American Pastoral

In American Pastoral, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Seymour 'Swede' Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. 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 longed-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.A wide-ranging and characteristically perceptive novel from Philip Roth, which explores the notion of the American dream from a variety of perspectives. Set mainly in the turbulence and conflict of the 1960s, it sets the middle-class aspirations of a father against the revolutionary tendencies of his daughter, elucidating the contradictions and transitions which beset America as a country during that period of history. "His second masterpiece in two years...a momentous novel" "Observer".