Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
American Pastoral Hardcover – January 1, 1997
- Print length423 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHoughton Mifflin Harcourt
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 1997
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches
- ISBN-100395860210
- ISBN-13978-0395860212
"All the Little Raindrops: A Novel" by Mia Sheridan for $10.39
The chilling story of the abduction of two teenagers, their escape, and the dark secrets that, years later, bring them back to the scene of the crime. | Learn more
Similar items that may ship from close to you
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
From Library Journal
-?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
From Kirkus Reviews
Review
But in American Pastoral the idea that a stringy-haired, sputtering sixteen-year-old destroys her father's life with a terrorist bomb reads like a piece of apparatus wheeled in from another novel altogether--even from another world. It never ceases to feel arbitrary, trumped up, forced upon the poor Swede. This is mostly because the notion seems to have little reality for the author, leaving him to summarize and philosophize rather than dramatize the concrete.
Roth is a masterly prose stylist, of course, and there are many passages of fine language in American Pastoral--luxuriously detailed descriptions of the author's beloved, doomed Newark, the leather-glove business, the New Jersey countryside, the Miss America pageant, the raising of cattle. And the themes themselves are characteristic of Roth: the trials of ethnic identity, the fate of Old World values transposed to the New World, the wrenching political confusion of recent American history. But these strengths are indulged in a way that becomes the book's weakness. The abstracted treatment of ideas, the weighty, morally serious exposition, result in a novel that holds its material at arm's length from the reader.
A story has to work as a story before it can work as an allegory. If one accepts the novel's dramatic premise and then makes a list of seemingly essential scenes, one finds that very few of them are directly portrayed in the book. -- The Atlantic Monthly, Ralph Lombreglia
American Pastoral is a little slow--as befits its crumbling subject, but unmistakably slow all the same--and I must say I miss Zuckerman's manic energies. But the mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable, and you have only to pause over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated, to see that Mr. Roth didn't entirely abandon Henry James after all. A sentence beginning "Only after strudel and coffee," for instance, lasts almost a full page and evokes a whole shaky generation, without once losing its rhythm or its comic and melancholy logic, until it arrives, with a flick of the conjuror's hand, at a revelation none of us can have been waiting for. -- The New York Times Book Review, Michael Wood
Product details
- Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition (January 1, 1997)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 423 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0395860210
- ISBN-13 : 978-0395860212
- Item Weight : 1.6 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #87,696 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,745 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.” Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
What made the novel particularly moving for me was the rich realism: so many details resonated with me. E.g., one of the forlorn streets of 1970s Newark, where two lonely London plane-trees have survived from the days when these typical old-fashioned shade trees were cared for and treasured , when they sheltered pedestrians from the sun in an age when people would still walk the streets of their town. This image of the lone surviving plane-trees captures the death of pedestrian culture as well as the death of the kind of caring, stewardship, and craftsmanship that once pervaded every aspect of American life. I was reminded of the streets of Saint Louis, Missouri, where the sight of a few towering old plane-trees on an otherwise blighted block would sometimes speak to me eloquently of a beauty that has been lost.
Or there's the high school athletics and the culture of school pride and the dime novels about baseball heroes, the chicken cacciatore, the Polish, Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrant families with their different traditions and cuisines, the Old World Catholicism gradually watering down from one generation to the next, the sterility of a faux-rural atmosphere in an exurban area increasingly dominated by all-American car and television culture, a "countryside" where the old genuine folkways are lost forever, the culture of beauty pageants, the obsessive consumption of news, the noise and din and workings of a traditional factory in pre-Rust Belt America, the devastating pressures of globalization, and more. All of it deeply familiar to me, from the tales my American grandparents would tell me about their own factory days, or even from my own experience, and from my wanderings through the old declining cities of the Midwest, whcih I so love (and which, in some ways, have a lot in common with the declining New Jersey towns depicted in this novel).
I was hoping this novel would not wallow in cliches about the supposedly brainlessly conformist 1940s and '50s, and it didn't--the era is not represented as particularly repressed, and its optimism, cultural coherence and relative "innocence" are explored with complex subtlety and with an awareness that the seismic shifts of change were already under way even then. The novel is a frank, honest, sincere, unsentimental elegy for the loss of American hopes and dreams, for an emerging American culture that disintegrated before it fully came into its own, and for all of those formerly proud industrial cities and formerly quaint rural towns that lost their souls and character in the course of the 20th century.
