I'm an American-German dual national about to return to my native Germany after 21 years in the United States. During my last couple of months in the U.S., I wanted to read a novel that somehow captured the essence of America and was truly "about" America. So, naturally, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Roth novel called "American Pastoral" came to mind. And I was not disappointed--this novel felt incredibly authentic, and it expressed with poetic intensity and narrative drama something very real and palpable about what this nation is and what became of it between 1945 and 1975 (endpoint of the main narrative) and 1997 (narrative present from which the main narrative is told).
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...
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Past is Prologue: The sad sixties revisited
I read the book and watched the movie. Both were exceptionally well done. American Pastoral is part of a trilogy by Philip Roth, in addition to American Pastoral, there is The Human Stain and I Married a Communist. Each book deals with the subject of the purity of an idea. The Human Stain deals with the phenomenon of political correctness taken to the nth degree, while I Married a Communist, is set in the fifties, in the bad old days of McCarthyism. And American Pastoral deals with the excesses of student radicals of the sixties. I will focus on American Pastoral. Set in Newark in the sixties and early seventies, American Pastoral contrasts the lives and ideals of Swede Levov, an honest businessman and glove manufacturer who pays his employees (most of whom were black) well and treats them with respect. Swede is married to Dawn, a former beauty queen, Miss Atlantic City, which doesn’t sit well with Merry, Swede’s beloved daughter. Merry has become a radical, through and through, and questions the lifestyle of her parents, judging them as superficial. Too many children came under the sway of student radicals and agitators. During the 1970s extremist groups like The Weather Underground and The Symbionese Liberation Army set off hundreds of bombs every year (Time) In Roth’s book, Merry is responsible for bombing a U.S. Post Office, which results in the death of an innocent man, and results in her running for cover in the smarmy world of the radical underground.After reading this and watching the film, I thought about all those misguided youth of my generation, I’m ashamed to say, who supported the North Vietnamese Army (the NVA) and elevated Ho Chi Minh to hero status. Meanwhile, one of the more interesting ways “Uncle Ho” dealt with his enemy was by burying them alive. In the 1940s, following WWII, communists infiltrated the left. They bought into Stalin’s bullshit, not realizing that he murdered twenty million people in “show trials” (read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon). The children of the nineteen-forty lefties were called “Red Diaper Babies.” Some of them grew up to become foot soldiers for the Weather Underground and other such groups. Interestingly, a murdering communist thug duped these Red Diaper Babies, just as their parents were in the previous generation.
Top reviews from other countries
Lucíola Nerilo
É adequado para o meu nível de inglês?
Reviewed in Brazil on February 7, 2020