American Pastoral
by Philip Roth(1997)
NovelEnglish
“The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood.”
American Pastoral
Philip Roth(1997)
A golden athlete, a beautiful wife, a glove factory humming with honest labour in the green hills of New Jersey: the life of Seymour "Swede" Levov is an American dream so perfect it seems invulnerable. Then his daughter sets off a bomb. Philip Roth's 1997 novel traces the detonation of a family and a country through the upheavals of the 1960s, narrated by Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, who circles the Swede's catastrophe with the obsessive attention of a man trying to understand how paradise is lost. The prose builds in long, furious, recursive sentences that refuse to let any comfortable explanation stand. Roth's great subject here is the American conviction that goodness should be a shield, and the bewilderment when it is not.
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