from Arcady and Eden, a compelling statement that we are all surface to everyone else, that "being unknowable is the goal" and all there is to be done is to cherish what has been lost.
Favorite quotes
Any other reading
- I Married a Communist (Book 2 of American Trilogy), by Philip Roth, 1998.
- The Human Stain (Book 3 of American Trilogy), by Philip Roth, 2000.
The glove factory, like everything in the Swede's imagined life, is held onto dearly beyond the point of sensibility. The Swede weathers the 1967 Newark riots, endures the mass exodus of the glove industry to the Philippines, continuing in spite of his father's protestations to take the glove empire overseas. Everything in the Levov family tragedy is clung to, as if foolishly embracing what you love will stop it from leaving you. But who is grasping at what was lost? The Swede, or Nathan Zuckerman cum the Swede? This _Triple Self Portrait_ narrative structure in fact forms the dramatic thrust of the novel. The artifice is the art, the medium is the message. This isn't just a family novel of disintegration, there is the loss of masculinity of Nathan Zuckerman, rendered incontinent by prostate cancer, and of the historically fashioned American man, brought down equal by the tides of equality, and of a generation, silent in name but booming in presence. It is no longer just a novel about the dissolution of the American pastoral "into everything its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral-- into the indigenous American berserk", but the betrayal of a generation's promise to their children that things really were as simple and defined as they were when they were growing up, the Swede and Nathan Zuckerman and their entire generation modern refugees to the rising tides of postmodernism.
The 60s launched a broadside to American patriarchy, and so it is doubly effective that not only Seymour's daughter but his wife have embraced a more operative form of the nihilism of the time; his daughter cum domestic terrorist finding solace with the Weather Underground, his wife running to the arms of the "Wasp blandness" of "Mr. America", William Orthcutt III. The collapse of Nathan "Skip" Zuckerman and Seymour "The Swede" Levov a fall from Arcady and Eden, a compelling statement that we are all surface to everyone else, that "being unknowable is the goal" and all there is to be done is to cherish what has been lost.
Favorite quotes
And then the loss of the daughter, the fourth American generation, a daughter on the run who was to have been the perfected image of himself as he had been the perfected image of his father, and his father the perfected image of his father's father ... the angry, rebarbative spitting-out daughter with no interest whatever in being the next successful Levov, flushing him out of hiding as if he were a fugitive--initiating the Swede into the displacement of another America entirely, the daughter and the decade blasting to smithereens his particular form of Utopian thinking, the plague America infiltrating the Swede's castle and there infecting everyone. The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral-- into the indigenous American berserk. (86)
Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive (248)
Was everyone's brain as unreliable as his? Was he the only one unable to see what people were up to? Did everyone slip around the way he did, in and out, in and out, a hundred different times a day go from being smart to being smart enough, to being as dumb as the next guy, to being the dumbest bastard who ever lived? Was it stupidity deforming him, the simpleton son of a simpleton father, or was life just one big deception that everyone was on to except him? (356)
After I'd already written about his brother--which is what I would do in the months to come: think about the Swede for six, eight, sometimes ten hours at a stretch, exchange my solitude for his, inhabit this person least like myself, disappear into him, day and night try to take the measure of a person of apparent blankness and innocence and simplicity, chart his collapse, make of him, as time wore on, the most important figure of my life [...] (74)
Any other reading
- I Married a Communist (Book 2 of American Trilogy), by Philip Roth, 1998.
- The Human Stain (Book 3 of American Trilogy), by Philip Roth, 2000.
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
How fragile is the American Dream? Read this and find out...
dark
funny
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This won a fucking Pulitzer? Who actually enjoyed reading nearly 500 pages of complete masturbatory nonsense that, I think, can be summed up as "normal guy tries hard to be good but one bad thing happens to him", and also there's lots of creepy casual misogyny thrown in? The weird obsession that writer dudes of this era have with writing the most cockamamie graphic sex scenes that have literally never happened perplexes me. Including the creepy sort of incestuous "dad is kinda attracted to his pubescent daughter" is another surefire nope from me, dawg. Also who talks like this? Who THINKS like this? How is there somehow an entire demographic of people who think this is good or realistic or interesting? I would like to meet them and give em a quick poke in the eye, which would be a much more enjoyable experience than the hours I spent reading this garbo.
American Pastoral
God what a novel. Not an easy one, but a necessary reflection on the immediate world around us and inside of us.
How we remember the dead, even those dead who we found hard to respect or revere become idealized.
This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion just a few hours old. That can happen when people die— the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality-the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward-even an outsider can't judge. The sight of a coffin going into the ground can effect a great change of heart—all at once you find you are not so disappointed in this person who is dead—but what the sight of a coffin does for the mind in its search for the truth, this I don't profess to know.
