Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
*Warning: Spoilers lie ahead like the stars on an American flag’s field of blue*
American Pastoral is a simple tale of Seymour “Swede” Levov. Levov was naturally gifted in sports and became a local hero in his New Jersey hometown and high school. Out of high school, in 1945, he joined the marines, but he was made a drill sergeant on Parris Island and never saw any combat. He married a beautiful woman who had won the title of Miss New Jersey but failed to win Miss America. He took over his father’s thriving glove-making business. He had a daughter, Meredith, known as Merry, and moved to the country with his family. In her teen years, Merry became and opponent of the Vietnam War and gained the name Ho Chi Levov among her classmates for her outspoken political opinions. In 1968, she set a bomb off at the postal area of the local general store, killing a family doctor in the process. The bomb blew up Levov’s American Dream along with the Hamlin Store. Levov doesn’t see his daughter again until 1973. It is a meeting that lasts for only a few hours at most but that leaves him as distraught as ever. The last quarter of the novel takes place at a dinner party hosted by Levov and his wife the very evening after he has seen Merry as we watch the family, and presumably America by extension, fall apart.
While Seymour Levov’s story would in itself be a gripping one, Philip Roth wants the story to be every bit as much about America as it is about Levov, and that’s where his weird narrative tricks start muddying up the waters of his simple tale. Roth’s tale of America’s lost innocence is essentially a conservative tale about how the beauty and promise of postwar America was destroyed in the late 1960s by race riots, activist women, and opposition to the Vietnam war. Roth, it seems to me, is too smart and world-weary to not know that his representation of America’s Paradise Lost is too simplistic and easy, so he casts layers and layers of doubt on top of the narrative which simultaneously lets him draw the simple conclusions he draws and suggest that he knows that the conclusions are too simple. He gets his simplicity and wants to keep his intellectual rigorousness at the same time--a move that, to me, falls flat.
The first and most prominent narrative complication in American Pastoral is the presence of a frame. The story of Seymour Levov doesn’t begin until page 83 in my edition. Before that, we learn bits about Seymour, but more importantly we learn about our narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, and his relationship with Levov, his idolization of Levov. The only other Roth novel that I have read is Portnoy’s Complaint, so I was unaware at the time that I read American Pastoral that Zuckerman is a recurring character in Roth’s books, a narrator who closely resembles Roth himself. Zuckerman was friends with Levov’s younger brother, Jerry, and had a huge man-crush on Seymour, making a childhood hero of him. The novel, published in 1997, begins in 1995, and the first chapter involves a long scene of Zuckerman and Levov meeting for dinner in May of that year. Throughout the scene Zuckerman attempts to reach below the surface, to figure out who Levov is, to suss out his motives, his thoughts, his traumas. Each time he tries to get a read on Levov, Zuckerman tells us “I was wrong.” So Roth sets us up with an unreliable narrator, a man who both idolizes Levov and who seems incapable to knowing what is going on beneath the surface. To complicate matters further, Zuckerman writes his version of events after he learns about Levov’s death and Merry’s bombing of the Hamlin store from Jerry, whom he meets at his 45th class reunion, in the fall of 1995. Once he finishes his story, he tells us this: “I had the amateur’s impulse to send Jerry a copy of the manuscript to ask what he thought. It was an impulse I quashed: I hadn’t been writing and publishing for nearly forty years not to know by now to quash it. ‘That’s not my brother,’ he’d tell me, ‘not in any way. You’ve misrepresented him. My brother couldn’t think like that, didn’t talk like that,’ etc.” Through the layers that Roth creates, we have an imaginary narrator creating the imaginary past of another imaginary character with a different unknowable imaginary past. As a result, nothing here is presented to us in a way that we can comfortably draw conclusions about Roth. He has shielded himself fiercely from the story that bears his name.
