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AMERICAN PASTORAL

by Philip Roth ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 1997

Roth's elegiac and affecting new novel, his 18th, displays a striking reversal of form—and content—from his most recent critical success, the Portnoyan Sabbath's Theater (1995). Its narrator, however, is a familiar Rothian figure: writer Nathan Zuckerman (of The Ghost Writer , et al.)—and in case you're wondering whether he still seems to be his author's alter ego, Nathan is now in his early 60s, recovering from both cancer surgery and a longtime affair with an English actress. Essentially retired, Nathan is approached by a high-school classmate's older brother—and the well-remembered hero of his youth: Seymour "Swede" Levov, once a blue-eyed athletic and moral paragon who strode through life with ridiculous ease, now nearing 70 and crushed by outrageous misfortunes. Swede asks his help writing a tribute to his late father, and soon thereafter dies himself. Piqued by the enigma of a seemingly perfect life (superb health, a successful family business, marriage to a former beauty queen) inexplicably gone wrong, Zuckerman "dream[s] a realistic chronicle" that reconstructs Swede's life—compounded of information gleaned from others who knew him, and centering in the 1960s when Swede's life began to unravel. His only daughter Meredith ("Merry") had rebelled against her parents' and her culture's complacency, protested against the war in Vietnam, claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing in which innocent people were killed, and gone "underground" as a fugitive. Most of the scenes Zuckerman/Roth imagines, therefore, are intensely emotional conversations in which the conflicting claims of social solidarity and individual integrity are debated with pained immediacy. Here, and in more conventionally expository authorial passages, meditativeness and discursiveness predominate over drama. Nevertheless, passion seethes through the novel's pages. Some of the best pure writing Roth has done. And Swede Levov's anguished cry "What the hell is wrong with doing things right?" may be remembered as one of the classic utterances in American fiction.

Pub Date: May 12, 1997

ISBN: 0-395-86021-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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by Sally Rooney

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American Pastoral

November 19, 2009 issue

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Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field

Published in 1935 in the middle of the Depression, William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral casts a hard modern light on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems about shepherds and shepherdesses with classical names like Corydon and Phyllida. Pastoral, Empson wrote, was a “puzzling form” and a “queer business” in which highly educated and well-heeled poets from the city idealized the lives of the poorest people in the land. It implied “a beautiful relation between the rich and poor” by making “simple people express strong feelings…in learned and fashionable language.” From 1935 onward, no one would read Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar or follow Shakespeare’s complicated double plots without being aware of the class tensions and ambiguities between the cultivated author and his low-born subjects.

Library of Congress

‘Migrant Mother,’ Nipomo, California, 1936; photographs by Dorothea Lange. Her original caption for this photograph was ‘Destitute peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936.’

Although shepherds and shepherdesses have been in short supply in the United States, versions of pastoral have flourished here. The cult of the Noble Red Man, or, as Mark Twain derisively labeled it, “The Fenimore Cooper Indian” (a type given to long speeches in mellifluous and extravagantly figurative English), is an obvious example. So is the heroizing of simple cowboys, farmers, and miners in the western stories of writers like Bret Harte, the movies of John Ford, and the art of Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Maynard Dixon, and Thomas Hart Benton. Both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath might be read as pastorals in Empson’s sense. The chief loci of American pastoral have been the rural South and the Far West, while most of its practitioners have been sophisticated easterners for whom the South and West were destinations for bouts of adventurous travel. They went equipped with sketchpads and notebooks in which to record the picturesque manners and customs of their rustic, unlettered fellow countrymen.

Empson noted the connection between traditional pastoral and Soviet propaganda, with its elevation of the worker to a “mythical cult-figure,” and something similar was going on during the New Deal when the Resettlement Administration (which later morphed into the Farm Security Administration) dispatched such figures from Manhattan’s Upper Bohemia as Walker Evans and Marion Post to photograph rural poverty in the southern states. Like a Tudor court poet contemplating a shepherd, the owner of the camera was rich beyond the dreams of the people in the viewfinder, whose images were used by the government both to justify its Keynesian economic policy and to raise private funds for the relief of dispossessed flood victims, sharecroppers, and migrant farm workers. Some, though not all, of the photographers were, like Evans, conscious artists; their federal patrons, like Roy Stryker, head of the information division of the FSA, were unabashed propagandists who judged each picture by its immediate affective power and took a severely practical approach to human tragedy.

Of all the many thousands of photographs that came out of this government-sponsored enterprise, none was more instantly affecting or has remained more famous than Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother . Taken in February 1936 at a pea pickers’ camp near Nipomo, seventy miles northwest of Santa Barbara, it was published in the San Francisco News the following month, when it resulted in $200,000 in donations from appalled readers. In 1998, it became a 32¢ stamp in the Celebrate the Century series, with the caption “America Survives the Depression.” For a long while now, I’ve tried to observe a self-imposed veto on the overworked words “icon” and “iconic,” but in the exceptional case of Migrant Mother it’s sorely tempting to lift it.

The picture defines the form of pastoral as Empson meant it, and the closer one studies it, the more one’s made aware of just what a queer and puzzling business it is. A woman from the abyssal depths of the lower classes is plucked from obscurity by a female artist from the upper classes and endowed by her with extraordinary nobility and eloquence. It’s not the woman’s plight one sees at first so much as her arresting handsomeness: her prominent, rather patrician nose; her full lips, firmly set; the long and slender fingers of her right hand; the enigmatic depth of feeling in her eyes.

Even after many viewings, it takes several moments for the rest of the picture to sink in: the pervasive dirt, the clothing gone to shreds and holes, the seams and furrows of worry on the woman’s face and forehead, the skin eruptions around her lips and chin, the swaddled, filthy baby on her lap. As one can see from the other five pictures in the six-shot series, Lange posed two elder children, making them avert their faces from the camera and bury them in the shadows behind their mother, at once focusing our undistracted attention on her face and imprisoning her in her own maternity. It’s a portrait in which squalor and dignity are in fierce contention, but both one’s first and last impressions are of the woman’s resilience, pride, and damaged beauty.

Against all odds, she’s less a figure of pathos than of survival, as the inscription on the postage stamp accurately described her. In 1960, Lange said of the woman that she “seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it”—a nice instance of Empson’s “beautiful relation between the rich and poor”—which was not at all how her subject remembered the occasion.

In 1958 the hitherto nameless woman surfaced as Florence Thompson, author of an angry letter, written in amateur legalese, to the magazine U.S. Camera , which had recently republished Migrant Mother :

…It was called to My attention…request you Recall all the un-Sold Magazines…should the picture appear in Any magazine again I and my Three Daughters shall be Forced to Protect our rights…Remove the magazine from Circulation Without Due Permission…

Years later, Thompson’s grandson, Roger Sprague, who maintains a Web site called migrantgrandson.com, described what he believed to be her version of the encounter with Lange:

Then a shiny new car (it was only two years old) pulled into the entrance, stopped some twenty yards in front of Florence and a well-dressed woman got out with a large camera. She started taking Florence’s picture. With each picture the woman would step closer. Florence thought to herself, “Pay no mind. The woman thinks I’m quaint, and wants to take my picture.” The woman took the last picture not four feet away then spoke to Florence: “Hello, I’m Dorothea Lange, I work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the plight of the migrant worker. The photos will never be published, I promise.”

Some of these details ring false, and Sprague has his own interest in promoting a counternarrative, but the essence of the passage, with its insistence on the gulf of class and wealth between photographer and subject, sounds broadly right. “The woman thinks I’m quaint” might be the resentful observation of every goatherd, shepherd, and leech-gatherer faced with a well-heeled poet or documentarian on his or her turf.

