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American Pastoral (Paperback) (平装)
by Philip Roth
| Category:
American dream, Non-fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Phillip Roth presents a view of American life and the typical American dream of the 1960's - with all the conflicts of social values, religion, and money during this turbulent era. |
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AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 10 items |
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Frost (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-11 00:00>
"American Pastoral" is indeed a special book. It displays none of the often unsettling preoccupation with sex that some of Roth's other books do. This novel examines the rise and fall of a man with a life that all his acquaintances thought was blessed-a start athlete and war hero, who goes on successfully to run his father's glove factory. A non-religious Jew, he marries a pretty Catholic girl (the former Miss New Jersey!), lives in a nice house, and has a pretty daughter, Merry-slips comfortably, in other words, into mainstream America.
Merry grows up, though, to be a sociopath, a fanatic, who as part of the general 60's counterculture movement, commits a terrible act of violence, and has to go into hiding... for the rest of her life. Her act destroys the foundations of Swede's world. We watch him and those close to him slowly disintegrate, emotionally and spiritually. Their decline is not a decline in material fortunes, but it is slow and gruelling nevertheless.
Roth writes like an angel. Much of this book is expository, written in precise, evocative, sometimes Faulkneresque, sometimes academic prose. The characters are vivid, immediate, and believable. This is also an idea book, though, and often the ideas are left abstract... which isn't bad. Roth doesn't try to force answers where perhaps none exist.
This book is truly a treat. |
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Witte (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-11 00:00>
This is such a great book, and yet it is so hard to read. From a purely technical standpoint it is brilliantly executed - as are all of Roth's books - setting up conflict after conflict, crisis afer crisis, with a complete (and refreshing) lack of real resolution. Nothing trite here. But even the most technical and literate of readers will invariably get caught up in the complex, heartbreaking pathos of this book, exploring as it does the undoing of a family that, on its surface, would seem to define the truest essence of what it means to be American. The turbulence of late 1960s America serves as both a thematic foundation and a plot accelerant, and I have to say that I feel Roth deftly captured the spirit of the times: the anger, the naivete, the mindless adherence to shallow ideals (on all sides) and the radical and painful transformation of our mercurial culture. The examination of a life being gradually and irreversibly destroyed (that of the main character, Seymour Levov), and those around him who help to destroy it (principally his daughter, Merry, but also his wife, his "friends," and some mysterious secondary characters), is portrayed so expertly that I periodically had to put the book down because it was almost too much to bear. Nevertheless, this book is truly an epic piece of contemporary American literature, and absolutely deserving of the Pulitzer. |
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-11 00:00>
Plodding yet powerful, this story of how the Levov family captures the American Dream in the Forties only to have it blown to bits in the Sixties, begins slowly. The reader must first wade through page after page on the intricacies of glove making and cattle raising. But Roth knows his characters: Not only the ambitious ethnics of Newark and Elizabeth, but also the blue-blooded WASPs of Morris County's horse country. Roth makes them real--nowhere more so than at the dinner party at the book's conclusion - and this makes it worth the effort of plowing through the tedium.
"American Pastoral" should be read together with Updike's "In the Beauty of the Lilies." In that work, a Protestant famly that holds the American Dream as its birthright throws the dream away at a time when the Levovs are still day laborers in Newark's tanneries. Updike's book takes a longer route to its final tragedy, in which the fourth generation post-Protestant protagonist dies a fiery death along with other members of a Waco-like cult. Post-Jewish, post-Catholic Merry Levov's destruction, first by the Sixties Weathermen and ultimately by an eastern religious cult, is even more devestating - being without hope or meaning.
What is Roth's message? Were the seeds of the Levov family tragedy planted when Swede Levov left the nurturing Newark Jewish community in search of an America where, unbeknownst to him, faith and the American Dream were already dying? Read the book and come to your own conclusion. |
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Leon (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-11 00:00>
While reading several of Roth's other books, I became amazed at his ability to put into prose, some of my deepest thoughts about various life situations that I found my self in at one time or another. We are about the same age and of the same cultural background. He grew up in Newark, I grew up in Brooklyn. In "Portnoy's Complaint", he referred to his cousins, Leon and Sidney. My name is Leon and my brother is Sidney. In "American Pastoral" as in "I Married a Communist", Zuckerman's father was a podiatrist who had office hours in his apartment. My father was a podiatrist who had office hours in the apartment. I also worked in Newark during the time that "American Pastoral" takes place and can relate to almost every detail of Roth's descriptions of the streets, the ruins, the underpass in Ironbound next to the destroyed house that Merry was in. The emotional turmoil of the characters, described in so much detail is indicitive of Roth's ability to touch every fiber of the human psyche and burn an image into the reader like no other author. Roth writes like he was a fly inside my brain. It was frightening to see so much of my own feelings written in such eloquent terms. Needless to say, I loved the book. |
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Lange (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-11 00:00>
This is an amazing novel. The story of "Swede" and his family is a true American tragedy, with events and seemingly innocuous, but sometimes known, choices, leading to a deep inquiry in novelistic terms into consciousness, cause and effect, and whether we can ever really know what goes on inside other people. Try as we might, we can only impose our own limited knowledge on others, try to understand them, and make our way as best we can. Roth marvelously lays out these issues in the context of a modern American hometown hero and guy who tries with all his might to do the right thing, with tragic consequences. This book works with the metaphor of physical wellness, disease, cancer, as indicia of the enigmas that Roth develops.
