Philip Roth: American Pastoral (2010, Penguin Random House)
432 pages
English language
Published Dec. 26, 2010 by Penguin Random House.
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.
Also contained in: American Trilogy 1997-2000
Forgot I hadn’t reviewed this one on here. Read about 11 years ago. It stuck with me. The movie isn’t terrible, but it works best as a novel. Few books deal with the questions raised by this novel.