Within this muddy framework, there are still more questions raised that are never answered. I am thinking particularly here of Merry and her agency. Levov is convinced that his daughter has been manipulated, brainwashed into creating the bomb and setting it off. In opposition to that idea is Rita Cohen, the petite woman who presents herself to Levov as a disciple of Merry, a woman who is awed and intimidated by Merry’s overwhelming personality. When Levov last speaks with Rita, however, Rita accuses him of telling Merry that Rita and Levov never slept together. The subject of Rita and Levov’s encounter at the hotel is mentioned only in passing in Merry and Levov’s conversation, so Rita is clearly not as connected with Merry as she has led Levov to believe. Who Rita is is never answered in the novel, nor is her connection to Merry ever revealed. Rita’s presence allows for some excellent drama and allows for Roth to create an over-the-top sex scene, but her presence in the novel itself does little to effect the overarching plot. Remove Rita from the novel, and the only real thing that you lose is the counterpoint to Merry’s agency. Without Rita, there is no one to suggest that Merry is not simply a pawn in someone else’s game. Levov’s inability to know—and ours as well--whether Merry was manipulated or manipulator is central to Levov’s crisis and pain. The only other thing that Rita contributes to the story is that she is another corrupted woman in a landscape of corrupted women.
It is important to the novel that Merry is a daughter and not a son. If Levov had a headstrong son who committed this act of terrorism, one who then met with his father at twenty-one with a sense of calm and purpose, the issue of his agency would not have been called into question, with or without a Rita Cohen. It is Merry’s femininity that calls her agency into question. She is always Levov’s little girl underneath the monster she has become, and I mean monster quite literally. When she became a teenage, Roth/Zuckerman describes her transformation this way: “the grasshopper child who used to scramble delightedly up and down the furniture and across every available lap in her black leotard all at once shot up, broke out, grew stout—she thickened across the back and the neck, stopped brushing her teeth and combing her hair; she ate almost nothing she was served at home but at school and out alone ate virtually all the time, cheeseburgers with French fries, pizza, BLTs, fried onion rings, vanilla milk shakes, root beer floats, ice cream with fudge sauce, and cake of any kind, so that almost overnight she became large, a large, loping, slovenly sixteen-year-old, nearly six feet tall.” Merry becomes monstrously unfeminine, and the disgust at her appearance and hygiene is anything but lovingly described in that passage. Both Merry and Rita are women whose femininity is twisted and threatening to Levov and the America he represents.
Poor Levov, high school sports icon, all-American kid, dutiful son, and loving father finds himself saddled with this beast of a child who seems to hate everything about the country he loves. She’s argumentative and vitriolic in spite of Levov’s loving understanding. No one can blame Levov for his handling of Merry’s desire to go to New York to hang out with her politically radical friends. Roth/Zuckerman is at pains to show what a devoted and thoughtful father he is. But then, Levov is surrounded by faulty women. His love for Dawn, his wife, was triggered by her beauty, and her beauty is the thing that he returns to about her again and again. Even at the moment that he most admires her, the moment in which she wins over his father, he attributes her ability to do that to her beauty. In opposition to Dawn’s femininity are Sheila Salzman’s cold intelligence that leaves us wondering how we are supposed to believe that Levov ever had an affair with her, Marcia Umanoff’s snooty academic posturing and delight in needling poor Lou Levov’s sense of morality, and Jessie Orcutt’s unexplained drunken behavior whose violence against Lou brings the novel to a close. The women of this novel are uncouth and violent and a never-ending source of aggravation for Seymour Levov. In spite of all of Levov’s violent fantasies in the last portion of the novel, he is not a man of violence. In contrast, the two overt acts of violence are committed by women, first Merry’s bombing and then Jessie’s stabbing of Lou Levov with a dessert fork. And after Jessie’s stabbing, it is Marcia who finds the whole thing amusing, and her laughter is the final crushing note that Levov has to endure: “Marcia sank into Jessie’s empty chair, in front of the brimming glass of milk, and with her face in her hands, she began to laugh at their obtuseness to the flimsiness of the whole contraption, to laugh and laugh and laugh at them all, pillars of a society that, much to her delight, was going rapidly under—to laugh and to relish as some people, historically, always seem to do, how far the rampant disorder had spread, enjoying enormously the assailability, the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things.” Marcia is one of the laughing jackals, delighting in the world falling apart, in America’s falling apart. In fact, she and the women like here are one of the causes of that destruction
