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3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
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
The story of the rise and fall of a small-town American hero and his extreme self-examination to unravel the "why" of his daughter's self-destructive radicalism. From the post-WWII age of innocence to the chaos of the Vietnam War era, American Pastoral examines the desire and loathing of the "American Dream" and the many ways we defy convention.
American Pastoral was my first venture into the writings of Philip Roth. While there is some gorgeous writing that captures the turbulent 60’s, it was all a bit much. By that I mean overwritten and overindulgent. By the last 20 or so pages, I was skipping paragraphs that had been covered over and over again. That said, I’m glad I finished it, I guess!
adventurous
challenging
slow-paced
a compellingly told story, but aggressively masculine. sometimes that can be done well (book of daniel springs to mind); here it feels indulgent, possibly autobiographical, and from what i’ve read about roth since this, it’s probably both.
just sitting around thinking about how much i h8 philip roth.
Some rote Roth nonsense, he really doesn’t have a handle on race in this one, needed an editing pass. Weirdly better on gender/sexuality
This book provides a vision of the American Pastoral that makes you question whether it is what it seems and whether it is worth the effort of achieving. The story of Seymour Levov, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Jewish sports hero, who has that country mansion, beautiful shiksa wife and runs a succesful business, inherited from his father, reveals that all is not what it seems. His beloved only daughter, influenced by the anti-Vietnam war movement in the 1960s, turns out to have blown up the local Post Office at the age of 16 killing a passer-by, after which she disappeared. Seymour is crushed but cannot understand why and this is what the book explores without positing a definitive answer, even when, years later, Seymour finds his daughter who, after being raped and carrying out more acts of terrorism, has become a Jain, refusing even to wash in order to avoid harming water.
Roth makes peripheral use of his alter-ego narrator Nathan Zuckerman, who serves to underline the theme of the difficulty/impossibility of knowing others: "You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again." But the narrator does a disappearing act about one third of the way through the story and the reader enters the mind of Seymour himself. Zuckerman, or Roth, returns at the close to pose the enigmatic question about the life of the Levovs: "And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible?"
So why did the daughter act as she did? Roth provides material for the reader to make up their mind, colouring in the race riots of the late 60s and some minimal background on the anti-war protests. There is also the more detail than one may want to know about the glove-manufacturing business and the background of Levov himself and his wife Dawn, the Irish Catholic immigrant beauty queen. The hollowness of the pretensions of the WASP neighbours, where the wife has become an alcoholic and the husband is cuckolding Seymour, are another revelation. In the end, the enduring result is perhaps the destruction of the family.
Roth makes peripheral use of his alter-ego narrator Nathan Zuckerman, who serves to underline the theme of the difficulty/impossibility of knowing others: "You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again." But the narrator does a disappearing act about one third of the way through the story and the reader enters the mind of Seymour himself. Zuckerman, or Roth, returns at the close to pose the enigmatic question about the life of the Levovs: "And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible?"
So why did the daughter act as she did? Roth provides material for the reader to make up their mind, colouring in the race riots of the late 60s and some minimal background on the anti-war protests. There is also the more detail than one may want to know about the glove-manufacturing business and the background of Levov himself and his wife Dawn, the Irish Catholic immigrant beauty queen. The hollowness of the pretensions of the WASP neighbours, where the wife has become an alcoholic and the husband is cuckolding Seymour, are another revelation. In the end, the enduring result is perhaps the destruction of the family.
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
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