The language is poetic and ravishing and carries you along with its vibrant rhythm, sweep and intensity. It is less lavish than, e.g. the poetic langauge of Updike, but that is not a defect--in fact, Roth feels more grounded, more precise, in some ways. And he never appears to ramble--despite its length of over 400 pages, the novel feels tightly and purposefully constructed, unlike the self-indulgently rambling Updike novel "Rabbit is Rich," for example.
The 1960s are seen very critically--and, quite frankly, it is refreshing to see the revolutionary spirit of the era not being idealized. And yet, the novel does not come across as reactionary--in some ways, the novel does not let the preceding era off the hook for causing the explosiveness of the 1960s...
Incredible novel! One of the truly memorable ones of the late 20th century, I would say. If time chooses wisely, this novel will be among the surviving texts we still read in 150 years...
In the second section of the book, Zuckerman disappears as the narrator and we’re in Swede’s consciousness as he tries to regain his footing after Merry’s crime, calling on the discipline and decency that made him an athletic hero in his youth. He’s tormented by a young woman, Rita Cohen, who claims to be an emissary from his daughter. Five years pass. The glove factory Swede took over from his father is struggling, and his beloved city of Newark is falling apart from riots and decay. Then he gets a call about Merry. The last part of this section is the most powerful and affecting of the book.
Part three is a long dinner party at Swede’s house. It’s 1973, and the Watergate hearings to impeach Richard Nixon are playing out on TV. Swede is struggling to keep some sense of himself while realizing he can’t protect that self from the cultural collapse that surrounds him and America. At the book’s end, Swede is struggling Job-like to assimilate the myriad afflictions that have befallen him and the world he thought he understood.
What’s great about this book is its contrast between the post WW II America Swede grew up in, and the cultural turmoil he encounters and is completely unprepared for in the late sixties. There is beautiful, hyper-focused writing on Newark’s rise and decay, the bucolic promise of small New Jersey town Swede moves to, the stresses of running a manufacturing business in America when the cheaper labor lives elsewhere. Swede’s attempt to hold on to his daughter after her horrifying act is part of his attempt to hold on to a way of being in the world that increasing doesn’t work. Swede’s personal tragedy embodies the larger tragedy of a culture at war with itself and fracturing in the process.
A few quibbles. Rita Cohen, who may or may not represent his daughter, is more a caricature than a character, and never feels quite real. She couldn’t possibly know what she knows without being connected to Merry, so why be coy about it? The third section, the dinner party, is too long, and the focus shifts over to Swede’s wife and father, which slows the novel’s momentum. The repetition that several Amazon reviewers complained about is most pronounced in this part.
America was conceived in high ideals by compromised men who couldn’t possibly live up to those ideals. American Pastoral may be the best fictional account ever written about this fundamental American tragedy.
Top reviews from other countries
Roth captured my attention throughout the three books and was certainly skilled at bringing out the psyche of the main characters.
In particular, two events stood out and were completely "gripping".
The adult daughter of the main characters in American Pastoral had devolved into a menacing and destructive individual who had shut off all contact with her parents. This state of affairs had carried on for a number of years during which the parents continued to search for her.
Suddenly the daughter wants to re-connect with them and will arrive at the same time that the parents are hosting an event at their home for friends.
In the midst of socializing, the father is anxiously awaiting her arrival. Roth stretched out the anguish of the Father over at least fifty pages ; I was unable to put down the book during this event.
The second event occurred in The Human Stain. One of the main characters deliberately meets the man believed to have caused the death of two acquaintances. However, he has to pretend that the meeting is a chance occurrence, which is difficult since they meet on a frozen lake while ice fishing. The character has to carry out a credible conversation on the merits
of fishing techniques while neither being an ice Fisher nor being familiar with the lake. A high risk and remote setting that does not offer much, if any, protection.
The American Dream of economic progress is played out throughout the three books. Most of the characters have. advanced relative to their parents. In contrast to this, Roth highlights the treatment accorded to Black Society and to the race riots that occurred at that time in New Jersey. The author also highlights the unsafe and dangerous conditions in which Miners had to work.
As well, the abandonment of some of the ideals of the Republic were drawn out when the Federal Government over reacted to the threat of Communism and curtailed many political rights.
Roth posed an ethical dilemma in the American Pastoral. The parents, distraught about their daughter's actions, were stymied in making contact with her over a lengthy period. Later in this timeline, the parents learn that an acquaintance (who is also the Daughter's Psychologist) was aware of her whereabouts but never shared any information with the parents.
A shortcoming is that the author quickly switches back and forth between characters which, at times, makes the story disjointed.
Also, some of the Jewish terms used were not defined in the Kindle Dictionary.