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3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
Ugh. Please make this man stop talking! I think if I was at a book reading I'd be the guy from Airplane that pours gasoline over himself. I don't need to read about every single mundane act of someone who I don't care about to begin with. I don't know how this guy is on everyone's must read list. I don't get it.
It felt like this book would never end, but when it did, I was like, Was that it?
The first 3/4 of this was spellbinding. The end sort of petered out for me, but such is the power of the book's structure that when I reviewed the final part of it in my mind, I realized how it actually amplified all of the doubling throughout the rest of the book. Layers upon layers of meaning to consider.
See also: John Updike's "Rabbit Redux" for another (goyische) view of the High School Golden Boy's Later Tsuris. I looked at contemporary reviews of "American Pastoral," and was amazed no one mentioned the similarities between the two novels by mid-century American masters.
See also: John Updike's "Rabbit Redux" for another (goyische) view of the High School Golden Boy's Later Tsuris. I looked at contemporary reviews of "American Pastoral," and was amazed no one mentioned the similarities between the two novels by mid-century American masters.
As good as I'd heard. Favorite Roth that I've read. While I had read books on tape/CD before, this was the first all-ipod book I've listened to and Ron Silver narrated it brilliantly. Will be v. interested to see how Ewan translates it to film. Haunting.
Roth is a genius with character, with interior, close-in narration. Even minor characters like Rita Cohen (who may or may not exist?) are rendered so clearly that it feels like they MUST be real people. I also enjoyed the structure of the story - the initial main character at the reunion, and then the parts from the Swede's perspective.
I also really enjoyed the ending, all the wrenches that were thrown into the Swede's life. The tension was not one note; it involved his daughter, father, mother, wife, friends and neighbors. It involved the very root of himself. I very much enjoyed the build up and the resolution, or lack thereof.
I did think some parts were tedious and/or too long or overwritten.
I have to say I loved the first short story I read by Roth, "Conversion of the Jews", and this novel struck me as so different, in topic and writing style. It was not what I was expecting, though I did like it. I look forward to reading more short stories and more novels so as to compare them.
I also really enjoyed the ending, all the wrenches that were thrown into the Swede's life. The tension was not one note; it involved his daughter, father, mother, wife, friends and neighbors. It involved the very root of himself. I very much enjoyed the build up and the resolution, or lack thereof.
I did think some parts were tedious and/or too long or overwritten.
I have to say I loved the first short story I read by Roth, "Conversion of the Jews", and this novel struck me as so different, in topic and writing style. It was not what I was expecting, though I did like it. I look forward to reading more short stories and more novels so as to compare them.
Would give it 4.5 stars if goodreads would let you do that.
This was my first Philip Roth read, and I have to say, it was an enjoyable experience. Roth really knows how to get to your senses through his writing, especially with the main female character. He can get you to cringe by describing the disgusting yet sad turn-around of a daughter of a well-known, idol-like citizen. As a reader, you'll keep flipping the pages to unravel the lives of this family. (I read this a while ago so all of the names and specific details seemed to have slipped my mind)
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
This is an incredible novel, a harrowing study of a man suffering an unrelenting tragic downfall, wrapped in a nuanced though somewhat distorted portrait of the post-war American boom and one generation's reaction to the countercultural movement. At its heart is the thoroughly realized character of Seymour "Swede" Levov: the city boy who loves the bucolic lifestyle of countryside living; the full-blooded Jewish son but every inch that blond-haired Aryan look and athletic predisposition that makes him both the envy and the oddity of his Jewish community; a man for whom stoic ordinariness of American living is the highest calling though whose early path through life is so charmed, fated and privileged this can hardly be written without inducing a snort of contempt in the reader; a thoroughly decent man whose entire world is turned upside down by the extreme actions of a wayward daughter; and, summarily, an avatar of the Silent Generation struggling and failing to understand that Man was expelled from Eden many millennia ago.