Marcia’s laughing leads Levov to ask the final question in the novel: “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” And here is where Roth gets to enjoy his sentimentality and his snark at the same time. Lou’s patronizing treatment of Jessie is painful to watch, even if you believe his heart is in the right place. Seymour would have had the perfect life if the women in his world would have only given up their own agency and followed his plans. Merry would have been the adoring daughter. Dawn would have been the happy wife. He would have been Johnny Appleseed, conquering and nurturing the wilds of America. They all would have lived in the house he chose and lived the life he dreamed and they all would have been happy. The ending question of the novel cannot be answered unproblematically. One cannot say that there is nothing wrong with the life of the Levovs. But the question depends on your desire to say that there is something beautiful about the life of the Levovs to feel the question’s pinch. You need to agree that there was something ideal about the world before the Fall whose absence we mourn. Levov is a simple hero, an American hero, and Zuckerman finds no fitter comparison for Levov historically than John F. Kennedy: “His great looks, his larger-than-lifeness, his glory, our sense of his having been exempted from all self-doubt by his heroic role—that all these manly properties had precipitated a political murder made me think of the compelling story . . . of Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, only a decade the Swede’s senior and another privileged son of fortune, another man of glamour exuding American meaning, assassinated while still in his mid-forties just five years before the Swede’s daughter violently protested the Kennedy-Johnson war and blew up her father’s life. I thought, but of course. He is our Kennedy.” Merry, in this analogy, is Lee Harvey Oswald and her primary victim is not the doctor who died in the blast, but her father, whose understanding of America died in the blast. Zuckerman’s tale depends on a lionizing of Levov and the America he represented, and in turn Roth’s novel depends on the same, but Roth knows that life is too complicated for that lionizing, so he distances himself while at the same time having the emotional thrust of his novel depend on it.
The novel is, not surprisingly, well written. Roth creates great encounters between characters and scenes that are pulsing with meaning and movement. My problems with the novel are all at the level of content, but the writing is not so amazing that it is with few parallels. In short, I believe that had this list of 100 fiction novels in the English language been created by two women or two black scholars instead of two white men American Pastoral would not have made the cut.
I haven’t even touched on the racial politics that hover at the fringes of the history Roth tells and the importance of Vickie, his office manager, and the praise Zuckerman wants to give Levov for employing black men and women in Newark until the economic environment led her to move his glove factory out of the country. I haven’t touched upon the weird Freudian scene in which Merry at twelve years of age asks Levov to “kiss me the way you k-k-kiss umumumother.” I haven’t touched upon the role of religion in Roth’s story, the relationship between Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism. If you have insight into these elements in the story, I’d love to hear about it.
American Pastoral is a simple tale of Seymour “Swede” Levov. Levov was naturally gifted in sports and became a local hero in his New Jersey hometown and high school. Out of high school, in 1945, he joined the marines, but he was made a drill sergeant on Parris Island and never saw any combat. He married a beautiful woman who had won the title of Miss New Jersey but failed to win Miss America. He took over his father’s thriving glove-making business. He had a daughter, Meredith, known as Merry, and moved to the country with his family. In her teen years, Merry became and opponent of the Vietnam War and gained the name Ho Chi Levov among her classmates for her outspoken political opinions. In 1968, she set a bomb off at the postal area of the local general store, killing a family doctor in the process. The bomb blew up Levov’s American Dream along with the Hamlin Store. Levov doesn’t see his daughter again until 1973. It is a meeting that lasts for only a few hours at most but that leaves him as distraught as ever. The last quarter of the novel takes place at a dinner party hosted by Levov and his wife the very evening after he has seen Merry as we watch the family, and presumably America by extension, fall apart.
