American Pastoral is about how even the best of us are powerless against the depredations of changing times and wanton people. Roth’s protagonist is the Swede, a hometown hero, successful businessman and - perhaps Roth tries a little too hard on this last bit – a very nice guy and quite the sympathetic character. Alas / of course, like any obedient sacrificial lamb or Christ-like figure, the Swede is brought to misery, here by a murdering daughter and faithless wife. The novel covers a lot of ground (in a manner I actually found confusing) and a subject often-returned to is Newark, NJ, the hometown of the Swede’s family and Roth himself. Much-bemoaned (primarily by the Swede’s salty old father) is the city’s passing through old and new and the incumbent entropic scars left behind. In short, right has become wrong and we see this throughout the novel as the Swede’s perfect life crumbles; starting with a cute daughter’s careless, brutal transformation into a hate-spewing bomber. The degree to which the Swede is at fault for his downfall is open to debate. He is a stalwart man and does no wrong, only seeking a sublime, peaceful life – the “American Pastoral.” But perhaps his idealism itself is his sin. There are no heavens or utopias: life is brutish and short as the saying goes, and survivors are seldom those who do no wrong. The novel is challenging and not just because it is depressing. Roth’s language can skew overwrought, and your Middle School English teacher would have a heart attack over all the run-ons. Consider: “Figuring that Orcutt ought to know what was happening to Jessie and needing time to collect himself, feeling suddenly the full weight of the situation he was so strenuously working to obliterate from his thinking at least until the guests went home—the situation he was in as the father of a daughter who had killed not just one person more or less accidentally but, in the name of truth and justice, three more people quite indifferently, a daughter who, having repudiated everything she had ever learned from him and her mother, had now gone on to disown virtually the whole of civilized existence, beginning with cleanliness and ending with reason—the Swede left his father temporarily to tend alone to Jessie and went around, by way of the back of the house, to the rear kitchen door to get Orcutt.” Great language, not pithy. A difficult read and only recommended to those who made it through the above.
