American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
Summary
Seymour Levov, called the Swede for his blond hair, was the athletic god of Weequahic High in Jewish Newark in the 1940s. He marries a former Miss New Jersey, takes over his father's glove factory, moves to a stone house in the country, and lives the life the whole neighbourhood was working toward.
Then his daughter Merry, sixteen, furious about Vietnam and burdened with a stutter, blows up the local post office and kills a doctor collecting his mail, and disappears. Everything after that is the Swede trying to understand a country and a child that will not explain themselves.
The novel is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's recurring novelist, who meets the Swede once as an adult, learns almost nothing, hears at a school reunion what happened, and then simply imagines the rest. So the whole book is a reconstruction, which Roth tells you outright before starting it.
Roth writes at length about how a glove is cut and sewn, and those passages are among the best things in his work: a man explaining a craft, in a factory his father built in a city that is burning, while his life comes apart in the background.
The centre of the book is a meeting years later between the Swede and a young woman who says she knows where Merry is and has conditions, followed by a scene in a room in Newark that is the most upsetting thing Roth wrote.
Expect long paragraphs, extended digressions, and a dinner party in the final hundred pages during which the whole American argument is conducted over dessert. Nothing is resolved, deliberately. Best for readers who want the quarrel about the 1960s at full volume from the losing side.
Historical Context & Significance
American Pastoral won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the only Pulitzer of Philip Roth's career, arriving nearly forty years after Goodbye, Columbus and in the middle of the extraordinary late run that also produced I Married a Communist and The Human Stain. The three are read together as the American Trilogy.
The Newark it mourns is documented. The riots of July 1967 left twenty six people dead and accelerated a collapse of manufacturing and population that the city has never fully reversed, and Roth, born there in 1933, returned to it in book after book.
Ewan McGregor directed a film version in 2016, starring in it as the Swede, which was poorly received. Roth stopped writing fiction in 2010 and died in 2018.