While Seymour Levov’s story would in itself be a gripping one, Philip Roth wants the story to be every bit as much about America as it is about Levov, and that’s where his weird narrative tricks start muddying up the waters of his simple tale. Roth’s tale of America’s lost innocence is essentially a conservative tale about how the beauty and promise of postwar America was destroyed in the late 1960s by race riots, activist women, and opposition to the Vietnam war. Roth, it seems to me, is too smart and world-weary to not know that his representation of America’s Paradise Lost is too simplistic and easy, so he casts layers and layers of doubt on top of the narrative which simultaneously lets him draw the simple conclusions he draws and suggest that he knows that the conclusions are too simple. He gets his simplicity and wants to keep his intellectual rigorousness at the same time--a move that, to me, falls flat.
The first and most prominent narrative complication in American Pastoral is the presence of a frame. The story of Seymour Levov doesn’t begin until page 83 in my edition. Before that, we learn bits about Seymour, but more importantly we learn about our narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, and his relationship with Levov, his idolization of Levov. The only other Roth novel that I have read is Portnoy’s Complaint, so I was unaware at the time that I read American Pastoral that Zuckerman is a recurring character in Roth’s books, a narrator who closely resembles Roth himself. Zuckerman was friends with Levov’s younger brother, Jerry, and had a huge man-crush on Seymour, making a childhood hero of him. The novel, published in 1997, begins in 1995, and the first chapter involves a long scene of Zuckerman and Levov meeting for dinner in May of that year. Throughout the scene Zuckerman attempts to reach below the surface, to figure out who Levov is, to suss out his motives, his thoughts, his traumas. Each time he tries to get a read on Levov, Zuckerman tells us “I was wrong.” So Roth sets us up with an unreliable narrator, a man who both idolizes Levov and who seems incapable to knowing what is going on beneath the surface. To complicate matters further, Zuckerman writes his version of events after he learns about Levov’s death and Merry’s bombing of the Hamlin store from Jerry, whom he meets at his 45th class reunion, in the fall of 1995. Once he finishes his story, he tells us this: “I had the amateur’s impulse to send Jerry a copy of the manuscript to ask what he thought. It was an impulse I quashed: I hadn’t been writing and publishing for nearly forty years not to know by now to quash it. ‘That’s not my brother,’ he’d tell me, ‘not in any way. You’ve misrepresented him. My brother couldn’t think like that, didn’t talk like that,’ etc.” Through the layers that Roth creates, we have an imaginary narrator creating the imaginary past of another imaginary character with a different unknowable imaginary past. As a result, nothing here is presented to us in a way that we can comfortably draw conclusions about Roth. He has shielded himself fiercely from the story that bears his name.
Within this muddy framework, there are still more questions raised that are never answered. I am thinking particularly here of Merry and her agency. Levov is convinced that his daughter has been manipulated, brainwashed into creating the bomb and setting it off. In opposition to that idea is Rita Cohen, the petite woman who presents herself to Levov as a disciple of Merry, a woman who is awed and intimidated by Merry’s overwhelming personality. When Levov last speaks with Rita, however, Rita accuses him of telling Merry that Rita and Levov never slept together. The subject of Rita and Levov’s encounter at the hotel is mentioned only in passing in Merry and Levov’s conversation, so Rita is clearly not as connected with Merry as she has led Levov to believe. Who Rita is is never answered in the novel, nor is her connection to Merry ever revealed. Rita’s presence allows for some excellent drama and allows for Roth to create an over-the-top sex scene, but her presence in the novel itself does little to effect the overarching plot. Remove Rita from the novel, and the only real thing that you lose is the counterpoint to Merry’s agency. Without Rita, there is no one to suggest that Merry is not simply a pawn in someone else’s game. Levov’s inability to know—and ours as well--whether Merry was manipulated or manipulator is central to Levov’s crisis and pain. The only other thing that Rita contributes to the story is that she is another corrupted woman in a landscape of corrupted women.