It also emerged that Florence Thompson was not just a representative “Okie,” as Lange had thought, but a Cherokee Indian, born on an Oklahoma reservation. So, in retrospect, Migrant Mother can be read as intertwining two “mythical cult-figures”: that of the refugee sharecropper from the Dust Bowl (though Thompson had originally come to California with her first husband, a millworker, in 1924) and that of the Noble Red Man. There is a strikingly visible connection, however unnoticed by Lange, between her picture of Florence Thompson and Edward S. Curtis’s elaborately staged sepia portraits of dignified Native American women in tribal regalia in his extensive collection The North American Indian (1900–1930), perhaps the single most ambitious—and contentious—work of American pastoral ever created by a visual artist.

Gordonton, Person County, North Carolina, July 9, 1939. Lange wrote in her caption for this photograph, ‘Country store on dirt road. Sunday afternoon…. Note the kerosene pump on the right and gasoline pump on the left. Brother of store owner stands in doorway.’

Both Linda Gordon’s Dorothea Lange and Anne Whiston Spirn’s Daring to Look hew to the line that Lange suddenly became a documentary photographer in 1932, when she stepped out of her portrait studio at 540 Sutter Street in San Francisco’s fashionable Union Square and took her Rolleiflex out onto the streets of the Mission District, three miles away, where she began to photograph men on the ever-lengthening breadlines in the last year of Hoover’s presidency. But this is to underplay the importance of the pictures she took from 1920 onward when she accompanied her first husband, Maynard Dixon, on his months-long painting trips to Arizona and New Mexico.

Lange was twenty-four when they married in March 1920, Dixon twenty years older. She was still a relative newcomer to San Francisco, having arrived there from New York in 1918; marrying Dixon, she also embraced his nostalgic and curmudgeonly vision of the Old West. A born westerner, from Fresno, California, he stubbornly portrayed the region as it had been before it was “ruined” by railroads, highways, cities, Hollywood, and tourism. In his paintings, the horse was still the primary means of power and transportation in a land of sunbleached rock and sand, enormous skies, cholla, and saguaro cacti, with adobe as its only architecture and Indians and cowboys its only rightful inhabitants. Although Lange had already established herself as an up-and-coming portrait photographer in San Francisco, her pictures on these trips to the desert were so faithful to her husband’s vision of the West that one might easily mistake many of them for Maynard Dixon paintings in black-and-white.

So she caught a group of Indian horsemen, seen from behind, riding close together across a sweep of empty tableland; a line of Hopi women and a boy, clad in traditional blankets, climbing a rough-hewn staircase trail through the pale rock of the mesa; a man teaching his son how to shoot a bow and arrow; families outside their adobe huts; and somber, unsmiling portraits of Indians whose faces show the same weary resignation to their fate as the faces that Lange would later photograph on the breadlines and in migrant labor camps. It was among the Hopi and the Navajo that she picked up the basic grammar of documentary, with its romantic alliance between the artist and the wretched of the earth.

One photograph stands out from her travels in the Southwest: a radically cropped print of the face of a Hopi man, in which much darkroom cookery clearly went into achieving Lange’s desired effect. At first sight, it looks like a grotesque ebony mask, its features splashed with silver as if by moonlight. Its skin is deeply creased, its eyes inscrutable black sockets. In its sculptural immobility, it appears as likely to be the face of a corpse as of a living being.

Seeing the finished picture, no one would guess the raw material from which Lange made the image as she focused her enlarger in the dark. There’s an uncropped photo of the same man, obviously shot within a minute or two of this one, to be seen in the Oakland Museum of California’s vast online archive of Lange’s work, in which he’s wearing a striped shirt and a bead necklace strung with Christian crosses, and has his hair tied with a knotted scarf around his forehead. His face looks humorous and easygoing; he seems amused to be having his picture taken.

This is not the negative that Lange used for her print, but it’s so close as to be very nearly identical. For the mask-like portrait, she moved her camera a few inches to her right, so that the razor-edged triangular shadow of the man’s nose exactly meets the cleft of his upper lip, and lowered it to make him loom above the viewer. What is remarkable is how she transformed the merry fellow in high sunshine into the unsettling and deathly face of the print. It might be titled The Last of His Race , or, as Edward S. Curtis called one of his best-known photographs, The Vanishing Race . There is, alas, no record of what the subject thought of his metamorphosis into a gaunt symbol of extinction.

Linda Gordon’s substantial, cradle-to-grave biography of Lange is usefully complemented by Anne Whiston Spirn’s careful documentation of one year—1939—in Lange’s working life. Both books have their flaws, but between them they add up to a satisfyingly binocular portrait of the photographer as she traveled the ambiguous and shifting frontier between art, journalism, social science, and propaganda. Lange’s work is much harder to place than that of, say, Walker Evans, and so is her personality. If neither Gordon nor Spirn quite succeeds in bringing her to life on the page, they do convey her complex and mercurial elusiveness. Roy Stryker of the FSA, who worked closely with Lange from 1935 through 1939, repeatedly sacking then rehiring her, vastly admired her photographs but found her maddening to deal with, and readers of Gordon and Spirn are likely to find themselves similarly conflicted.

Gordon, a social historian at NYU, whose faculty bio says that she specializes in “gender and family issues,” is best at placing her subject within the context of the various milieus in which she moved. She is good on the artistic and photographic scene in New York in the Teens of the last century, where the young Lange discovered Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz, and the luminaries of the Pleiades Club, and excellent on the rowdier bohemian coterie that she joined in San Francisco in the Twenties, where she met Dixon (in his customary urban uniform of Stetson and spurred cowboy boots), Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. Gordon is reliably lucid on the aesthetic and political movements of the time, though Lange herself too often remains more cipher than character in an otherwise vivid picture of her place and period.

It’s in the gender and family issues department, her academic specialty, that Gordon is simultaneously confident and not entirely persuasive. Much is made of Lange’s childhood polio, which left her with a crippled right foot and permanent limp. Gordon calls her “a polio”—a grating phrase, which, according to Google, is rare but not without precedent. Further hurt was inflicted on Lange when her father moved out of the Hoboken house when she was twelve; and in writing of her as a wife and mother, prone to “hubris,” “irascibility,” “rages,” and “obsessive control,” Gordon portrays her as a damaged woman.

Lange acquired a stepdaughter, Consie, when she married Dixon, with whom she had two children of her own, Dan and John. In her second marriage, to the Berkeley economist Paul Taylor, she added three more stepchildren to her brood, in an age when women were expected to do all the work of parenting. Like so many people of their class and generation, the Dixons and the Taylors were in the habit of boarding out their kids whenever they threatened to interfere with their demanding work schedules. Not surprisingly, the children came to remember Lange as a domestic tyrant who neglected their needs and scarred them for life.

Autres temps, autres moeurs . Artists and writers were especially culpable in this regard, taking the line that their unique talents entitled them to days of concentrated silence and bibulous, grown-up, social evenings, undistracted by the barbaric yawps of the nursery. (Chief among Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise was “the pram in the hall.”) Lange’s treatment of the children in her life was not egregiously different from that of others in her set in San Francisco and Taos, and Gordon’s nagging concern over her deficiencies as a parent tends to unbalance her book.

Although Gordon speculates freely about Lange’s thoughts and feelings, and surrounds her with an impressive mass of contingent details, one waits in vain to catch the pitch of her voice in conversation, her wit (did she have wit?), her personal demeanor and manners when at ease among friends. She emerges from the book more as a stack of interesting attributes than as a fully realized character in her own right.

