American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American’s rise and fall – of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. Seymour “Swede” Levov – a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father’s Newark glove factory – comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything … everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even the most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. With vigorous realism, Roth takes us back to the conflicts and violent transitions of the 1960s. This is a book about loving – and hating – America. It’s a book about wanting to belong – and refusing to belong – to America. It sets the desire for an American pastoral – a respectable life of space, calm, order, optimism, and achievement – against the indigenous American Berserk.
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To decipher the late 1960′s through the story of Swede Levov, whose life is cast into the fires of those years, Roth calls again upon the saturnine side of his disposition; it answers to the purpose as never before. Good-looking, prosperous Swede, who has inherited his father’s glove factory in Newark, N.J., and married a former beauty queen, is …
Roth’s Masterpiece. Characters that will stay with you after the final page. There’s a reason this novel won the Pulitzer for fiction. The intersection of the American Dream and a Personal/Familial Nightmare
Not my usual genre, but I loved it. Couldn’t stop thinking about the characters until long after I finished.
One of my favorite books. Roth’s epic!
American Pastoral is Philip Roth’s twentieth of twenty-seven novels. It was published in 1997 and won the Pulitzer Prize the next year. It has 520 reviews on Amazon, mostly five-star but the novel also has a few snarky one- and-two-star reviews, one of which quipped that American Pastoral was the best book of all time on glove making. I loved …