If you're looking for plot, this book is not it. There are certain moments where a smoother progression of thrilling events is hinted at: the mystery of how such a good-man as Swede and his pretty, multi-dimensional wife Dawn manage to raise a terrorist. But the author teases these things only to subsequently bury the promise of pace by way of protracted, comprehensive digressions into the Swede's past. But each of these stifling adventures into the Swede's memory is so effusively and lushly written, and forms such a complete account of Swede's bewilderment and shattered unity of spirit, that it should be appreciated for what it is. An attempt to write down particularly moving sentences from the novel had to be abandoned as I ended up nearly transcribing an entire third of the novel up to that point. The prose and writing is staggering: everything from turns of phrase, deep psychological conceits and sincerities, the instability of the perspective and framing (in which 3rd person point of view gives way to fevered, passionate 1st person and 2nd person interludes, as if in extreme moments, the reader can see, on the page: the nascent Id, the repressed furious interiority of Swede smashing its head against the immovable gates of his agreeable countenance), and a great thematic preoccupation with the truth about people, how little we know about them, and they about themselves; a somewhat meta-textual aside about the powers and limits of analysis and fiction, subtext and surface.
If you're looking for plot, this book is not it. There are certain moments where a smoother progression of thrilling events is hinted at: the mystery of how such a good-man as Swede and his pretty, multi-dimensional wife Dawn manage to raise a terrorist. But the author teases these things only to subsequently bury the promise of pace by way of protracted, comprehensive digressions into the Swede's past. But each of these stifling adventures into the Swede's memory is so effusively and lushly written, and forms such a complete account of Swede's bewilderment and shattered unity of spirit, that it should be appreciated for what it is. An attempt to write down particularly moving sentences from the novel had to be abandoned as I ended up nearly transcribing an entire third of the novel up to that point. The prose and writing is staggering: everything from turns of phrase, deep psychological conceits and sincerities, the instability of the perspective and framing (in which 3rd person point of view gives way to fevered, passionate 1st person and 2nd person interludes, as if in extreme moments, the reader can see, on the page: the nascent Id, the repressed furious interiority of Swede smashing its head against the immovable gates of his agreeable countenance), and a great thematic preoccupation with the truth about people, how little we know about them, and they about themselves; a somewhat meta-textual aside about the powers and limits of analysis and fiction, subtext and surface.
...and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. 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. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terrible significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.
In many ways I feel like this is as close as it gets to the definitive post-war American novel. The countercultural movement is not written in an especially flattering light (through Swede's perspective and that of the frame-writer Zuckerman belonging to that same generation), but it all serves less as an academically truthful inspection of a moment in history and more as a revealing truth of Swede's own limits of world-view and imagination, the men behind their heroic myths, the eternal inter-generational struggle, the broken social contract of that fabled American Dream for which earlier ancestral immigrants broke their backs for the sake of their grandchildren, the sheer horror of a world, which at the turn of one dramatic moment, becomes utterly unreasonable for those whom the world had, for a time, conspired for their success.
And who can adjust then? Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossible. But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy - that is every man's tragedy.
So I'm waiting for my copy of Solenoid to arrive in the mail, I finish the novel I'm reading and have to start something new... A friend randomly asks on facebook what everyone's reading and the person who responds after me is reading American Pastoral and I think, "Hey I have that, haven't read it yet, and it did win a Pulitzer..."
Well, I wish I could endorse this laudably ambitious novel, but I found that its praiseworthy efforts are, in the end, about equal to its terrible drawbacks. First of all, the novel seems to want to do two things simultaneously: 1. say something profound about America, both its so-called "dream" and the fact that the much of the post-war baby-boom were like a virus infecting that dream with hatred rather than indignation (see what I did there, Roth fans?) of said country and its dream, and 2. rewrite Moby Dick, replacing whaling with glove making. The novel both succeeds and fails simultaneously at both things. (Also, this topic is so much more like a Don Delillo than a Philip Roth novel, amiright? Weird. Same year as Underworld too: very similar novels in a way.)
First: glove making. I often recommend Moby Dick to friends and acquaintances as I think it's an amazing work of literature. It may well be the greatest novel yet written by an American, if not the quintessential "Great American Novel" of yore. These people, some of whom may have struggled through some of the novel in school, frequently rebut, "Yeah, but I just couldn't care less about whaling, so it bored me." Ignoring my own similar prejudice, for I've never picked up Infinite Jest because I can't bring myself to read a novel about a tennis pro, I always respond, "I don't give a flying fuck about whaling either, but the most amazing thing about Moby Dick is that it makes me really care about whaling while I'm reading it because it's so well written!"