Napa Valley, California, December 1938. Lange’s caption: ‘More than 25 years as a bindlestiff. Walks from the mines to the lumber camps to the farms. The type that formed the backbone of the IWW in California, before the war.Subject of Carleton Parker’s s

Where Gordon’s Dorothea Lange and Spirn’s Daring to Look coincide to happiest effect is on Lange’s marriage to Paul Schuster Taylor and her on-again-off-again work for Stryker at the FSA. Taylor, described by Gordon as “a stiff and slightly ponderous suit-and-tie professor” (she’s often sharper on her secondary characters than she is on her primary one), met Lange in 1934, shortly after her separation from Maynard Dixon, at an exhibition of her pictures of the San Francisco poor at a gallery in Oakland. Later that year, he hired her, at a typist’s salary, as the official photographer for the California Division of Rural Rehabilitation, of which he’d just been appointed field director. From January 1935, they were traveling together across California, visiting enormous, featureless agribusiness farms, worked by mostly Mexican migrant laborers. Taylor, who’d learned Spanish for the purpose, conducted interviews while she took photos. She took to calling him Pablo, he called her mi chaparrito (“my little shorty”). They were married in December.

Much as she’d learned to see the uncultivated West through Maynard Dixon’s eyes, and to frame her pictures like Dixon paintings, in Taylor’s company she acquired the mental habits of a painstaking social anthropologist. Taylor taught economics at Berkeley, but his avidity for human data took him far outside the usual confines of his discipline and into the “field,” where he transcribed the life stories of migrants. Lange copied him. A shy man, Taylor would introduce himself to groups of Mexicans by saying that he was lost and needed directions, a technique quickly adopted as her own by Lange. Soon after they’d met, she began to accompany her photographs with what she called “captions”—crisply detailed accounts, some running to essay length, of the circumstances that had led each subject to his or her present situation.

For Stryker at the FSA, the picture was the thing, and he spiked all, or nearly all, of her writing; in Daring to Look , Spirn reunites Lange’s 1939 photos with their original texts in a long-overdue act of restoration. The captions are rich in themselves, full of the dollars and cents of anguished household accounting, stories of escape from starved-out Dustbowl farms in rattletrap Fords, and snatches of talk, for which Lange had a fine ear; as a North Carolina woman told her, “All the white folks think a heap of me. Mr. Blank wouldn’t think about killing hogs unless I was there to help. You ought to see me killing hogs at Mr. Blank’s!” She was a patient listener, and relentlessly inquisitive. Photographing tobacco farmers, for instance, she became expert on how the plant was cultivated, harvested, cured, and sold, and her captions describe with great precision what was meant by such terms as “topping,” “worming,” “sliding,” “priming,” “saving,” “putting in,” “yellowing,” “killing out.”

Gathering this sort of information from her subjects changed the way she photographed them. Before 1935 and her collaboration with Taylor, she was a fly-on-the-wall observer in her pictures of Native Americans and the unemployed. After 1935, her photographs reflect an increasingly intimate relationship between the woman behind the camera and the person in front of it. One sees a new candor and engagement in her subjects’ faces, as if each shutter-click has momentarily interrupted an absorbing conversation. In this respect, Migrant Mother is quite atypical of Lange’s FSA work: she spent only a few minutes with Florence Thompson, and her caption is unusually brief (according to Thompson’s grandson, it was also riddled with errors of fact).

The deepening involvement in her subjects’ lives seems all the more impressive when one follows the hectic itinerary of her own life in Daring to Look . Between January and October 1939 she traveled far and wide through the states of California, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, spending weeks at a time in her car, documenting the trudging “bindlestiffs” and homeless families on Highway 99, the labor camps and mile-wide fields of factory farms in the California valleys, tobacco in North Carolina, “stump farms” on logged-over forest in the Pacific Northwest, the newly irrigated orchards and farms of the Columbia basin. Wherever she went, she attached individual faces and stories to the desolate social geography of American agriculture from coast to coast. Spirn’s book is redolent of the hot and dusty unpaved roads on which Lange drove by day, and of inadequately lit rooms in cheap motels, where she wrote up her captions in the evenings.

Bad as her relations with Stryker were, she made her best pictures for the FSA. The current of indignant political feeling that flows through her work was in tune with the agency’s propagandist mission, and—more than Evans, Ben Shahn, Marion Post, and other FSA photographers—Lange had an increasingly deep knowledge and understanding of what she was seeing, as a result both of her own searching interviews with her subjects and of her husband’s work on the inequities of the agricultural economy. * Time and again, she struck a perfect balance between photographing a mass plight and honoring the dignity of each singular life—a balance she never quite recaptured again. Her 1942–1943 series on Japanese internment, for instance, has ample indignation, but lacks the active and visible rapport that she made with the farmworkers.

In 1954, Lange snagged a commission from Life magazine to do a photo-essay on Ireland, and around 2,500 negatives survive from this trip, which she made with her son Dan, then twenty-nine and an aspiring writer. Daniel Dixon was assigned the job of interviewing subjects and composing captions, leaving her free to concentrate entirely on photography. The results of this unwise division of labor are revealing.

Oakland Museum of California

County Clare, Ireland, 1954; photograph by Dorothea Lange

In County Clare, Lange was an enchanted tourist. After the barbed wire and vast flat landscapes of Californian agribusiness, she reveled in the small, irregular, hillocky Irish fields, their rainwashed drystone walls and ancient hedges. Instead of improvised shack-towns and government-built camps, she focused on stone bothies overhung with thatch and streets of single-storey terraced cottages with rickety horse-drawn traps parked at their doors. She stopped to take shots of ruined churches; placid, grazing cows; horses and haywains; old men with scythes; shepherds tending their flocks in the fields and driving them down narrow lanes. In Lange’s Ireland, almost everybody’s smiling, and her photographs form an archive of 1950s toothless, gap-toothed, and prosthetic Irish grins. Yet there’s little hint of two-way rapport in the faces of these people, who appear to be saying “Cheese” to deferentially oblige the lady-visitor from America, as she roamed the countryside picturing its happy peasantry.

She hardly seemed to notice that the clothes of her Irish subjects were as tattered and patched as those of the poorest Okies. If she questioned why the farms and fields were so small, or why there were so many horses and so few machines, it doesn’t show in her photographs. She was here to discover Arcadia—a land of simple folk, content with their lot, going about their time-hallowed rustic occupations, equipped with the same rudimentary technology that had served them for centuries. In Ireland, Lange reverted to pastoral in its most naive and sentimental form. It’s tantalizing to wonder how she would have handled this assignment had the commission come from a social activist like Stryker instead of Henry Luce’s Life . Her photos were in perfect harmony with the conservative politics of the magazine: they extol the tranquillity of a society under the law of Nature, and of God.

The magazine savagely cut Lange’s essay, rejected Daniel Dixon’s captions, and supplied its own, including “serenely they live in age old patterns” and “THE QUIET LIFE RICH IN FAITH AND A BIT OF FUN.”

In the last chapter of Daring to Look , Anne Whiston Spirn drives along the routes taken by Lange in 1939. By 2005 the roads were generally improved but the housing and social conditions of agricultural workers on industrial farms were little changed, and Spirn found new rural slums on the sites of the old New Deal labor camps. A caption written by Lange in 1939 still holds broadly true:

The richer the district in agricultural production, the more it has drawn the distressed who build its shacktowns. From the Salt River valley of Arizona to the Yakima valley of Washington, the richest valleys are dotted with the biggest slums.

This is painfully evident in Washington state, where I live. Were Lange to return here with her camera seventy years on, it would not be a Rip Van Winkle experience so much as a numbing sense of déjà vu. The cities and suburbs would be unrecognizable to her, but the poverty in the countryside created by the corporate agricultural system would yield material for photographs identical to those she took in 1939. There are small, Spanish-speaking farm towns on the Columbia plateau where the average per capita income is still in the middling four figures.

In summer, migrant fruit pickers pile into the Columbia and Yakima valleys, living in camps little different, and hardly more affluent, than the one where Lange found Florence Thompson. And inventive new ways of being poor continue to emerge. In Forks, at the foot of the Olympic National Park, there are run-down trailer parks on the edges of the town, inhabited by “brushpickers,” mostly Guatemalan, who make a tenuous living by scavenging in the woods for the moss, ferns, beargrass, and salal used by florists around the world to add greenery to bouquets.

