A feast of intelligence, empathy, sociological accuracy and inventive writing.
The first of Philip Roth’s superb American Trilogy, Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral is a feast of intelligence, empathy, sociological accuracy and inventive writing. It’s also surprisingly engaging — surprising in that not much happens and what does is told with an eye more toward psychological truth than dramatic twists. But the characters are so wonderfully well-developed that their struggles become yours, to a degree that is as engrossing as it is thought-provoking.

The book tells the story of Seymour “The Swede” Levov, a good-looking blond athlete and all-around golden boy who grew up Jewish in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1930s and '40s. He takes over his father’s successful glove-making business, marries a beautiful gentile and moves to an affluent suburb. It’s a charmed life until 1968, when his increasingly radical 16-year-old daughter Merry blows up a post office in an act of nihilistic protest only partially attributable to the Vietnam War. A man is killed in the explosion, and Merry goes into hiding.

But American Pastoral is not an action story of domestic terrorists on the lam; it is a philosophical and psychological one, depicting the Swede’s long, slow struggle to account for and acclimate to what has happened. It is also an exquisite rendering of the social backdrop for the Swede’s attainment and subsequent loss of the American dream, one in which the Swede’s fundamental decency and optimism are pummeled by the social upheaval of the ’60s — from the devastating Newark race riots to suburban white kids’ countercultural disaffection.