Sadly, American Pastoral did not make me care about glove making, factory building, precision leather working, etc. etc. try as it might. And it did try, too hard. The form of the novel is quite original and alluring, and again uses a super ambitious technique in which the narrative (the plot, the story) endlessly interrupts itself with long speeches, digressions, and thoughts about the immigrant population who built the great manufacturing companies that dominated U.S. prosperity between WWI and II in the form of glove making, and which Reagan's new cubical bureaucracy economy and labor unions coupled and cheap starvation labor abroad eventually destroyed.
One reader here (a favorite review of mine) wishes Roth had an editor, but I don't think this novel would be any better for that, given that these digressions are a huge part of the point. Still, they're all rather repetitive and endlessly put off the fate of the characters in which one gets invested (see, I was invested so the novel's not all bad at all) and want to get to and it's frustrating for the reader. Moby Dick is never frustrating to me because its endless creative shifts in rhetorical forms keeps me entertained through whaling and renews my interest in whaling with each new chapter. Conversely, American Pastoral returns endlessly to the same old stories, putting off its rather engrossing plot to little positive effect. So, Moby Dick it ain't. God forgive me, I skimmed at times. it was just too much.
As to the American dream... Well, I do think this novel does a fabulous job presenting the generation that came to the U.S. as immigrants and built the American Dream with manufacturing as well as the following generation that accepted the dream and kept the factories going until the inner city decay, race riots, new economic structures et al. forced the manufacturing jobs to other countries and made America the bureaucratic bullshit cubicle job country.
I sympathize with Roth, whose generation, like my own, is stuck in-between: mine falls right between Boomers and Gen X, too young to remember Kennedy's assassination, too old for Molly Ringwald movies, while his was too young to fight in WWII and be "great," but already in high school and thus too old to be boomers, and were even the parents of Boomers. All of this was fabulously depicted in the novel, which perfectly expressed their point of view on things, even if those views are bound to be rather traditional and thus somewhat conservative. To Roth's credit, he tempers these views by making these characters Roosevelt liberals, anti-Vietnam, and even McGovern voters(!). Even so, their views of the more radically charged 1960s anti-Vietnam protesters and, well, yeah, the anti-establishment terrorists of the 1960s and '70s, is pretty conservative. Even if our protagonist here, being a terrorist's dad, is somewhat sympathetic, still, the narrative never balances out with the other side of the story.
I can only surmise Roth didn't want, or was simply unable, to really tell the other side of that story, yet the novel also seems to yearn to do so and even, in a few flashes, almost gets there. I kept thinking to myself, I will withhold judgement until the end for maybe there he will finally get to the heart of the other side of this story--and the end was, sadly for me who really wanted to hear the other side of the story, exactly why the U.S.A. produces vipers of sedition in its own bosom--but it was sorely disappointing and only doubled-down on the older viewpoint. I felt like I'd waded through an endlessly huge glove factory to get to the truth of a character who remained a shadowy ghost throughout.
This kind of sedition can't be merely a sickness, that some people are born hating their homeland, like a deadly virus without any reason. The novel seems to say that the only dissent possible is healthy ineffectual liberal letter writing. Which, I think we've seen, is getting us no place fast against a really rotten stink at the heart of the U.S.A., its war machine, military Industrial complex, and its billionaire conservative class that the American dreamers refuse--like this novel--to really see or acknowledge. While I have rejected terrorism (read my own novel Inbetween to see my own fictional views on the subject), I very clearly see why it might be necessary to do so to make America truly great, if that's really what we want, just as most of us acknowledge that standing up against Hitler and Mussolini with armed violence was the only possible choice.
Well, I wish I could endorse this laudably ambitious novel, but I found that its praiseworthy efforts are, in the end, about equal to its terrible drawbacks. First of all, the novel seems to want to do two things simultaneously: 1. say something profound about America, both its so-called "dream" and the fact that the much of the post-war baby-boom were like a virus infecting that dream with hatred rather than indignation (see what I did there, Roth fans?) of said country and its dream, and 2. rewrite Moby Dick, replacing whaling with glove making. The novel both succeeds and fails simultaneously at both things. (Also, this topic is so much more like a Don Delillo than a Philip Roth novel, amiright? Weird. Same year as Underworld too: very similar novels in a way.)