Migrant Mother has become the symbol of a now-remote decade, to which the passage of years has lent a period glow. Yet across the rural West the Great Depression is less a historical event than a permanent condition, which existed before the 1930s and is still there now, though it shifts from place to place and fluctuates in its severity. The warning in the rearview mirror applies here: the lives in Lange’s photographs for the FSA are closer than they may appear.

November 19, 2009

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Jonathan Raban's books include Surveillance , My Holy War , Arabia , Old Glory , Hunting Mister Heartbreak , Bad Land , Passage to Juneau , and Waxwings . His most recent book is Driving Home: An American Journey , published in 2011. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and the Governor's Award of the State of Washington. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books , The Guardian, and The Independent . He lives in Seattle.

Taylor and Lange merged their talents in An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion , published in 1939. The couple assembled her photographs, his text, and their captions, working together, as they wrote, “in every aspect of the form as a whole to the least detail of arrangement or phrase.” ↩

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Reviews of American Pastoral by Philip Roth

American Pastoral

by Philip Roth

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Literary Fiction
Mid-Atlantic, USA
1960s & '70s
Mid-Life Onwards
Jewish Authors

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A magnificent meditation on a pivotal decade in our nation's history, is in every way different from the profane and sclerotic antihero of Sabbath's Theater.

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 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. Winner - Pulitzer Prize.

The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city's old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete. The name was magical; so was the anomalous face. Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov. The Swede starred as end in football, center in basketball, and first baseman in baseball. Only the basketball team was ever any good - twice winning the city championship while he was its leading scorer - but as long as the Swede excelled, the fate of our sports teams didn't matter much to a student body whose elders, largely undereducated and overburdened, venerated academic ...

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April 20, 1997 The Trouble With Swede Levov By MICHAEL WOOD Philip Roth's new hero gets everything he dreamed of More on Philip Roth from The New York Times Archives American Pastoral By Philip Roth. 423 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $26. ho would have thought Nathan Zuckerman would fall in love with normality, with the all-American life? With the old idea of the melting pot as order and progress, a pacified history in which resentment and misunderstanding fade away across the generations? With Thanksgiving as a form of ethnic truce, where the Jews and the Irish hang out together as if no one had ever crucified anyone? This is, after all, the garrulous, manic hero of five Philip Roth novels, and the subtle fictional critic of Mr. Roth's autobiography, ''The Facts.'' His alter id, as you might say, the man whose business is to get out of control and give offense. ''I am your permission,'' Zuckerman tells Mr. Roth in that book, reproving him for lapsing into the tame decencies of the uninvented life, ''your indiscretion, the key to disclosure.'' ''The distortion called fidelity is not your metier,'' Zuckerman insists. And Mr. Roth himself says he is pleased to have escaped the constrictions of the Jamesian tact and elegance he once admired, liberating his talent for what he calls ''extremist fiction.'' Yet here is Zuckerman attending a class reunion of veterans from Weequahic High in Newark , checking out the prostates and remarriages and high-powered jobs and the dead fathers; having dinner in New York with a former star athlete from the same school, a nice guy called Seymour Levov, alias the Swede, and wondering at the fellow's sheer likable ordinariness. ''Swede Levov's life, for all I knew, had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore just great, right in the American grain.'' The little clause (''for all I knew'') gives the game away. Of course Zuckerman is wrong about this -- there wouldn't be a novel here if he weren't, let alone a Philip Roth novel. ''I was wrong,'' Zuckerman says handsomely. ''Never more mistaken about anyone in my life.'' But what's interesting about the book is that Zuckerman could have thought, even for an instant, that he was right; and that we can't, in the end, know how right or wrong he is, since he is making everything up, dreaming ''a realistic chronicle,'' as he says, quoting the old Johnny Mercer song (''Dream when the day is through''), and taking off into history as he imagines it. It's true that the imagining is grounded in the most meticulous reconstructions of old times and places -- the Levov family glove factory, the spreading acres of west New Jersey, a Miss America competition in Atlantic City, the beat-up neighborhoods of what used to be the city of Newark -- and it gets easier and easier to forget that Zuckerman's industry and imagination are providing all this. He gives us plenty of clues, though, before he vanishes for good on page 89, off into fiction, in the middle of a dance with an old schoolmate named Joy Helpern. ''You get them wrong before you meet them,'' Zuckerman says of ''people'' in general, ''while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again.'' How could the writer of fiction be exempt from this contagion? Zuckerman/Roth would reply that there is no exemption; only the need, whether you're a novelist or not, to keep imagining other people, and the hope that guesses may give life to the dead and the fallen and the lost. Zuckerman attributes his attachment to the romance of ordinariness to a cancer scare of his own, but he offers a subtler diagnosis in ''The Facts.'' ''The whole point about your fiction (and in America, not only yours),'' he tells Mr. Roth, ''is that the imagination is always in transit between the good boy and the bad boy -- that's the tension that leads to revelation.'' Swede Levov is the good boy for whom life is just great -- except that he's not. He is the good boy whose life turns to disaster -- as if that's what good boys were for, and only the bad boys go free. Or he is the good boy whom Zuckerman can imagine and mourn for only in this way. Swede is alive when the story opens, dead soon after. Zuckerman picks up a few details of his life at the reunion, notably from Swede's ferocious brother, a bullying cardiac surgeon in Miami. The rest is his dreamed chronicle. In and out of Zuckerman's mind the story hinges on Swede's 16-year-old daughter, Merry, an only, pampered child, who has fallen in with a section of the Weathermen and blown up a rural post office, killing a doctor who happened to be mailing his bills. The time is 1968. Merry goes into hiding, is raped and becomes destitute, gets involved in further bombings in Oregon, winds up back in Newark, stick-thin, filthy, a veil over her face, having become a Jain, dedicated to such extremes of nonviolence that she can scarcely bring herself to eat because of the murder of plant life involved. The novel stages an encounter between Swede and his derelict-looking daughter, and the scene manages to be both shocking and discreet. But the novel revolves not so much around this scene as around what Merry has done, the deaths she has caused, and the absurd, irresistible question of how this respectable Jewish athlete and his Irish, former-Miss-New-Jersey wife could have given birth to this once angry, now dislocated, apparently reasoning, weirdly unthinking girl. The question can't be answered, of course, but causalities keep shaping themselves in the mind. Is it because the parents are so respectable, so decent and so liberal, as much against the war in Vietnam as their daughter, that the girl has to turn out this way? Is there an American allegory here, immigrant generations rising to prosperity only to fall into violence and despair? Or have the parents done everything they can and should have, and is it Merry the changeling who reminds us that the inexplicable exists? ''And what is wrong with their life?'' the novel ends. ''What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?'' This is an answer to Zuckerman's own merciless portrait of the (female) intellectual who laughs with delight at the sight of historical disorder, ''enjoying enormously the assailability, the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things.'' But the answer itself still seeks to moralize the wreck of a world, as if Zuckerman had never heard of Job, as if the Levovs' virtue ought really, after all, to have been a protection for them, rather than an invitation to damage. ''American Pastoral'' is a little slow -- as befits its crumbling subject, but unmistakably slow all the same -- and I must say I miss Zuckerman's manic energies. But the mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable, and you have only to pause over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated, to see that Mr. Roth didn't entirely abandon Henry James after all. A sentence beginning ''Only after strudel and coffee,'' for instance, lasts almost a full page and evokes a whole shaky generation, without once losing its rhythm or its comic and melancholy logic, until it arrives, with a flick of the conjuror's hand, at a revelation none of us can have been waiting for. Because both novels are hefty and self-consciously American, trying to rethink national history, because both deal in painstaking and slightly mind-numbing realism, because both begin in New Jersey and end in hell, ''American Pastoral'' invites comparison with John Updike's ''In the Beauty of the Lilies.'' The chief difference is that Mr. Updike's novel ends in a secular apocalypse, the last act in the story of the death of a Christian God, while Mr. Roth's ends in the imagination of ruin, the death of a Jew's dream of ordinariness. The difference is not extreme, although both stories are. Michael Wood is the author of ''The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction.'' He teaches at Princeton University. More on Philip Roth From the Archives of The New York Times Review of " Goodbye, Columbus " (1959) Review of " Letting Go " (1962) Review of " Portnoy's Complaint (1969) Review of " Portnoy's Complaint " by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt Philip Roth Shakes Weequahic High (February 29, 1969) Review of " The Ghost Writer (1979) Review of " Zuckerman Unbound " (1981) " The Book That I'm Writing " (1983), Philip Roth on "The Anatomy Lesson" Review of " The Anatomy Lesson " (1983) " Roth's Real Father Likes His Books " (1983), by Maureen Dowd " Conversations with Philip " (1984), by David Plante Review of " Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue " (1985), by Harold Bloom Review of " The Counterlife (1987), by William Gass Review of " The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography " (1988), by Justin Kaplan " What Facts? A Talk with Roth " (1988) Review of " Deception (1990), by Fay Weldon Review of " Patrimony " (1991), by Robert Pinsky " To Newark, With Love. Philip Roth. " (1991) " Dear Dirty Dublin: My Joycean Trek with Philip Roth " (1991) by William Styron " Roth Returning to Newark to Get History Award " (1992) Review of " Operation Shylock " (1993), by D. M. Thomas Review of " Sabbath's Theater " (1995) " Claire Bloom Looks Back in Anger at Philip Roth " (1996) Review of Claire Bloom's memoir, " Leaving a Doll's House " (1996) Return to the Books Home Page

