Take a photo of a barcode or cover
ewg109 's review for:
American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
Updated: Having reread this, I found Roth's long soliloquies more suffocating than transporting. Rather like taking to Lou about gloves. But because this is Roth I can't stop thinking about this book and its themes. My new theory is that Swede Levov's journey is really that of America itself--the golden boy vs the golden city on the hill. That it wasn't the Swede's blonde good looks, or pageant winning wife, or money, or colonial home that made him American, but his pathological need to repress the pain and betrayal behind a veneer of respectability and banal satisfaction.
The whole book is worth reading for the moment at the end of the book when he takes Dawn's hand. Its everything.
Original review: Oh my God. Wow. This book was so visceral and intense. Roth's book within a book is the perfect approach to examine the fall of the archetypal perfect man. A man brought down not by his own doing, but by his family, his business, and by his country. In essence a man who is destroyed by everything he loves. At times Roth rambling style was so lucid and clear that it utterly transported me, at others is got to be suffocating. But, there was so much going on in this novel that I don't even know where to begin.
The whole book is worth reading for the moment at the end of the book when he takes Dawn's hand. Its everything.
Original review: Oh my God. Wow. This book was so visceral and intense. Roth's book within a book is the perfect approach to examine the fall of the archetypal perfect man. A man brought down not by his own doing, but by his family, his business, and by his country. In essence a man who is destroyed by everything he loves. At times Roth rambling style was so lucid and clear that it utterly transported me, at others is got to be suffocating. But, there was so much going on in this novel that I don't even know where to begin.