davidaguilarrodriguez 's review for:

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

4.0

dark funny reflective tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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Boomer Angst: The Novel

American Pastoral is an interesting if exhausting novel — very much a product of its moment. It's a book about the collapse of American innocence, the failure of the liberal imagination, and the yawning chasm between how we think life should be and the chaos that actually ensues. 

It is a novel that screams: What happened to my nice suburban life? Which, depending on your mood, can feel either tragic or tedious. I'd veer toward mostly tedious when this is the focus. 

At its best, this is a story about unknowability. Roth’s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, imagines the life of Swede Levov — a Jewish golden boy who marries a beauty queen, runs a glove factory, and believes in the promise of postwar American decency. But Zuckerman is clear: this is his imagination of Swede’s life. The story becomes a meta-narrative about storytelling itself — how we mythologize people, how we impose narratives, how we desperately try (and fail) to understand the inner lives of others. 

That metafictional lens is the book’s greatest strength. It’s not the 60s radicalism or the “loss of American innocence” that lingers most — it’s Roth's interrogation of how stories fail us. Zuckerman’s projection of the Swede is as flawed as the Swede’s own projection of America. 

The novel is framed by a tragic but majestically rendered 1940s Newark, a mythic portrait of Jewish assimilation and athletic glory. The Swede, seen through Zuckerman’s nostalgic gaze, is larger than life. But as we dive into his imagined adult life, the cracks show. His daughter, Merry, commits an act of domestic terrorism. His wife, Dawn, unravels. His American Dream turns nightmare. Yet even in its worst moments, Swede clings to an illusion of control. 

Swede is a naive figure. He wants so badly to be a good man, to keep things “normal,” but his vision of normalcy is built on denial and repression. Roth tears him apart — sometimes with empathy, sometimes with cold disdain. Swede isn’t destroyed by the 60s, or by radicals, or by Merry’s bomb — he’s destroyed by his own refusal to confront the contradictions of his life and country. 

Merry, on the other hand, is a problem. She is presented as an incomprehensible figure — a radicalized daughter who becomes an unknowable void. On a thematic level, this works in a way. But emotionally, it falls flat. Roth doesn’t seem to know how to write her, beyond symbol and symptom. His depiction of Dawn, the suburban wives, and especially of Rita Cohen — a gross male fantasy of a hippie radical — confirms that Roth’s limitations in writing women are not a feature, but a bug. 

Where the book triumphs is in scenes that feel lived-in. The early Newark sections, the myth-making around the Swede’s youth, and most importantly, the final dinner party. That dinner — with its petty marital tensions, neighborly resentments, and the unforgettable Shakespearean "Fool" wisdom of Lou Levov (the Swede’s father) — is the book’s emotional crescendo. Lou crashes the bourgeois pissing contest with old-school moral clarity. It’s brilliant. The book roars back to life in that scene. Lou was by far my favorite character and he came correct with the energy to draw my interest back into a book I was getting fairly bored with. 

Roth’s prose, aside from some of the content, really hit hard for me when he was interrogating stories and memory, less so when he was repeating the same ideas over and over again about American life. It's spiraling, interrogative, obsessive. His sentences don’t meander playfully like a postmodernist; they crash like waves then drill down like a Talmudic midrash. When it works, it’s exhilarating. When it doesn’t, it’s repetitive and annoying.

Thematically, the book covers a lot of ground: assimilation, Jewish identity, liberal guilt, political violence, generational fracture, storytelling itself. Some of these themes (like Jewish assimilation) are razor-sharp. Others (like the “loss of American innocence”) feel dated and obvious — like a Boomer discovering that the world is complicated for the first time.

But here’s the thing: American Pastoral came out in 1997. And what is this book, if not a pre-9/11 meditation on American stability and the intrusion of terrorism into private life? Swede’s family is the country. Merry’s bomb is the 21st century arriving early. The book doesn’t fully grasp the larger forces it’s playing with — but it feels the unease. Roth wasn’t writing about the 60s. He was writing about the 90s, about the fraying of postwar myths, about how something terrible was coming, even if no one could name it yet. 

In the end, American Pastoral is both a thought-provoking novel and a frustrating one. It’s most thoughtful as a novel about the limits of empathy and storytelling than it is as a political novel. It's most enjoyable as a depiction of a world Roth knew well (40s Newark childhood, 70s suburban dinner parties like something out of the great movie by Ang Lee The Ice Storm). It’s most tedious as a novel about 60s radicalism and realizations about the shattering of certain dreams of complacency. And yet it’s most interesting as a time capsule of the creeping anxiety at the end of the 90s and the things people had on their mind at the end of the last decade of American exceptionalism.

What the hell was going on at the end of the 90s? While the reviewers of the time were so focused on this idea of "yeah this book really slaps when it comes to asking questions about the American Dream and showing that Boomer era life wasn't what was promised", the more interesting thing about it is that it wasn't an elegy for what had happened or failed to happen but a premonition of what was to become much, much worse.