American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997) Vintage (1998) 432 pp

I ‘m hooked. The more Roth I read the more I’m convinced he is the greatest American writer alive today (and there are several great ones). But Roth — Roth’s books are in another league. Freshly finished with The Prague Orgy (the last book in what Vintage calls “Zuckerman Bound” containing The Ghost Writer , Zuckerman Unbound , The Anatomy Lesson , and The Prague Orgy ) I decided to not move on to his latest “Zuckerman” novel, Exit Ghost , published last year. Instead I chose to finally read Roth’s Pulitzer Prize winner: American Pastoral . American Pastoral also — and I was so happy — includes one of my newest favorite literary characters of all time, Nathan Zuckerman, albeit in a different role.

While “Zuckerman Bound” and Exit Ghost are written about Nathan Zuckerman, American Pastoral is written by Nathan Zuckerman, creating a sophisticated and effective framing devices. The first section, “Paradise Remembered,” is Zuckerman’s reflection on how this book came about. It’s a beautiful introduction to the themes of the novel that are displayed and flayed and displayed again in a different light and then stripped down with stunning compassion which leads to chilling effects in the last two parts, “The Fall” and “Paradise Lost.”

Zuckerman has aged a little more than a decade since I last visited him (only a month ago) in The Prague Orgy . It’s his forty-fifth-year high school reunion. Events and encounters lead him to reflect on his youth and, in particular, on his boyhood hero: Seymour “the Swede” Levov. The Swede is among the generation of Jews who were finally able to take full advantage of what America offered; he is descended from immigrants who had nothing, from a second-generation Jewish family that started building up a foundation, and from a father who has built a successful glove making factory. His grandfather and then his father had to work hard, and now the Swede is set up for an easy life; he even takes on the physical features of an all-American boy. Zuckerman idolized the Swede. He was the perfect athlete who was raised to an even higher status since he was enacting these great athletic feats while the country engaged in World War II. As is usual with Roth (but he still surprises me with his ability), the narrative looks at the Swede’s status from many angles: as a blessing, as an insignificant fact, as a piece of nostalgia, and as a curse.

And it all began — this heroically idealistic maneuver, this strategic, strange spiritual desire to be a bulwark of duty and ethical obligation — because of the war, because of all the terrible uncertainties bred by the war, because of how strongly an emotional community whose beloved sons were dying far away facing death had been drawn to a lean and muscular, austere boy whose talent it was to be able to catch anything anybody threw anywhere near him. It all began for the Swede — as what doesn’t? — in a circumstantial absurdity.

Zuckerman has seen the Swede a few times since childhood, and he’s still struck with awe, still a little giddy. One day not long before the high school reunion Zuckerman receives a letter from the Swede asking him to meet him in a New York City restaurant. The Swede’s father has died, and the Swede actually wants Zuckerman to consider helping him write a piece about his father. While Zuckerman would never do such a thing for another person, he is too intrigued by the Swede to say no. Zuckerman hopes to get under the surface of this apparently perfect man who has lived an apparently ideal life.

Only . . . what did he do for subjectivity? What was the Swede’s subjectivity? There had to be a substratum, but its composition was unimaginable. That was the second reason I answered his letter — the substratum. What sort of mental existence had been his? What, if anything, had ever threatened to destabalize the Swede’s trajectory?

Zuckerman, trying to see beneath the at once humble and complacent veneer, is disappointed. Turns out that at the dinner the Swede doesn’t even go into the piece he wants written about his father. They pass a dull evening together, and Zuckerman, in a sense, gets over the Swede. There is nothing going on under the surface. Unless . . .

Unless he was not a character with no character to reveal but a character with none that he wished to reveal — just a sensible man who understands that if you regard highly your privacy and the well-being of your loved ones, the last person to take into your confidence is a working novelist. Give the novelist, instead of your life story, the brazen refusal of the gorgeous smile, blast him with the stun gun of your prince-of-blandness smile, then polish off the zabaglione and get the hell back to Old Rimrock, New Jersey, where your life is your business and not his.

He knows nothing more about the Swede, however, until the high school reunion comes around. There he runs into the Swede’s younger brother, Jerry. Only a bit of information is passed from Jerry to Zuckerman, but it’s enough. A tidbit about the Swede’s daugher shows Zuckerman how wrong he was to pass off the Swede as just another superficial human being, too ideal to be interesting. As happens at large reunions, Jerry and Zuckerman are separated before Zuckerman can satisfy his curiosity any further.

Though Zuckerman has little to go on, he delves into writing a book about the Swede’s life, focusing on the period of the 1960s and Vietnam and the early 1970s with Watergate, when, he postulates, the Swede’s daughter has most destabalized not only his life but the life of his wife, the neighbors, the community, and the United States. It is a fantastic, virtuosic plummet into the heart of America.

I can’t remember a book that caused a more visceral reaction to me. Roth does not pull punches, and he is not shy about making the reader feel complicit. Because of this, I can’t say I’d recommend American Pastoral to everyone despite the fact that I consider it one of the greatest novels of the last century. It deserves to be looked at with an open mind and with an understanding that Roth is not putting anything in here for gratuitous effect, and the effect is often devastating. I swear, when the Swede encounters Rita Cohen to pass information to Merry I felt like I was there. My mouth went dry. Like the Swede, I too wanted to run out of the room I was in. I felt like the Swede, and I admired Roth even more for his ability to do that. Indeed, Roth, more than any other writer I know of, has the ability to pull me into the emotions the characters are feeling. I feel transported, like the Swede:

The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral — into the indigenous American berserk.

Another striking aspect of the novel is its treatment of Newark, a city I’m drawn to since I spent a summer working as a judicial intern in the Federal Court, which sits right in the area described in the novel, and I still frequent Newark’s streets. Roth, like Zuckerman and the Swede, grew up in Newark in a time when it had a better reputation. Here we get a gritty, up close shot of the city following the ugly and destructive riots of 1967; forty years later, these riots still affect the city and its abysmal reputation. Over the past few years, Newark has been attempting to revitalize itself. It has a classy performing arts center and a brand new state-of-the-art stadium. The homicide rate is dropping, finally. But this scene is still familiar:

Along this forsaken street, as ominous now as any street in any ruined city in America, was a reptilian length of unguarded wall barren even of graffiti. But for the wilted weeds that managed to jut forth in wiry clumps where the mortar was cracked and washed away, the viaduct wall was barren of everything except the affirmation of a weary industrial city’s prolonged and triumphant struggle to monumentalize its ugliness.

