Cover of the book American pastoral
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American pastoral

byPhilip Roth, Philip A. Roth

Who is this book for? Readers interested in character-driven narratives that explore complex social issues and the American experience.

Topics IdentityPowerFamilySocial conditions
MoodMelancholic, Suspenseful
ViolenceModerate
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction 1998 American Pastoral is perhaps Philip Roth’s masterpiece. Slipping into his Zuckerman sequence (briskly followed by I Married a Communist in the following year), the novel charts the slow-motion destruction of a once-ideal life. Narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, American Pastoral focuses on Seymour "Swede" Levov, the son of a successful glove manufacturer whose business he eventually inherits. Handsome, wealthy, his story is the American Dream made real. However, all that is shattered by the political radicalisation of his daughter, a girl outraged by the horrors of the Vietnam war. To his abject horror, her role in an act of extreme, home-turf terrorism rips his life apart: American Pastoral unpicks that downfall, the Swede’s story partly seen through the prism of his younger brother Jerry and Zuckerman’s own encounters with this most tragic of figures. Sweeping in the political anarchy and sadness of post-Vietnam America, Roth vividly captured the end of a certain innocence, when 60s idealism was swept aside by dark and unstoppable forces.

Language

en

Published on

03/05/1998

Pages

423

Format

Paperback

ISBN

9780099771814

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