Wednesday, October 05, 2005
American Pastoral
I've only read one other book by Philip Roth, Operation Shylock, which recounts a weird metafictional trip to Israel, and which I really enjoyed (up until an inconclusive ending). American Pastoral is generally acclaimed as one of Roth's recent masterpieces and it won him the Pulitzer. I've wanted to read it for a while.
Well, I was disappointed. The man writes very well, but frankly this book is overlong and didactic. It lacks much of the provocative humor, the grotesquerie and absurdity that Roth is known for. It tells us about Seymour "Swede" Levov, a Jewsih business man from New Jersey who comes up from humble beginnings, moves to the suburbs, marries a shiksa and pursues the American dream. His life falls apart in the late 60s when his daughter gets caught up in a violent branch of the antiwar movement. Basically, Roth wants to compress the whole post-WWII history of America into the life of one man, one ordinary seemingly bland man -- dealing with topics like ethnic assimilation, the decline of the inner city, the loss of manufacturing jobs, the debate between liberalism and radicalism on the left. It's all very potent stuff but the problem is that much of it is outlined for the reader in long internal monologues that highlight for the reader exactly what the sociological significance of this or that character or incident is. Starting with the title, the whole book is so weighted down by its status as an elegy for America that there is little room left for idosyncracy or sponataneous life. It's a worthy book but it seems more like a short story puffed up to the length of a novel with needlessly repetitive commentary.
One more thing: has anyone ever written about how conservative Philip Roth is? This was true of Operation Shylock, too, in which he dealt with the dilemma of a Jew who understands that Israel's behavior towards the Palestinians is problematic but feels that his identity as a Jew must lead him to support them. In both books, Roth flirts with radical ideas but puts them in the mouths of characters so comically extreme that his common-sense narrators must reject them. While both books feature a lot of debate about weighty political issues, to the extent that they advance any political philosophy it is pretty nostalgic, backward looking and supportive of the status quo.
Well, I was disappointed. The man writes very well, but frankly this book is overlong and didactic. It lacks much of the provocative humor, the grotesquerie and absurdity that Roth is known for. It tells us about Seymour "Swede" Levov, a Jewsih business man from New Jersey who comes up from humble beginnings, moves to the suburbs, marries a shiksa and pursues the American dream. His life falls apart in the late 60s when his daughter gets caught up in a violent branch of the antiwar movement. Basically, Roth wants to compress the whole post-WWII history of America into the life of one man, one ordinary seemingly bland man -- dealing with topics like ethnic assimilation, the decline of the inner city, the loss of manufacturing jobs, the debate between liberalism and radicalism on the left. It's all very potent stuff but the problem is that much of it is outlined for the reader in long internal monologues that highlight for the reader exactly what the sociological significance of this or that character or incident is. Starting with the title, the whole book is so weighted down by its status as an elegy for America that there is little room left for idosyncracy or sponataneous life. It's a worthy book but it seems more like a short story puffed up to the length of a novel with needlessly repetitive commentary.
One more thing: has anyone ever written about how conservative Philip Roth is? This was true of Operation Shylock, too, in which he dealt with the dilemma of a Jew who understands that Israel's behavior towards the Palestinians is problematic but feels that his identity as a Jew must lead him to support them. In both books, Roth flirts with radical ideas but puts them in the mouths of characters so comically extreme that his common-sense narrators must reject them. While both books feature a lot of debate about weighty political issues, to the extent that they advance any political philosophy it is pretty nostalgic, backward looking and supportive of the status quo.
# posted by Brian @ 5:30 AM 