The book doesn’t dwell in the urban areas, though. The Swede has moved from Newark to the rural community of Old Rimrock. It’s a stark contrast: Newark is primarily inhabited by Democrats and immigrants, Jewish or Catholic; Old Rimrock is primarily Republican and inhabited by wealthy WASPs. The Swede’s generation was one of the first to change these stereotypes. With his Irish Catholic wife, the Swede moves thirty miles west of Newark, and allows Roth to explore yet another side of America.

I’ll admit that my proximity to the landscape has made me like this book more than I perhaps would have otherwise, as I suspect is the case with Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland . Still, American Pastoral is more layered than the clichéd onion. In many ways, that layering is the major motif in the novel: there are glove factories, face-lifts, paintings that look like their painters were trying to “rub out” the paint rather than apply it. We see it in the narrative structure which has a fictional author writing a fictional account about a real person. We see it in the way Roth plays with the layers of time. We see it in the layers of meaning in each scene. This is an intimate look at a family that spreads out into an astounding discussion of America and her history.

Alice Munro: The View from Castle Rock

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Pat Barker: The Women of Troy

Barbara Pym: Excellent Women

César Aira: The Divorce

Jack Spicer: After Lorca

45 comments.

I am planning at some point to write something extensive about this novel, as I think it’s the best work of fiction I’ve read in the last five years. I read it last October as a part of a Jewish Literature series that we were holding at the library during the fall, and a full year later I still find myself going back to it to reread chosen passages, and thinking about these characters and their shattered illusions. The framing device of using Nathan to tell the Swede’s story has become more poignant now that I’m working through those early Zuckerman novels. And of course reveling in the writing, which as you point out, is just in another league. I’ll let you know when I write this manifesto, but for now it’s enough to say that I couldn’t agree more with your assessment.

Very interesting, Trevor. I read American Pastoral a few years ago, before I’d read any other Zuckerman books and after I’d read a couple of Roths which hadn’t exactly wowed me (though, having acquired the taste for him, they probably would now). This was the book which made me realise how great he could be. I expect if (or when) I reread it, it’ll move up to one of the highest positions in my Hall of Roth.

Worth mentioning the last lines, which I think in their way are as fine and beautifully put as any last lines I’ve read (and which don’t, I believe, constitute a spoiler):

And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?

I’m thinking of giving The Counterlife , or perhaps Patrimony , a go next.

An intriguing review, as usual, Trevor. I read American Pastoral in a single go with the other parts of the trilogy, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain. And I find I remember the other two better than this book — although your review convinces me that I need to return to American Pastoral soon. I may have made a mistake in reading the whole trilogy at once — your review indicates to me that this book is quite a bit more subtle than the other two. Just as you wonder how much your own experience with Newark influenced your reaction to this book (quite a bit, I think — and I don’t mean that as a criticism), the politics of the other two books probably made them more accessible for me.

Along that line, Booker-longlisted Linda Grant wrote a fascinating — and very critical — review of I Married a Communist in The Guardian, Oct. 3, 1998, which expands into some more general thoughts about Roth. While it is somewhat of a polemic, it is worth tracing down for a read because I do think she makes some quite legitimate points about Roth, even if they are over-stated. I also found the review relevant to some of the themes that are found in The Clothes on Their Backs.

Here is the Linda Grant piece which Kevin refers to. I shall skip it for now, as I have I Married a Communist on my Roth shelves to come to in due course. However I couldn’t help catching this sentence in passing:

I don’t know that anyone understands more about men than Philip Roth, or less about women.

Michael, I look forward to your “manifesto.” I need to get down to the library soon to find out what’s going on. And if you’re interested, when Indignation comes out on September 16, the Barnes & Noble in Tribeca will be broadcasting some kind of Philip Roth appearence. I guess that’s the next best thing to an actual appearence.

Kevin and John, before I go on to the next two books in this “trilogy” I’m going to take a step back and read The Counterlife . I kind of like seeing Nathan Zuckerman at the different points of his life, and don’t quite want to move on until I get him in the early 1990s.

I haven’t read the Linda Grant piece yet, Kevin, but I’m anxious to. I’m not sure I want her to spoil my experience with the next few books, though. Still, I’m definitely interested in that perspective, which, after seeing the quote John pulled, I am not qualified to rebut.

I think you are right about going back in the Zuckerman series rather than going forward. I also think this late trilogy requires some pausing between books and that I made a mistake in not taking that time.

I wouldn’t worry about the Grant piece spoiling the books — it is in fact more about Roth as a writer than about the particular book. She raises some very interesting contextual points about Roth(and certainly says he should be read) that you can either accept or reject (John’s selected quote is a good example — I don’t think it spoils the books). I don’t necessarily agree with Grant’s conclusions — I do think her observations about Roth are definitely worth considering.

I took your advice and read the review, Kevin. Very interesting. And you’re right – I don’t think it spoils Roth for me.

To pull another quote:

Opening the first page of any Philip Roth is like hearing the ignition on a boiler roar to life. Passion is what we’re going to get, and plenty of it.

On a side not, today I took a drive to the Weequahic section of Newark where the Swede grew up. It’s very interesting to see the old-style homes that look quite rundown. I talked to a few of the people who lived there and they mentioned that many in the community are addicts. As I drove away there were full streets of boarded up, gutted out buildings. Still not there.

I went back to this review today after the Booker shortlist was announced (I know that’s a stretch, keep reading and I’ll explain). I think Trevor’s review contains something that is all too rare in reviews and needs to appear more often — an acknowledgement that personal experience with the geography or context of the book has significantly affected the final judgment.

I’ve never been to Newark so Roth’s references are interesting but have no context. On the other hand, when I look at the “loose” trilogy that this book introduces, I read The Human Stain while visiting a sociology professor friend in Amherst — not the Berkshires, but very close, and surrounded by academics in what might be the world’s best centre of liberal arts colleges.

I think The Human Stain a much better book than American Pastoral, but how much did the circumstances of when and where I read it affect me? A lot, I suspect. And when I reread American Pastoral, I will keep Trevor’s thoughts — and the fact he went back to Newark on the weekend (I do love that touch, although I share his disappointment) in mind. I know reviewers don’t like to insert themselves in the review, but sometimes they have to. This review is a perfect example of how to do that.

Obviously a good book should transcrend the personal life of the people who read it. Equally obviously, however, reviewers have to admit that they know what they know and they can’t deny their personal experiences which influence their judgement. This review does a very good job of showing how to do that.

As for the Man Booker (I promised that above is this very long post), I hated The Northern Clemency but a dovegreyreader post has caused me to at least be careful about expressing my opinion: she said (the quote is an impression not for certain) “maybe you had to be there”. I wasn’t there and I certainly acknowledge that maybe if I was this is a better book. That doesn’t make it a great book by any means — just means I should adjust my opinion, as I would of American Pastoral now that I know what someone who knows the territory thinks.

I really like The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant. I also first visited London in 1975 as a 27-year-old Canada journalist, following the Premier of Alberta, on a European tour. I returned the next year as an excited tourist (and London to this day remains my favorite city to visit). I spent the summer of 1979 based in London as a Commonwealth Press Union fellow. Linda Grant’s book speaks to my experience of discovering a wonderful city in this, for me, wonderful city — does that make it a less or better book?

And finally, Trevor, could I talk you into reading an Annie Dillard book for the blog sometime in the future ? As a pure writer, I would include her in my “greatest living Americans” list and I think she tends to get overlooked (more in the Stegner-Williams rather than Roth-Bellow-Updike(?) tradition). I lived in Pittsburgh from 2000 to 2003 so I would most like to see your thoughts on An American Childhood (and I generally hate memoirs), but anything that strikes your interest would be welcome.