It is important to the novel that Merry is a daughter and not a son. If Levov had a headstrong son who committed this act of terrorism, one who then met with his father at twenty-one with a sense of calm and purpose, the issue of his agency would not have been called into question, with or without a Rita Cohen. It is Merry’s femininity that calls her agency into question. She is always Levov’s little girl underneath the monster she has become, and I mean monster quite literally. When she became a teenage, Roth/Zuckerman describes her transformation this way: “the grasshopper child who used to scramble delightedly up and down the furniture and across every available lap in her black leotard all at once shot up, broke out, grew stout—she thickened across the back and the neck, stopped brushing her teeth and combing her hair; she ate almost nothing she was served at home but at school and out alone ate virtually all the time, cheeseburgers with French fries, pizza, BLTs, fried onion rings, vanilla milk shakes, root beer floats, ice cream with fudge sauce, and cake of any kind, so that almost overnight she became large, a large, loping, slovenly sixteen-year-old, nearly six feet tall.” Merry becomes monstrously unfeminine, and the disgust at her appearance and hygiene is anything but lovingly described in that passage. Both Merry and Rita are women whose femininity is twisted and threatening to Levov and the America he represents.
Poor Levov, high school sports icon, all-American kid, dutiful son, and loving father finds himself saddled with this beast of a child who seems to hate everything about the country he loves. She’s argumentative and vitriolic in spite of Levov’s loving understanding. No one can blame Levov for his handling of Merry’s desire to go to New York to hang out with her politically radical friends. Roth/Zuckerman is at pains to show what a devoted and thoughtful father he is. But then, Levov is surrounded by faulty women. His love for Dawn, his wife, was triggered by her beauty, and her beauty is the thing that he returns to about her again and again. Even at the moment that he most admires her, the moment in which she wins over his father, he attributes her ability to do that to her beauty. In opposition to Dawn’s femininity are Sheila Salzman’s cold intelligence that leaves us wondering how we are supposed to believe that Levov ever had an affair with her, Marcia Umanoff’s snooty academic posturing and delight in needling poor Lou Levov’s sense of morality, and Jessie Orcutt’s unexplained drunken behavior whose violence against Lou brings the novel to a close. The women of this novel are uncouth and violent and a never-ending source of aggravation for Seymour Levov. In spite of all of Levov’s violent fantasies in the last portion of the novel, he is not a man of violence. In contrast, the two overt acts of violence are committed by women, first Merry’s bombing and then Jessie’s stabbing of Lou Levov with a dessert fork. And after Jessie’s stabbing, it is Marcia who finds the whole thing amusing, and her laughter is the final crushing note that Levov has to endure: “Marcia sank into Jessie’s empty chair, in front of the brimming glass of milk, and with her face in her hands, she began to laugh at their obtuseness to the flimsiness of the whole contraption, to laugh and laugh and laugh at them all, pillars of a society that, much to her delight, was going rapidly under—to laugh and to relish as some people, historically, always seem to do, how far the rampant disorder had spread, enjoying enormously the assailability, the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things.” Marcia is one of the laughing jackals, delighting in the world falling apart, in America’s falling apart. In fact, she and the women like here are one of the causes of that destruction
Marcia’s laughing leads Levov to ask the final question in the novel: “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” And here is where Roth gets to enjoy his sentimentality and his snark at the same time. Lou’s patronizing treatment of Jessie is painful to watch, even if you believe his heart is in the right place. Seymour would have had the perfect life if the women in his world would have only given up their own agency and followed his plans. Merry would have been the adoring daughter. Dawn would have been the happy wife. He would have been Johnny Appleseed, conquering and nurturing the wilds of America. They all would have lived in the house he chose and lived the life he dreamed and they all would have been happy. The ending question of the novel cannot be answered unproblematically. One cannot say that there is nothing wrong with the life of the Levovs. But the question depends on your desire to say that there is something beautiful about the life of the Levovs to feel the question’s pinch. You need to agree that there was something ideal about the world before the Fall whose absence we mourn. Levov is a simple hero, an American hero, and Zuckerman finds no fitter comparison for Levov historically than John F. Kennedy: “His great looks, his larger-than-lifeness, his glory, our sense of his having been exempted from all self-doubt by his heroic role—that all these manly properties had precipitated a political murder made me think of the compelling story . . . of Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, only a decade the Swede’s senior and another privileged son of fortune, another man of glamour exuding American meaning, assassinated while still in his mid-forties just five years before the Swede’s daughter violently protested the Kennedy-Johnson war and blew up her father’s life. I thought, but of course. He is our Kennedy.” Merry, in this analogy, is Lee Harvey Oswald and her primary victim is not the doctor who died in the blast, but her father, whose understanding of America died in the blast. Zuckerman’s tale depends on a lionizing of Levov and the America he represented, and in turn Roth’s novel depends on the same, but Roth knows that life is too complicated for that lionizing, so he distances himself while at the same time having the emotional thrust of his novel depend on it.
