The American Dream, the Global Nightmare

There are books that move you, and there are those that slide off you without leaving anything; there are those that are beautiful, truly beautiful, that leave you with a smile. Some make you cry. There are those whose story you appreciate, of others you adore a character or the author. There are those you wish you had never read, and those you wish you could start over. Oscar Wilde said that there are those written well and those written badly, rather than moral or immoral.

And then there is Pastorale Americana. And this is a book that really gets inside you, touches your guts, contaminates your veins, one of those that once sedimented inside will never come out again, leaving you transformed. What is it about? About everything we can't understand. An ode and an accusation to America, to the family, to the human race, to the world. It talks about suffering and anger, but above all it talks about love, in the purest and most irrational, violent and absolute, deep and mean concept.

A great idea takes hold of him: his capacity to suffer no longer exists.

This book is a powerful exploration of the human condition, delving into the complex emotions and experiences that shape our lives. It challenges our preconceptions and forces us to confront the harsh realities of the world around us. Through its vivid characters and gripping narrative, Pastorale Americana offers a profound and thought-provoking commentary on the state of modern society. It is a book that will stay with you long after you have turned the last page, leaving you with a new perspective on life and love.

Philip Roth is a renowned American author, and this particular work is one of his most outstanding creations.

It is a three-generation novel that delves deep into the complex and ruptured relationship between a father and daughter during the 1960s in America.

The father firmly believed that he was living the idyllic postwar American dream. However, in reality, it was a time of great political and social upheaval due to the Vietnam War and rampant racial discrimination.

The youth of that era rebelled vehemently against the government and their parents. His only daughter was no exception. She even took responsibility for a terrorist bombing, ran away, and unfortunately, was manipulated by political groups.

Years later, the father finally saw the harsh truth about the chaos that lay beneath the seemingly peaceful American pastoral. But by then, his life had already been irrevocably destroyed by his daughter's actions and the tumultuous decades.

The novel is masterfully written, vividly depicting the ideological and social differences that characterized that era, making it a must-read for those interested in American history and literature.

At this point, it will be my turn to reconsider the five stars that have been attributed so far.

There is everything: the journey of a man, the history of the family and its individual members, and then History, the evolution of a nation and its culture: the dissolution of the American dream.

It has been one of the most enlightening rereadings ever done. There truly exists the right time for each book.

This work not only delves into the personal experiences and growth of a man but also weaves in the broader context of family history and the overarching narrative of a nation's development. The exploration of the American dream and its gradual disintegration adds a layer of depth and poignancy.

The rereading has brought new insights and perspectives, highlighting the significance of timing in understanding and appreciating a literary work. It makes one realize that a book can have different meanings and impacts depending on when it is read and the reader's own life experiences.

Overall, this has been a remarkable literary encounter that has left a lasting impression.

Third Reading

The book commences as an homage to a man, Nathan Zuckerman's childhood idol, Seymour Levov, the "Swede," due to his athletic feats in local sports. It also initially presents as an homage to the so-called "greatest generation." However, this opening is misleading. The closer we get to the Swede and his family, the more we uncover his tragic character flaws. Perhaps his most prevalent flaw is his lack of deep intellectual life. He is a nonthinker, functioning mainly by the numerous rules and prohibitions set by his elders, ill-equipped for a socially volatile future.

The Swede, a Jew with a "viking" appearance - blonde and fair-skinned, far from the Nazi Germany's Der Stürmer parodies - lives in a wartime stateside era filled with parental prohibitions yet also brimming with astonishing possibilities. He is his father's son. Despite having the talent to aim for the major leagues, he listens to his father and enters the glove trade.

American Pastoral is a ruminative novel. It contemplates aspects like the Swede's innocence and then reconsiders them multiple times based on new evidence or conclusions. We are deeply immersed in Nathan Zuckerman's thoughts, going over and over matters, so his obsessions become ours. After several readings, I finally realized Roth's model for the detailed glove manufacturing sequences was Moby Dick; or The Whale.

I found nothing superfluous in the story. Living twenty miles from Newark, New Jersey, and having worked near New York's garment district after its prime, and being alive during the late Civil Rights Era, though young, I can attest that Roth beautifully captures its essence. For me, on this third reading, the book truly gripped me only when the Swede's daughter Merry's independence kicks in and she starts traveling to New York City to stay with her Communist friends.

Then there's Rita Cohen's description, which Roth puts so aptly: "What was this whole sick enterprise other than angry, infantile egoism thinly disguised as identification with the oppressed." (This section reminds me of Nein Cheng's description of the Red Guards in her Life and Death in Shanghai.) There are so many beautifully written scenes. The Swede's reunion with Merry, who, five years later, has become a devout Jain, is truly captivating. American Pastoral is a spellbinding, astonishing novel, one of the essential books of life.

The Right to Leave

His daughter was a crazy assassin hiding on the floor of a room in Newark. His wife had a lover who pretended to catch her above the kitchen sink. His ex-lover had knowingly led his family to disaster, and he was trying to please his father by splitting hairs.

There is nothing wrong with being as weak as Seymour Levov, the Swede. Reason and passion teach him this. The story that Roth tells has a symbolic and extreme value. The words say more than their meaning, perhaps pushing into a territory beyond credibility, an area of prayer and otherness, where recognition and failure play ambiguous and changeable roles. So Levov has found many answers, and now time only poses questions, and they are lonely and unconscious, lacking imagination. They are like random instructions, like wild coercions: that bomb that explodes in the social body, without loss, behind everyone. And no one has the courage to defuse it. Roth speaks of a man defenseless and vulnerable to the fatality of history, to the betrayal of hope. His world, his value system, so young and vital, turns against him, vengefully, inclined in the denied pain and the contaminated blood, cruel for equity and innate logic. His conscience tries to understand the questions of the present and rotates around the axis of the real, transforming evil into good, chance into destiny, sense into compassion, nothing into conciliation, in order to be able to still look forward, to get out of an inanimate place, to find a human sign in the painful memory of the trauma. The trauma of Merry, the unhappy girl who cannot speak, cannot give voice to what she thinks, there is a fracture in her inner self, an expressive distortion: "the daughter who knocks him out of the much-desired American pastoral and projects him into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence and the despair of the counter-pastoral: into the innate blind rage of America". The tragedy remains hidden behind the visible normality of an existence designed for success. The rational father and the passionate daughter are opposed and indivisible figures, in a bitter, sad and enigmatic America, testimony of the crazy connection between before and after, between inside and outside, between material and ideal. We are so hypocritical and morally irresponsible that the nights pursue us with their lies. It becomes useless to give continuity to the old world of a ruined country, which is a glove of skin no longer wearable. New needs and commands are transmitted between generations adrift, incoherent individuals claim a central place on the scene. The grotesque and threatening outcome of action leads to an inconsistent and inescapable void. The voice of prudence is unprepared for the tragic courage, for the uncompromising decision, it disintegrates in an uncontested innocence. Seymour suffocates in guilt and the obsession of the error, the tyrant, the judge, the common opinion, the public square, the virtual complicity, the mask of the unrespectable, the utopia of peace. He tries to remain himself and cries instead in front of the portrait of a defeated myth, of an irreproachable example now in voluntary retirement from life, with the plurality of overlapping senses and the permanence of determining and impassive details, without a way out. That suffering that spares no one, that leads Merry to annihilation, to the loss of identity. No longer a daughter, no longer a woman, no longer a subject. "No one passes through life without being marked in some way by regret, pain, confusion and loss". Here, there is a dimension in which one can get used to nightmares and not be able to stop crying, and Roth tells us a way to dialogue with this stubborn and lacerating condition.

"The fact remains that, in any case, understanding people well is not living. Living is misunderstanding them, misunderstanding them badly and badly and then badly and, after a careful examination, still badly. This is how we know we are alive: by making mistakes. Perhaps the best thing would be to forget whether we are right or wrong about people and simply enjoy the trip. But if you can...Well, you're lucky."

This is by far the most self-indulgent and pointless book I have ever had the misfortune to read.

I could try to string together a series of poorly crafted run-on sentences in an attempt to describe this abysmal work, but that would simply be an imitation of Roth.

I truly wish that I could have those hours back that I wasted reading this book.

I also have a rather uncharitable wish that Roth's editor would somehow find their way to my apartment so that I could give them a good punch in the face.

The story is utterly pointless, and when coupled with the ridiculously self-indulgent and dense prose, as mentioned before, it has made this one of my least favorite books of all time.

It's a real disappointment, and I can't help but wonder what Roth was thinking when he wrote this.

Maybe he was just trying to be different, or maybe he thought that this kind of writing was somehow profound.

But in my opinion, it's just a big waste of time and paper.

I would not recommend this book to anyone, unless they have a masochistic tendency and enjoy reading bad literature.

American Life.....Philip Roth

Translation: The Harvester Nabeel.

This is a great novel, read at leisure, and you will find in it the variables of nations, and how the fate and life of a person change according to his society and circumstances, and how the family shares the fate, and each of them is different from the other.

The portrayal of relationships and their development and maturation in the novel is amazing, and the depth in it is presented easily and simply.

A beautiful novel about the American dream, and how America reached that power, and how many sacrifices and concessions were made, all of that through the lives of individuals with different temperaments and circumstances. Philip Roth succeeded in presenting them to us with his inherent talent.

Every time I read a Philip Roth novel, I am happy. His works are refined literary texts, beloved novels with the sincerity and concerns of a true writer. And every time I wish that all people would read him.

American Pastoral

Philip Roth's Pulitzer-Prize winning novel "American Pastoral" (1997) delves into the life of Seymour "Swede" Levov, revealing the tragedy hidden beneath his seemingly successful exterior.

The story is set in Newark, the New Jersey suburbs, and the rural town of Old Rimrock. It is told through the perspective of Roth's recurring character, Zuckerman.

Swede is the third generation of a family that has built a prosperous glove manufacturing business in Newark. He was an outstanding athlete in high school and enlisted in the marines, but WWII ended before he saw action. He then graduated from college, declined a baseball contract, and took over the factory from his father.

Swede's marriage to Dawn Dyer, a Catholic and former Miss New Jersey, was the only act of true independence in his life. They moved to Old Rimrock, where Dawn pursued her dream of becoming a cattle farmer. Their daughter, Merry, was difficult and became a radical during the Vietnam era.

Merry bombed a store in Old Rimrock, killing a local physician, and then fled to Oregon, where she committed more bombings and killed three people. When Swede finally found her, she was emaciated and had become a Jain.

The denouement of the book takes place during a tense dinner party hosted by Swede and Dawn. Roth offers a nostalgic portrayal of American life in the 1960s, while also highlighting the violence and disruption of the era.

The book shows the disintegration of American life through Swede's personal tragedies, but also offers a glimmer of hope for a return to the values of an earlier generation. "American Pastoral" is a disturbing, serious novel that grapples with important questions about the American dream.

Robin Friedman

After two previous failed attempts to read Pastoral Americana, I finally reached the end.

On the first few pages, with things ending in "bol" (basketball...football...baseball...), I already started to yawn, but I continued.

However, when the men with prostate problems and memories of school days arrived, I began to scratch my head, but I still persisted.

As soon as I entered the glove factory, the yawning and scratching stopped. I like gloves.

And then... I felt very stupid for thinking that Philip Roth only wrote about "men's things". No! He writes about America - a dream for some and a nightmare for others. He writes about terrorism, family relationships, and rebellious children.

Others also write about all these things. What impressed me was the character of the Swede - a handsome, rich, happily married man who always did everything correctly - with his heart broken by a daughter he adored and never understood.

In the end, there is an absolute truth: We can be beautiful, rich, intelligent, admired, loved; have the world at our feet. But if we lose our children, we have nothing, we are nothing.

At a certain point, the Swede's despair reminded me of Uma Canção Desnaturada by Chico Buarque, which I hadn't heard in years and, as always, it moved me: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CwOHLER...

Having just completed my reread of American Pastoral, I want to begin my updated review in an unusual way. I'll start with two quotes from authors who are not Philip Roth. The first quote is from Stuart Rojstaczer's The Mathematician's Shiva, a Novel: "Tornadoes are a good metaphor for how bad things happen in our lives. They build from small disturbances that usually don't mean a thing and almost always dissipate. But somehow one particular random event attracts others, and all of them together grow and attract more nasty stuff. Once it gets up to a critical size, the odds of it growing even larger are no longer remote." The second quote is from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable: "This multiplicative difficulty leading to the need for greater and greater precision in assumptions can be illustrated with the following simple exercise concerning the prediction of the movements of billiard balls on a table. I use the example as computed by the mathematician Michael Berry. If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to compute what would happen at the first hit. The second hit becomes more complicated, but possible; you need to be more careful about your knowledge of the initial states, and more precision is called for. The problem is that to correctly compute the ninth impact, you need to take into account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table.... And to compute the fifty-sixth impact, every single elementary particle of the universe needs to be present in your assumptions. An electron at the edge of the universe, separated from us by 10 billion light-years, must figure in your calculations, since it exerts a meaningful effect on the outcome."

I went with my husband to see the movie version of American Pastoral despite its bad reviews, as I thought he would never read it. The movie couldn't touch the interiority of this novel. Philip Roth spends so much time on what's inside the main character's head and what transpires between him and the others, with much of it often being in his head too. But even though the reviewers put the movie down, it took us back in time to the '60s. It was evocative for us. Next thing you know, we had gotten the paperback and downloaded the audio from the library and were reading it.

The name, American Pastoral, represents the illusion that this child of immigrants had about America - that it was a place where if you lived right and worked hard, you would reap what you sowed. America, the promised land. Then, during the late 1960s and early '70s, that illusion was shattered as cities burned, businesses and factories left, and youth rebelled - in this case, the protagonist's own daughter, in a big way. Tragedy as reality intrudes. As I was part of the baby-boom youth movement of that period, this book allowed me to reflect in a new way on what my parents' experience may have been. Also, I had read another book recently that equated the "America as promised land" phenomenon with the Protestant experience in America - that they were the "new Jews" who came over here to escape Pharaoh-like persecution and were going to "do it right" and reap their just rewards. That author (Peter Gomes, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus) thought 9/11 had this same sort of impact. Well, Roth's characters are not Protestants, and they beat the main rush as to loss of illusion.

What we talked about mostly while reading is why the central disaster at the heart of this book happened. Why did teenage rebellion in this case turn into a full-scale, multi-year explosion of violence? Why did the protagonist ("Swede"), who'd effortlessly done everything right, become unable to do anything right? In addition to his mounting external losses, his self-image is torn apart - shredded - by the most grating and despicable accusations imaginable, from both inside and out - the stuff of nightmares.

Was his brother, in addition to his zealous vindictiveness, right? Was what his beloved wife said, after she broke under the strain, right (a 180-degree turn from her prior stance though it was)? The accusations of Merry as a sixteen-year-old anti-war zealot? Or, oh, the surreal psychotic satirical hate spewing from the mouth of mystery girl Rita Cohen?

So, he, a Jew, married a Catholic. They lived neither in a Catholic nor Jewish neighborhood but inserted themselves into blue-blood WASP territory. He followed in his father's footsteps occupationally and loved it. His daughter stuttered. She could not emulate her mother's physical perfection. She was an only child.

Then there was the war, and the times they were a-changin'. The Swede was oh-so-reasonable! Couldn't he have stopped treating Merry like an equal with whom to reason and just set limits? That's what I was thinking. My children didn't turn out that way. For which I must be thankful! Sure, you're in control of what's happening - until you're not.

A revolution occurred between the generation of my parents - Swede's - and mine (Merry's). Approaches I took with my children "worked," partly because no such revolution separated us. A lot of what my parents' generation said to mine had become meaningless.

I think Swede Levov bought into the American dream, his appearance and athletic prowess facilitating the process. The war was over, the bad guys and their Nazi ideology overcome, and you could be what you wanted to be, marry whom you wanted to, live where you wanted, or so said all the voices you could hear. The thing you couldn't plan for, though, was what you couldn't hear, what couldn't be acknowledged. But it was still there, and not so far under the surface.

I think on top of everything else in all its various combinations and permutations, something that was not in the book gave Merry an extra dose of vulnerability: she was different from her peers. There was a dimension missing from her life that was present in theirs. Consequently, there were no major friendships to dilute everything else that was going on with her and her family. Gentility may have prevailed as far as active bullying or ugly comments, but it's not hard to imagine that there were barriers - and an unseen impact, for when it can't be talked about and you pick up on the vibes, you think it's you. What if she'd lived in a Catholic neighborhood and been raised as Catholic, or in a Jewish neighborhood and raised Jewish? Or at least in some less white-bread neighborhood?

Swede bought into the American dream, but it couldn't quite live up to how it was advertised, and somebody had to pay. Why do we always have to assign blame, anyway? Is it the Aristotelian influence that primes us to look for the fatal flaw? Yet none of us is ever going to show up perfect, and there's sheer blind luck and more factors than we can count. There isn't always someone to blame. There is tragedy.

1998 Pulitzer Prize
Time Magazines 100 best novels

I have read a significant number of books, and the majority of them are considered "classics". Generally speaking, as a whole, these are highly rated and highly regarded works. However, even within this context, there are occasions when a particular book stands out from the rest. This is precisely the case with this book for me.

It is challenging to convey the essence of this book to others, and it is even difficult for me to fully understand it myself. The reason for this is that it does not follow a linear narrative like most books. Instead, it has a non-linear structure, which I believe is what they refer to as such. Nevertheless, I can assert that this book makes a profound impression. It is impactful, thought-provoking, and yes, even depressing at times.

Roth, with the skill of a master surgeon, exposes the heart and soul of an American family. His writing and storytelling are truly at their best.

RIP Philip Roth. May 23, 2018.

Like the Faces of a Polyhedron
It started with difficulty. I carried it forward without conviction for about a hundred pages and then abandoned it. Those long sentences without pauses, those introspective discourses falling from above... they didn't allow me to "enter" the story. I read something else. I took it up again, with intermittent interest. I had to reach the fourth chapter to identify the turning point and "make it mine"; then even the longest periods began unconsciously to slide and, indeed, to give strength and spontaneity to the story. And then it was a continuous abduction, until the final question that leaves the reader grappling with their own conscience. And I participated and suffered with the Levov family from every angle: the life of a "perfect" family is decomposed, observed in detail and the reader finds themselves floundering in the "sludge" of their own life. The American dream, which runs through and animates the novel, is nothing but a polyhedral container; it is observed through every face and then dismantled; every family relationship, every social and religious aspect is laid bare, without discounts for anything or anyone. And every face is turned upside down, the entire surface reversed, until its interior is discovered, what was hidden in the dark, obscured by the masks of appearance and the good life: the comedy of behaviors that hides the many daily tragedies. (But what kind of mask do they all wear? I thought these people were on my side. While on my side there's only the mask, here it is!).

In the end, I tried to reread the first part, which had initially seemed so... distant to me. Some consider it a "frame". In reality, it is not taken up to a conclusion, it is not closed (the writer Nathan Zuckerman, whom Philip Roth seems to often resort to in his novels, remains confined in those first chapters); rather, it is a support, an introduction that seemed to me, however, a bit too heavy (perhaps with an entire second chapter too much) and that risked making the entire content collapse. But this is only my poor opinion.