Sorry for another very long post, but when a reviewer sparks interesting thoughts that go beyond the review he/she has to expect them.

KevinfromCanada

I know Stegner, Kevin, but who is the Williams you compare Dillard with?

John Edward Williams may be the most overlooked novelist in American history. Born in Texas in 1922, he spent most of his life at the University of Denver (not a category A school in any category, football, writing, you name it) teaching creative writing. A poet (sorry I don’t read poetry, so no opinion), his entire work consists of four novels:

Nothing But Night, published I think in 1948 and he disavowed it so I’ve never read it. Butcher’s Crossing, pub 1960 now available from NYRB Classics, a great Stegner-like book about a buffalo hunt in the American West, just before the market for buffalo skins collapsed. If you do like Stegner, you like this book. If I remember you like The Outlander, so I think you would quite like this one.

Stoner, pub 1965 (also in the NYRB Classics series) — An academic novel, quite comparable in some ways to some of the great Oxford and Cambridge novels. Only this one concerns the son of a dirt-poor Missouri farmer who gets to go the state university (you can see where the Oxon comparison fades).

Augustus, pub 1973 (still in commerical publication in North America, not sure about the UK) — Picks up the Roman story where the TV series leaves off, even thought it was written 35 years before they thought of the TV series. An epistolatory, diary novel — totally different from the other two. Having said that, the friends that we lend our Rome DVDs to always want to read the novel. I do like this book — I think the other two are better.

Williams is an author whom it is impossible to classify and he didn’t really write enough to be in any pantheon. I do think you would find him interesting.

He obviously didn’t write a lot or follow a genre. All three are wonderful books.

John: Is there any chance you would take on an Annie Dillard book, or am I reaching? I’d love to see how someone from outside North America looks at her work.

Kevin, your lengthy comments are always welcome! I find the comments one of (if not the) most enjoyable part of blogging about books.

I have actually read An American Childhood . It’s been years, and I recently saw it in a bookstore and thought I needed to revisit it. Your request shall be granted! And fairly soon, I think.

And I agree about how location influences a book. I read the overly long The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer because I knew the locations in that book too. In fact, one day I was reading it in a car service station and found that I was at the exact address he was describing – creepy! I wouldn’t recommend that book to anyone because of its length, but I enjoyed it as a history of a community I knew.

I’m pulling An American Childhood off the shelf tomorrow — I’ve been looking for a non-contemporary book to read before the Giller longlist comes out and this is an excellent choice. If you change your mind and choose another Dillard, please let me know — I’d like to be up to date whenever you post a review. Cheers, Kevin

I tend to go through Roth phases; there have been times when I’ve read nothing else for weeks at a time, but I’ve had no interest in him lately (I even tried rereading The Human Stain a couple of summers ago, and didn’t finish it, although I loved it the first time I read it.) I’m not sure my experience is uncommon, so I’ll have to go back to him at some point and try to work out why that is.

he last book of his that I read was The Plot Against America , and that one didn’t quite work for me. Again, at this stage I’d have to go back to it to work out why.

Kevin, I did pull out An American Childhood last night, though I have two other book reviews coming up before it, so late next week I should get that one posted.

Rob, that’s interesting. I definitely think that his raw passion and the fantastic rants might make time away from Roth beneficial. But you’re the first person I’ve had say that The Plot Against America didn’t work. I haven’t read it yet. My next Roth will be either The Counterlife or Indignation , which gets published next Tuesday here in the U.S. After those two I plan to take a break for a while (we’ll see how long that lasts). I’m interested to know if Roth ever becomes pallatable for you again.

I’ll certainly be trying him again, sooner or later, so I’ll let you know!

I’d like to join Rob on the list of people who thought The Plot Against America didn’t work. Actually, I’m wondering whether a high opinion of Roth may be an American phenomenon that we don’t get in the rest of the world. I’ll keep wondering about that until your next Roth effort, Trevor, and promise to have an opinion by then.

Not massive on Roth either. I found ‘American Pastoral’ dense – rather overwrought. I was a little indifferent to The Plot Against America, although I wouldn’t go as far as to say it ‘didn’t work’. The only other one I can remember reading is ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’. A grubby, smutty sex comedy if I remember rightly, and very funny, but it doesn’t seem to warrant Roth the status he enjoys. I’d definitely give him another go, which is your favourite Trevor?

Kevin, I’ve wondered how well Roth travels to other nations. Seems every year when the Nobel Prize for literature is announced, there’s some discussion about whether it’s time for Roth. I have to say, I’ve rarely had as much pure joy in reading as when I was reading the first two Zuckerman books. I don’t think all of that was my proximity to New Jersey and New York, but I’m sure some of it was. I definitely appreciate comments from those of you who bring a different perspective to the books.

Demob Happy, I’m afraid to say that my experience with Roth is limited to the “Zuckerman Bound” books and American Pastoral and Everyman , so while I can pick my favorite, it might change when I’ve made it through the rest of his books. As for now I’ll give you my three favorites: The Ghost Writer , Zuckerman Bound , and American Pastoral . I think the most substantial of those is American Pastoral , and I had a different reaction to it than you did. I haven’t read The Plot Against America yet, but many of my friends (once again, those from New Jersey and New York) love it. I have a feeling I’ll enjoy it quite a bit too, especially since I find Lindbergh’s passifism fascinating already. We’ll see! Next on my shelf is The Counterlife .

Interestingly, a couple of years ago the New York Times asked “a couple hundred prominent writers, critics, editors, and other literary sages” (not all of whom are American) what “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years” was. Beloved won, which is kind of expected though I didn’t warm up to it. American Pastoral was a runner-up. The crazy thing was that of the seventeen honorable mentions, five were by Philip Roth: The Counterlife , Operation Shylock , Sabbath’s Theatre , The Human Stain , and The Plot Against America . ( Here is the article.) So it does appear that here in America Roth has a very devoted following. How will his work hold up in the larger world as the years go by?

I’m intrigued enough by this issue that I promise a serious effort. I think I’ll start with a reread of American Pastoral, since your review provides some fresh context. Considering Sabbath’s Theatre and The Counterlife (neither of which I’ve read) as the rest of this stage of the project. And given my previous experience, I’ll be taking some time and leaving some space between various books.

I went to that Times article after my posting my last comment and can’t resist adding another one.

I’ve read all but seven novels on the list (including all in the first two categories) and three of the seven I haven’t read are Roth — so maybe I have some hidden bias against him.

Then again, I’ve read all three of the DeLillo and would find them all marginal (Underworld is the only one I can actually remember and most of that is because of the baseball). And I think McCarthy’s trilogy faded badly after the opening book. As did Updike’s foursome (the first two of which were written outside the 25 year time frame of the query). Maybe my problem is with American fiction of the last 25 years.

It is quite incredible that only two of the books that made the list were authored by women.

I’ll add this to my list of things to wonder about.

On the Updike front, I would actually recommend the Beck books rather than the Rabbit books. He did write them as short stories but they are linked, so they read as a novel, or rather three novels. Both series cover the same period — for my money, the Beck books get stronger, the Angstrom weaker. Everyman’s Library has a wonderful and affordable version which pulls them all together, with a quite good introductory essay.

I too have problems finding U.S. women writers to put on the list. I read Kingsolver, but find her a little shallow. And Dillard’s best books are non-fiction as you note (although The Maytrees is quite a good novel). After Morrison (who is a bit tough to read) it is hard to come up with a name. And then when I look at British names — Byatt, Drabble, Penelope Fitzgerald, Grant, Enright just off the top of my head — it’s hard not to think there’s been a better go from that gender over there. And when I look at Canada — Atwood, Urquhart, Munro, Hay (again just to start) — I’d say we’ve had a pretty good go here. Might be a subject you could address in a later review.