The novel is, not surprisingly, well written. Roth creates great encounters between characters and scenes that are pulsing with meaning and movement. My problems with the novel are all at the level of content, but the writing is not so amazing that it is with few parallels. In short, I believe that had this list of 100 fiction novels in the English language been created by two women or two black scholars instead of two white men American Pastoral would not have made the cut.
I haven’t even touched on the racial politics that hover at the fringes of the history Roth tells and the importance of Vickie, his office manager, and the praise Zuckerman wants to give Levov for employing black men and women in Newark until the economic environment led her to move his glove factory out of the country. I haven’t touched upon the weird Freudian scene in which Merry at twelve years of age asks Levov to “kiss me the way you k-k-kiss umumumother.” I haven’t touched upon the role of religion in Roth’s story, the relationship between Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism. If you have insight into these elements in the story, I’d love to hear about it.
reflective
slow-paced
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I discovered Philip Roth last summer, when I picked up a used copy of "The Human Stain" and proceeded to have my mind completely blown by both the story and Roth's incredible writing. I wasn't sure what to expect when I decided to dive into "American Pastoral": when you fall in love with a book and pursue the author's other works, you always run the risk of being severely disapointed - and people seem to either love or hate this book with a suprising passion…
I'm happy to report that I was not disapointed in the least: a quarter of the way in and I already felt like I had been kicked in the teeth (in the best possible way) by the story of Seymour "The Swede" Levov. Roth's ability to create vivid characters and put their thoughts and feelings on the page never ceases to impress me: I really feel like I am in their heads, and when said characters have a story as devastating as that of the Levov family, it is an incredible reading experience. I put the book down dizzy, my head reeling with images and ideas, and I love when that happens.
Roth explores the idea that people are never what they appear to be on the surface: with great compassion, he digs at an All-American family man, his former beauty queen wife and their stuttering daughter, turning them inside out to show us that nothing is as it seems, that the American Dream might have been an optical illusion all along, that perfection is an unbearable burden that can't be kept up indefinitely.
The literal explosion of the Swede's ideals, when his out-of-control daughter commits a horrific act of violence, and his disillusionment are detailed with heartbreaking precision. What do you do when everything you have ever hold sacred and believed to be good and true disintergrates around you, no matter what you do? How do you pick up the pieces and go on, how do you make sense of the surreal failure that your dream world has so unexpectedly turned into? Roth explores the power of choices, how we can trace back so many things to that one fork in the road where were decided to turn right instead of left, the moment in time from which a huge series of events cascaded.
The Swede's compulsion to always be what other people want him to be and to live a life he feels to be the highest ideal of American lives can seem naive, but it also comes from a truly earnest place: there is not an ounce of malicious intent in this upright man, and he cannot understand it in others. His incapacity to conceive that the rest of the world doesn't mean as well as he does is his Achilles' heel, and his daughter - who is nuts, but more lucid than him - uses it to make him aware of his blindness.
