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"Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers,magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print."
American Pastoral
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American Pastoral
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This Book is Currently in the Wild!
1 journaler for this copy...
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Purchased at a used bookstore on Baker Street in Cranbrook, BC during a recent business trip.(Photo: author Philip Roth.) |
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The sixth book in Roth's Nathan Zuckerman series, and the first book of the series' second trilogy (followed by I Married a Communist and The Human Stain), American Pastoral tells the story of Seymour "the Swede" Levov, brother of Nathan's classmate Jerry Levov. A triple letterman at Weequahic High, the Swede (nicknamed as a teenager for his gentile, all-American good looks) grows up to become a wealthy glove manufacturer, taking over his father's business and marrying a former Miss New Jersey before settling down in a 200 year old stone house on Arcady Hill Road, in the fictional Newark hamlet of Old Rimrock. Unfortunately for the Swede, his life is destined to become more complicated than might have been predicted. It's the 1960s. Weequahic (location of the Levov family's glove factory) is -- literally -- burning, as are South Vietnamese monks on the evenings news, and the political passions of Swede's sixteen year old daughter Merry. To the great consternation of her liberal parents and grandparents, Merry gets involved with a mysterious New York-based political movement (think Weather Underground). As American Pastoral begins, it's 1995 and narrator Zuckerman is sixty-two, an internationally acclaimed author living in a house in the Berkshires ("about ten miles from a college town called Athena"), where he is struggling to come to grips with the aftermath of surgery for prostate cancer. At his forty-fifth high school reunion, Zuckerman learns from Jerry Levov, now a famous Miami cardiac surgeon, that the Swede has just died of cancer. He also learns that Merry, about whom Zuckerman had known nothing, was the infamous "Rimrock Bomber", who killed a well-loved local physician by detonating a bomb in the town's general store to "bring the war home to America". This revelation forces Zuckerman to abandon his image of the Swede's idyllic life: "... the daughter and the decade blasting to smithereens his particular form of utopian thinking, the plague America infiltrating the Swede's castle and there infecting everyone. The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, violence, and the desperation of the counter pastoral -- into the indigenous American berserk." American Pastoral is an engaging novel, but it's also bloated and somewhat confusing. Right up until the book's last sentence/question we're not sure if Roth intends his readers to sympathize with the Swede, or with Merry, or with neither, or with both. Zuckerman disappears as a character after the first third of the novel, and we're no longer sure whether the narrative voice is his, or Roth's, or some other omniscient observer. I missed Zuckerman (whose un-delivered speech to his 45th reunion class I enjoyed very much, notwithstanding its nostalgic excesses), and I wish he had remained more conspicuously present. You can read reviews of American Pastoral in Slate magazine here, Salon here and the Boston Phoenix here. There's also a Salon magazine article on Roth's Nathan Zuckerman series here, and a 2004 Guardian piece on Philip Roth here.
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Released 6 yrs ago (11/15/2005 UTC) at Bentall Centre (see notes for details) in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada WILD RELEASE NOTES:
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