First: glove making. I often recommend Moby Dick to friends and acquaintances as I think it's an amazing work of literature. It may well be the greatest novel yet written by an American, if not the quintessential "Great American Novel" of yore. These people, some of whom may have struggled through some of the novel in school, frequently rebut, "Yeah, but I just couldn't care less about whaling, so it bored me." Ignoring my own similar prejudice, for I've never picked up Infinite Jest because I can't bring myself to read a novel about a tennis pro, I always respond, "I don't give a flying fuck about whaling either, but the most amazing thing about Moby Dick is that it makes me really care about whaling while I'm reading it because it's so well written!"
Sadly, American Pastoral did not make me care about glove making, factory building, precision leather working, etc. etc. try as it might. And it did try, too hard. The form of the novel is quite original and alluring, and again uses a super ambitious technique in which the narrative (the plot, the story) endlessly interrupts itself with long speeches, digressions, and thoughts about the immigrant population who built the great manufacturing companies that dominated U.S. prosperity between WWI and II in the form of glove making, and which Reagan's new cubical bureaucracy economy and labor unions coupled and cheap starvation labor abroad eventually destroyed.
One reader here (a favorite review of mine) wishes Roth had an editor, but I don't think this novel would be any better for that, given that these digressions are a huge part of the point. Still, they're all rather repetitive and endlessly put off the fate of the characters in which one gets invested (see, I was invested so the novel's not all bad at all) and want to get to and it's frustrating for the reader. Moby Dick is never frustrating to me because its endless creative shifts in rhetorical forms keeps me entertained through whaling and renews my interest in whaling with each new chapter. Conversely, American Pastoral returns endlessly to the same old stories, putting off its rather engrossing plot to little positive effect. So, Moby Dick it ain't. God forgive me, I skimmed at times. it was just too much.
As to the American dream... Well, I do think this novel does a fabulous job presenting the generation that came to the U.S. as immigrants and built the American Dream with manufacturing as well as the following generation that accepted the dream and kept the factories going until the inner city decay, race riots, new economic structures et al. forced the manufacturing jobs to other countries and made America the bureaucratic bullshit cubicle job country.
I sympathize with Roth, whose generation, like my own, is stuck in-between: mine falls right between Boomers and Gen X, too young to remember Kennedy's assassination, too old for Molly Ringwald movies, while his was too young to fight in WWII and be "great," but already in high school and thus too old to be boomers, and were even the parents of Boomers. All of this was fabulously depicted in the novel, which perfectly expressed their point of view on things, even if those views are bound to be rather traditional and thus somewhat conservative. To Roth's credit, he tempers these views by making these characters Roosevelt liberals, anti-Vietnam, and even McGovern voters(!). Even so, their views of the more radically charged 1960s anti-Vietnam protesters and, well, yeah, the anti-establishment terrorists of the 1960s and '70s, is pretty conservative. Even if our protagonist here, being a terrorist's dad, is somewhat sympathetic, still, the narrative never balances out with the other side of the story.
I can only surmise Roth didn't want, or was simply unable, to really tell the other side of that story, yet the novel also seems to yearn to do so and even, in a few flashes, almost gets there. I kept thinking to myself, I will withhold judgement until the end for maybe there he will finally get to the heart of the other side of this story--and the end was, sadly for me who really wanted to hear the other side of the story, exactly why the U.S.A. produces vipers of sedition in its own bosom--but it was sorely disappointing and only doubled-down on the older viewpoint. I felt like I'd waded through an endlessly huge glove factory to get to the truth of a character who remained a shadowy ghost throughout.
This kind of sedition can't be merely a sickness, that some people are born hating their homeland, like a deadly virus without any reason. The novel seems to say that the only dissent possible is healthy ineffectual liberal letter writing. Which, I think we've seen, is getting us no place fast against a really rotten stink at the heart of the U.S.A., its war machine, military Industrial complex, and its billionaire conservative class that the American dreamers refuse--like this novel--to really see or acknowledge. While I have rejected terrorism (read my own novel Inbetween to see my own fictional views on the subject), I very clearly see why it might be necessary to do so to make America truly great, if that's really what we want, just as most of us acknowledge that standing up against Hitler and Mussolini with armed violence was the only possible choice.
Compelling and powerful. A bit exhausting. I need something light now!