I found myself wondering how I would have reacted, had I been Merry's age, sitting in front of the television and watching a monk set himself on fire because nothing else he could do would carry the weight of his protest against the powerlessness imposed on his people. It is only too realistic to suppose that a sensitive and intelligent child can look at this horrific image of a gentle monk burning himself to death and be forever changed by that event. I abhor violence, and I don't think I would have been pushed into the kind of radical revolutionary tactics that attracted Merry, but I know the home-life disatisfaction, and I know how the anger and frustration that comes from that can burn inside someone until they don't know how to react except by lashing out. Obviously, Merry's reaction to her father's denial and passivity is compeltely disproportionate, but it is not impossible to imagine.
I can see how Roth's writing is not for everyone: he is long-winded, and just as I had experienced with "The Human Stain", his rhythm took a few pages to get used to. But once my brain got in the right gear, I breezed through the pages maniacally. When the narrative becomes the rambling stream-of-consciousness of the character he is exploring, it can be hard to follow, especially if you were never perticularly interested in the glove manufacturing business or Miss America pageants. Believe me, those are things that are as far from my reality as one can imagine, but I was completely enthralled despite my not giving a hoot about high school football culture. I think the only thing I can hold against this book was that it ended too soon for me: I wanted to know more about how the Swede decided to rebuild himself, which we know he did, but Roth skips over that part of the story entirely. But overall, it is a moving and hard-hitting read that I enthusiastically recommend to everyone.
That being said, I can't really recommend the movie, which tries very hard to incorporate every important aspect of the story, but fails to convey the emotional weight of Roth's writing. I'm beginning to think his work might be un-adaptable for the silver screen, as I was just as disapointed with the movie version of "The Human Stain"…
I'm happy to report that I was not disapointed in the least: a quarter of the way in and I already felt like I had been kicked in the teeth (in the best possible way) by the story of Seymour "The Swede" Levov. Roth's ability to create vivid characters and put their thoughts and feelings on the page never ceases to impress me: I really feel like I am in their heads, and when said characters have a story as devastating as that of the Levov family, it is an incredible reading experience. I put the book down dizzy, my head reeling with images and ideas, and I love when that happens.
Roth explores the idea that people are never what they appear to be on the surface: with great compassion, he digs at an All-American family man, his former beauty queen wife and their stuttering daughter, turning them inside out to show us that nothing is as it seems, that the American Dream might have been an optical illusion all along, that perfection is an unbearable burden that can't be kept up indefinitely.
The literal explosion of the Swede's ideals, when his out-of-control daughter commits a horrific act of violence, and his disillusionment are detailed with heartbreaking precision. What do you do when everything you have ever hold sacred and believed to be good and true disintergrates around you, no matter what you do? How do you pick up the pieces and go on, how do you make sense of the surreal failure that your dream world has so unexpectedly turned into? Roth explores the power of choices, how we can trace back so many things to that one fork in the road where were decided to turn right instead of left, the moment in time from which a huge series of events cascaded.
The Swede's compulsion to always be what other people want him to be and to live a life he feels to be the highest ideal of American lives can seem naive, but it also comes from a truly earnest place: there is not an ounce of malicious intent in this upright man, and he cannot understand it in others. His incapacity to conceive that the rest of the world doesn't mean as well as he does is his Achilles' heel, and his daughter - who is nuts, but more lucid than him - uses it to make him aware of his blindness.
I found myself wondering how I would have reacted, had I been Merry's age, sitting in front of the television and watching a monk set himself on fire because nothing else he could do would carry the weight of his protest against the powerlessness imposed on his people. It is only too realistic to suppose that a sensitive and intelligent child can look at this horrific image of a gentle monk burning himself to death and be forever changed by that event. I abhor violence, and I don't think I would have been pushed into the kind of radical revolutionary tactics that attracted Merry, but I know the home-life disatisfaction, and I know how the anger and frustration that comes from that can burn inside someone until they don't know how to react except by lashing out. Obviously, Merry's reaction to her father's denial and passivity is compeltely disproportionate, but it is not impossible to imagine.
