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.
Publisher: Vintage PublishingISBN: 9780099771814Number of pages: 432Weight: 298 gDimensions: 198 x 129 x 26 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Philip Roth's American Pastoral is one of those books you know is going to change you in some profound way shortly after you start reading it and it did for me. I read it last summer and nothing has quite surpassed it for me since. A very painful read.'- Angea Nagle,Irish Times
'Marvellous... Raging and elegiac.'- The Guardian
'A tragedy of classical proportions... a magnificent novel.'- The Times
'Utterly tragic and compelling. It's one of the greatest modern American novels.'- Tatler
'Wonderful,rich... entirely gripping.'- The Sunday Telegraph
Philip Roth
A giant of twentieth-century American literature,Philip Roth is best known for his acerbic,darkly comedic writing which tackles weighty ideas about American society,masculinity and Jewish identity. Both acclaimed and often controversial,his best-known works include Portnoy's Complaint,the Zuckerman Boundseries,American Pastoral,The Human Stain and the alternative history novel The Plot Against America.
Visit the Philip Roth author page
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