American Pastoral
by Philip Roth(1997)
Novelc. 420 pages
“The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood.”
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One great work, every day
by Philip Roth(1997)
“The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood.”
Philip Roth(1997)
Seymour Levov, the Swede, golden boy of Newark, has his life destroyed when his daughter bombs a post office in protest of the Vietnam War. Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for this, and it is his most ambitious novel, a portrait of postwar American prosperity and its betrayals. Nathan Zuckerman narrates, imagining his way into a life he envied. The pastoral turns violent; the dream curdles. The prose is relentless, building through paragraphs that feel like indictments. What happened to America? What happened to the Swede? Roth asked the questions his generation had to ask.