I can see how Roth's writing is not for everyone: he is long-winded, and just as I had experienced with "The Human Stain", his rhythm took a few pages to get used to. But once my brain got in the right gear, I breezed through the pages maniacally. When the narrative becomes the rambling stream-of-consciousness of the character he is exploring, it can be hard to follow, especially if you were never perticularly interested in the glove manufacturing business or Miss America pageants. Believe me, those are things that are as far from my reality as one can imagine, but I was completely enthralled despite my not giving a hoot about high school football culture. I think the only thing I can hold against this book was that it ended too soon for me: I wanted to know more about how the Swede decided to rebuild himself, which we know he did, but Roth skips over that part of the story entirely. But overall, it is a moving and hard-hitting read that I enthusiastically recommend to everyone.
That being said, I can't really recommend the movie, which tries very hard to incorporate every important aspect of the story, but fails to convey the emotional weight of Roth's writing. I'm beginning to think his work might be un-adaptable for the silver screen, as I was just as disapointed with the movie version of "The Human Stain"…
The third Roth and by far my favorite, which I did not expect.
Ron Silver gave an tremendous performance, and truly, you could not ask for a better narrator. He made the story come alive. He is probably why I loved this book. It will be very hard to see Ewan MacGregor in this role in the movie because Silver is the Swede for me.
Ron Silver gave an tremendous performance, and truly, you could not ask for a better narrator. He made the story come alive. He is probably why I loved this book. It will be very hard to see Ewan MacGregor in this role in the movie because Silver is the Swede for me.
Wow if you had told me about this book I don't think I would have expected to like it but it is an amazing book. You slowly move into the book by meeting the writer/narrator of the real story but both stories are connected. Can't wait to get the next book.
Five stars over all. Roth makes choices at nearly every turn that are exactly the opposite of what the reader expects. I read a particularly lurid scene (one of the very few) on an airplane while a woman next to me repeatedly stole not-so-subtle glances at the page. I can't help but feel that Roth had somehow engineered this from beyond the grave. It felt like part of the book itself.
Other reviewers complain about the lengthy glove-making expositions (the protagonist runs a glove-making factory in New Jersey). I loved these sections and would have been happy to read more. I found something inordinately pleasurable in reading about the details of a little-considered industry in between sections of inexplicable drama and relentless self-questioning. I can only imagine that Roth enjoyed researching and writing these sections as much as I enjoyed reading them.
Things tone down a little in the 3rd section (of three). I would have taking it all a little bit further, spinning a implausible tale of cult fascination and oracular vision, but then my version would never be considered for a Pulitzer Prize, now would it?
Other reviewers complain about the lengthy glove-making expositions (the protagonist runs a glove-making factory in New Jersey). I loved these sections and would have been happy to read more. I found something inordinately pleasurable in reading about the details of a little-considered industry in between sections of inexplicable drama and relentless self-questioning. I can only imagine that Roth enjoyed researching and writing these sections as much as I enjoyed reading them.
Things tone down a little in the 3rd section (of three). I would have taking it all a little bit further, spinning a implausible tale of cult fascination and oracular vision, but then my version would never be considered for a Pulitzer Prize, now would it?
I read this book because Stephen King praised it. And I can certainly see that it influenced his writing. Roth's in-depth descriptions of his characters' hopes and histories and values are impressive. I still prefer King, but Roth is definitely interesting. He either has an encyclopedic knowledge of thinks like glovemaking, or else is adept at convincing fiction and everything I learned from him about gloves was garbage. I'm not quite interested enough to figure out which. It took me a long time to read this. Right now, my sense is that one Roth book was enough; maybe a Saul Bellow would be good to read next, after the 3 interesting books coming out this month for me (including Holly from Stephen King, yay!)
This wasn't my favorite Roth novel, mostly because he keeps going off on tangents. I don't mind tangents, and I don't mind (most) postmodern elements, but this was a bit much.
I did really enjoy the first half, though, it just got tiresome during the second part of the book.
Still, he is a great storyteller, and I'll probably remember the Swede for a while to come.
I did really enjoy the first half, though, it just got tiresome during the second part of the book.
Still, he is a great storyteller, and I'll probably remember the Swede for a while to come.
An American novel that is great (not The Great American Novel).