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jeffmauch 's review for:
American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
I rarely find reason to rate a book so poorly, but this one truly deserves it. It was a struggle for me to finish and I probably should have tossed it before the halfway point, but I pressed on because i read one too many reviews about how if you gave up on it, you just didn't understand it. Bullshit. I understood it. There's nothing complex here. Its the story of a man who is seemingly living the American dream. A high school star that joins the military just in time for World War Two to end and enjoy the post war prosperity. He marries a beauty queen, inherits a life of better than middle class opulence, only for it to slowly crumble around him in the later years due to societal changes and family events beyond his control. The real problem here is that the author spends massive amounts of time on tangents. There are multiple times in the novel, 20-30 pages at a time, where he goes off explaining the process of making leather gloves from the selection and tanning of the leather to the sewing of it. It's relevant in the sense that the protagonist runs a glove factory, but is completely unnecessary to the story. Same goes for the history of some of the settling of the area the story takes place. It's as if the author feels that because he did a deep dive on the research he has to prove to the reader what he's learned. The fact is even if you cut these tangents out of the book, shaving a third of the books length, you still are left with a boring story filled with internal monologue that just isn't that interesting. 2/5