Books › American Pastoral
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1998
American Pastoral
580 pages
A devastating autopsy of the American Dream that watches a golden life unravel against the chaotic backdrop of the 1960s.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like watching a slow-motion car crash in a sunlit, idyllic suburb. It is a dense, muscular, and relentlessly interrogative experience that pulls you into the golden nostalgia of post-war America before violently ripping the rug out from under you. The prose is sweeping and breathless, circling obsessively around the unknowability of the people we love most and the terrifying intrusion of history into private life. The mood shifts from warmly elegiac to dread-soaked and claustrophobic as the illusion of control shatters. It demands patience but rewards it with a devastating emotional payload. This is a book for readers who want to be challenged by brilliant, cynical literary fiction that leaves a lasting, bruised ache.
- Mood
- melancholic
- claustrophobic
- nostalgic
- dread-soaked
- Tone
- elegiac
- cynical
- probing
- tragic
- disillusioned
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- illusion of the American Dream · generational rupture · unknowability of others · collision of history and private life · parental grief
- The writing
- Dense, muscular, and relentlessly interrogative, characterized by sweeping, breathless sentences that dig obsessively into the characters' psyches.
- The arc
- Begins in a haze of golden nostalgia and slowly descends into a devastating, inescapable nightmare of shattered ideals.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave sweeping, psychologically complex literary fiction that wrestles with the dark underbelly of American history and identity.
Content notes
- domestic terrorism
- political violence
- parental grief
- mental illness
- marital infidelity
About the book
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel published in 1997 concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk".
American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Seven years later, the novel was included in Time's List of the 100 Best Novels, a list covering the period between 1923 and 2005. In 2006, it was one of the runners-up to Toni Morrison's Beloved, in the "What is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?" contest held by the New York Times Book Review.
Description from Open Library.
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