Highly recommended for those who like to read about what makes people tick, and who won't be bothered with an ending that leaves room for uncertainty. |
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Gary (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-11 00:00>
I loved this book. Roth had become so hard to read in recent years that I was reluctant to pick this up but I found it as enjoyable as anything he has ever done. A pentrating look into the lives of my father's generation, men of limitless ambition but limited abilities. It chilled me to the bone. It said so much about being Jewish in America in the 20th century and about being american post world war 2 that it should be required reading in college history classes. Of course, it is written in the typical roth prose, shining like a gem throghout. I recommend this to everyone I know and even though it was slow in parts - why is that such a crime? Isn't real life slow in parts, too? - I was very sorry when it ended. Mazeltov to Roth but this is a book for non-jews as well. The Swede is one of the great characters of modern american fiction. Fantastic! |
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Freedman (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-11 00:00>
This is one of Roth's best novels. The story is told with great narrative power, the characters are drawn with great sympathy and understanding. The question the moral question of the novel is how the All- American boy who does everything right, and seems to make it all work has his life turned upside down and his daughter become a political radical completely estranged from what her parents stand for. The novel is long and I could have done without the prolonged description of the glovemaking industry. Its good to know that a twentieth century novelist can write a nineteenth century novel, but it does not seem to me of vital necessity. All these writers filling their books with factual descriptions of some particular industry seem to be imitating Melville's whale industry stuff, and seeking a kind of grand status as chroniclers of the whole society .Balzac in Bayonne, and Tolstoy in Teaneck are just not necessary. So I found the whole thing a bit long but there was much compensation. I will point to what for me is the best part of the novel and it seems to me one of the funniest and best pieces of American writing I know. Roth's description of his high- school reunion was for me the most poignant and funny part of this work. And here I would just say that despite all my reservations about so many different sides of Roth, political religious etc. I still find him to be the funniest writer I have ever read and as his best unbeatable. This work contains some of that Roth very best stuff, and I could not more highly recommend it. |
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Guthleben (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-11 00:00>
Philip Roth is undoubtedly a genius. The power of his intellect, the beauty of his language, the sheer relentless narrative of his novels is remarkable. American Pastoral (the first in a trilogy followed by I Married an American Communist and The Human Stain) chronicles the Jewish American immigrant experience, the boom post-war years in which "The Swede" Levov inherits his father's self-made legacy and, whilst obeying all the rules, somehow finds his life unravelling. The narrative covers 50 years and is stitched together like one of the Swede's Newark Maid gloves. But there are no kid gloves for our hero, no easy answers to the big questions facing the ex-high school sports star with the ex-Miss New Jersey wife who together somehow produce a psychopathic daughter. How could the 50s spawn the 60s, Vietnam, Watergate, Deep Throat? The Swede has no idea and we are left to watch and ponder as his life cracks beneath him. Along the way we are treated to Philip Roth's discourses - on baseball, beauty pageants, a father's loving description of his pre-adolescent daughter, even the process of glove manufacturing. As always, they stud this book like literary diamonds. |
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Greenberg (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-11 00:00>
This astonishingly insightful tragedy shows the unreliable outcome that can stem from almost any of our American contemporary civil virtues, demonstrating that outcomes can't be predicted from input. The structure of the book convincingly shows us the "The Swede" first as a fortunate simpleton, hiding the intense, multi-dimensional tragedy of his life and his spirit.
Later we find that Seymour is overwhelmed by the failure of his own well-intended efforts to save his daughter, his community, his family and his profound decency. The reader suffers along with the character as he simply refuses to save himself from the mystery, pain and layered consequences of an explosive event that consumes all he loves.
The portrayal (& betrayal) is told in entirely convincing prose, with flawless ethnic insight and painfully realistic anguish. Reading this was overwhelming. |
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Ellis (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-11 00:00>
This is an amazing book which for me worked powerfully on several levels - first, the characters are beautifully drawn, fleshed out to accompany and in some instances haunt us beyond the reading of the book. Next, Philip Roth evokes Newark of the second world war and follows it through its sad decline and the turmoil of the sixties and seventies with a thoroughly convincing sense of time and place. Finally, he answers a question which remains timely - where is it after all that terrorists come from? And the deeply disturbing answer is that they may very well come from characters we come to understand and care about. This is a book for the ages and I'm so glad I read it. |
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1 Total 1 pages 10 items |
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