Doing the ‘right thing’ isn’t enough. We see only what we see and know only as far as we can know if we don’t look at a larger world, deeper and wider beyond our own short sight.
"Please, not now, don't tear me down, don't undermine me. I love my daughter. I never loved anything more in the world.”
"As a thing."
"What? What is that?"
"As a thing—you loved her as a fucking thing. The way you love your wife. Oh, if someday you could become conscious of why you are doing what you are doing. Do you know why? Do you have any idea? Because you're afraid of creating a bad scene! You're afraid of letting the beast out of the bag!"
"What are you talking about? What beast? What beast?" No, he is not expecting perfect consolation, but this attack-why is he launching this attack without even the pretext of consoling? Why, when he has just explained to Jerry how everything has turned out thousands and thousands of times worse than the worst they'd expected?
"What are you? Do you know? What you are is you're always trying to smooth everything over. What you are is always trying to be moderate. What you are is never telling the truth if you think it's going to hurt somebody's feelings. What you are is you're always compromising. What you are is always complacent. What you are is always trying to find the bright side of things. The one with the manners. The one who abides everything patiently. The one with the ultimate decorum. The boy who never breaks the code. Whatever society dictates, you do. Decorum. Decorum is what you spit in the face of. Well, your daughter spit in it for you, didn't she? Four people? Quite a critique she has made of decorum."
—
Every generation has an ideal, an American ideal, which isn’t a full reality of what our country is. We are slipping further down (up? Left? Right? in some direction nonetheless) with a sense of superiority and progress. No one can stop it.
“He could not prevent anything. He never could, though only now did he look prepared to believe that manufacturing a superb ladies' dress glove in quarter sizes did not guarantee the making of a life that would fit to perfection everyone he loved. Far from it. You think you can protect a family and you cannot protect even your-self. There seemed to be nothing left of the man who could not be diverted from his task, who neglected no one in his crusade against disorder, against the abiding problem of human error and in-sufficiency—nothing to be seen, in the place where he stood, of that eager, unbending stalk of a man who, just thirty minutes earlier, would jut his head forward to engage even his allies. The combatant had borne all the disappointment he could. Nothing blunt remained within him for bludgeoning deviancy to death.”
God what a novel. Not an easy one, but a necessary reflection on the immediate world around us and inside of us.
How we remember the dead, even those dead who we found hard to respect or revere become idealized.
This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion just a few hours old. That can happen when people die— the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality-the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward-even an outsider can't judge. The sight of a coffin going into the ground can effect a great change of heart—all at once you find you are not so disappointed in this person who is dead—but what the sight of a coffin does for the mind in its search for the truth, this I don't profess to know.
Doing the ‘right thing’ isn’t enough. We see only what we see and know only as far as we can know if we don’t look at a larger world, deeper and wider beyond our own short sight.
"Please, not now, don't tear me down, don't undermine me. I love my daughter. I never loved anything more in the world.”
"As a thing."
"What? What is that?"
"As a thing—you loved her as a fucking thing. The way you love your wife. Oh, if someday you could become conscious of why you are doing what you are doing. Do you know why? Do you have any idea? Because you're afraid of creating a bad scene! You're afraid of letting the beast out of the bag!"
"What are you talking about? What beast? What beast?" No, he is not expecting perfect consolation, but this attack-why is he launching this attack without even the pretext of consoling? Why, when he has just explained to Jerry how everything has turned out thousands and thousands of times worse than the worst they'd expected?
"What are you? Do you know? What you are is you're always trying to smooth everything over. What you are is always trying to be moderate. What you are is never telling the truth if you think it's going to hurt somebody's feelings. What you are is you're always compromising. What you are is always complacent. What you are is always trying to find the bright side of things. The one with the manners. The one who abides everything patiently. The one with the ultimate decorum. The boy who never breaks the code. Whatever society dictates, you do. Decorum. Decorum is what you spit in the face of. Well, your daughter spit in it for you, didn't she? Four people? Quite a critique she has made of decorum."
—
Every generation has an ideal, an American ideal, which isn’t a full reality of what our country is. We are slipping further down (up? Left? Right? in some direction nonetheless) with a sense of superiority and progress. No one can stop it.
“He could not prevent anything. He never could, though only now did he look prepared to believe that manufacturing a superb ladies' dress glove in quarter sizes did not guarantee the making of a life that would fit to perfection everyone he loved. Far from it. You think you can protect a family and you cannot protect even your-self. There seemed to be nothing left of the man who could not be diverted from his task, who neglected no one in his crusade against disorder, against the abiding problem of human error and in-sufficiency—nothing to be seen, in the place where he stood, of that eager, unbending stalk of a man who, just thirty minutes earlier, would jut his head forward to engage even his allies. The combatant had borne all the disappointment he could. Nothing blunt remained within him for bludgeoning deviancy to death.”
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes