American Pastoral

American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997). As the close of the 20^th century, the American century, Roth delivered an elegy for all of its promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him. For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longer-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. And there he seeks the help of Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, to help him make sense of it all.

Total Points: 12 (JGil 4) (MM 8)