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More copies of this ISBNThis title in other editionsAmerican Pastoralby Philip Roth
AwardsWinner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century's 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. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece. Review:"Dazzling...a wrenching, compassionate, intelligent novel...gorgeous." Boston Globe
Review:"At once expansive and painstakingly detailed....The pages of American Pastoral crackle with the electricity and zest of a first-rate mind at work." San Francisco Chronicle
Review:"One of Roth's most powerful novels ever...moving, generous and ambitious...a fiercely affecting work of art." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review:"[M]agnificent....This is Roth's most mature novel, powerful and universally resonant....The picture is chilling." Publishers Weekly
Review:"[E]legiac and affecting....[P]assion seethes through the novel's pages. Some of the best pure writing Roth has done." Kirkus Reviews
Review:"American Pastoral successfully shoulders its weighty public theme of American optimism undone by a propensity for the extreme. It also rounds up Roth's usual subjects — Jewish assimilation, bourgeois pretension and the shiksa's fatal allure....Roth's faithful, often piercing apprehension of the jagged emotional transactions between parent and child form this book's true achievement....Sadly though, this is another novel by a marquee author that suffers from intimidated or inactive editors. There are long sections of conversation...that just go on and on. Structurally, the book is poorly shaped. Roth doesn't circle back to the 90-page preamble featuring Zuckerman, the ending feels arbitrary and the gratifying if bracing payoff that American Pastoral vigorously promises throughout is denied. But, if you want a Philip Roth book that isn't just another bulletin from his life, this one is that and more." Albert Mobilio, Salon.com
Review:"Roth is a masterly prose stylist...and there are many passages of fine language....But these strengths are indulged in a way that becomes the book's weakness. The abstracted treatment of ideas, the weighty, morally serious exposition, result in a novel that holds its material at arm's length from the reader." Ralph Lombreglia, The Atlantic Monthly
Review:"Pastoral...is well crafted with vivid, crisp prose, but unlike [other Roth novels], it's empty....Once again, no one escapes the misery that personifies modern America." Ted Leventhal, Booklist
Review:"Roth doesn't tell the whole story blow by blow but gives us the essentials in luminous, overlapping bits. In the end, the book positively resonates with the anguish of a father who has utterly lost his daughter. Highly recommended." Library Journal
About the AuthorIn 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004.” Recently Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. Roth is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize.
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