I’m definitely going to keep my eyes open now. I’m sure I’m just being blind right now and need to look harder and read more books by American women. The only two coming to mind now are Lahiri (and she’s not written what could be considered the best single work of American fiction, though Interpeter of Maladies was pretty good) and Proulx. I’m not a fan of Anne Tyler, and I haven’t read Carol Shields. Seems like my favorites have all passed on and were writing in the first half of the last century.

I’ll definitely be returning to this as I think more. Please keep me informed of what you (all of you) come up with.

Kevin, I agree about DeLillo and McCarthy. I loved All the Pretty Horses but found it stood on its own very well. In fact, I’ve heard the other parts of the trilogy almost lessened the power of the first book. Consequently, I’ve never read them.

I actually have yet to venture into Updike. For years I’ve went to the shelf and pulled out the first Rabbit book only to put it back after finding something else. I always figure that I’ll get to Rabbit someday. That day is approaching, I now feel.

And I also was intrigued by the practical absence of women on the list. Most of my favorite women authors are British, though, so I had a hard time coming up with other American women who’d put forth a great piece of American fiction – Annie Dillard’s best are nonfiction-ish. I like Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible , but don’t think it’s the single-best work of the last 25 years. Help me come up with other women who deserve to be on the list.

American women. The only two coming to mind now are Lahiri (and she’s not written what could be considered the best single work of American fiction, though Interpeter of Maladies was pretty good) and Proulx. I’m not a fan of Anne Tyler, and I haven’t read Carol Shields

So, who does that leave? Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Annie Dillard, and Toni Morrison? Can’t say I’ve read them though, except Oates’ Black Water .

Stewart’s list illustrates my dilemma. Oates writes so many books (of uneven quality) that reading her is almost a fulltime project in itself (okay, I push the case somewhat). I know Didion and Dillard (both of whom are quite good) more for their non-fiction work. Ozick does count and is someone I have overlooked. Toni Morrison is an acquired taste that I don’t have — which says more about me than her. Janette Turner Hospital also writes some very good books although Australia and Canada get to claim her as well as the U.S., not that that matters.

There’s also Amy Tan, who legitimately could have garnered a vote in this race for The Joy Luck Club , which I read and didn’t really appreciate, or The Bonesetter’s Daughter , which I didn’t read and don’t intend to and which premiered in opera form just Monday night in San Francisco.

Geraldine Brooks, perhaps? Or Marilynne Robinson. Based purely on them both taking the Pulitzer in recent years.

Marilynne Robinson happens to be the other honorable mention on the NY Times list, for her 1980 book Housekeeping . I haven’t read it or Gilead (or her new one for that matter), but she’s definitely in the running.

I haven’t read Geraldine Brooks, either, but I haven’t gotten the sense that people would classify her as a master yet.

I can’t help but observe that all of the names that have been mentioned (and I have no others to add) are a cut or two below Roth and even Updike. I can’t tell you the number of times I have picked Gilead off the shelf and put it back.

Then again, most critics agree that Edith Wharton is a cut or two behind Henry James. Which brings me to the main point of this post.

Trevor, you have been exploring, successfully, books about New York. I haven’t dug deep into the blog, but my impression is that you were born and raised somewhere else, live outside the City (on a long commute), work in the City, know the region. As you are well aware, those of us who read North American fiction read a lot about New York City. We welcome impressions from someone who “knows” but is not a native. You seem to qualify.

So I would like to suggest a New York City project. You have reviewed Netherland and like it (lonely so far, but as I’ve indicated elsewhere that will probably change) and moved backward with Roth. Would you consider continuing the trip? I’d love to see your thoughts on a Salinger (probably one of the short story volumes, but Catcher in the Rye would be fine), a Fitzgerald (again I would prefer something other that Gatsby) and finally, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (that’s the one title I most want in the project).

Sorry to deflect the thoughts on this stream but as a reader who reads a lot of novels about New York, I would very much like Trevor to engage in this project.

Project accepted, Kevin! I’ve read most of the titles you’ve suggested, but it’s been years – before I came to the New York area. I’m sure my perspective on them is different now, both becaue of where I live and also because I’m just at a different part of life. I’ll keep this project in mind as I venture into other areas.

Always looking for things like this!

Just for some flavour, as I’ve not read them, but a couple of other New Yorkers that I’ve seen out and about are Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale and Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed .

Winter’s Tale would be most interesting, although from my perspective it is more about an imagined than a real New York — which is not to eliminate it. Don’t know The Unpossessed. The problem with New York novels is once you start listing them the list becomes endless — seems like every North American writer has to write a New York novel (I can list more than five Canadians who have included New York in their novels). So, Trevor, the challenge is to pick a manageable, yet comprehensive, list.

[…] always want to blog about fantasy novels, and literary folk will always want to blog about Philip Roth. Neither am I thinking about old-versus-new books, which again is down to the blogger’s […]

Have just returned here after not visiting this discussion in a couple of weeks and I see that Ozick, whom I mentioned just now on my blog, has been raised here already.

Kevin, thanks for clarifying who Williams is. In fact I have a copy of Stoner in the NYRB edition so I should have worked that one out for myself.

As for Dillard, I’m ashamed to say she was only a vague echo in my mind until I saw Trevor’s recent post on her. I will look out.

John: I hope Williams finds his way on to your agenda in the next few months. He is not perfect, but he is a much overlooked author.

To respond to your appeal — I’m not American and I loved American Pastoral . Surely a book with such a rich sense of place is more interesting to someone who doesn’t know the place?

“I can’t remember a book that caused a more visceral reaction to me.” — This is exactly the book’s great strength. It’s so vivid. Certainly my favourite Roth so far — and, moreover, one of my favourite 20th Century novels.

In case you’re interested, I’ve just written a post about Sabbath’s Theater .

Regarding The Plot Against America — I absolutely loved it, right up until the ending, which is one of the silliest and worst chapters I’ve ever read by Roth.

Jonathan, that you enjoyed it so much is excellent news! I’m not sure I agree with you that the book is more interesting to someone who doesn’t know the place, though. It lingers in my mind everytime I wander around where I live. That said, I’m not sure my experience is necessarily better than any one else’s.

Thanks for the post on Sabbath’s Theater too. I won’t get to that one or The Plot Against America for a while, though, since I’m about to step back from American Pastoral and go through Counterlife and then finish the rest of the Zuckerman novels in order. I look forward to every minute of it!

I see the chair of the Nobel Prize for Literature committee says U.S. writers are “too isolated, too insular” to win the prize. (I found the interview on the NY Times site — you might want to post a link to the whole ludicrous thing.) So I guess that means no Nobel for Roth, let alone Updike, Oates or a host of others, Toni Morrison having already won.

I found the comment interesting because, despite my interest in literary prizes, I rarely pay attention to the Nobel winner beyond noting who it is. Certainly in the last decade, they haven’t introduced me to anyone that I found intriguing — and I can’t say the ones I knew about beforehand such as Coetzee are way up on my list of favorites. I’d have to go all the way back to 1988 (Mahfouz) to find a winner that I greatly admire, even if there are some whom I certainly acknowledge are good, not necessarily great, writers.

I just thought of an American female author that hasn’t been mentioned here: Francine Prose. I have only read her book about writing and reading, but I have heard good things about her fiction.

Anyone know whether she’s potentially up on the first tier of American writers?

Nope! I’d never heard of her until I saw her introduction to the NYRB edition of Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica .

[…] the Glimmering World in the US), and this book. Recent discussion of Philip Roth on my blog, and an attempt to identify great American female writers on another, inspired me finally to start working my way […]

re: a project on New York Novels AND notable female writers- I’m surprised that no one has yet mentioned DAWN POWELL, particularly THE LOCUSTS HAVE NO KING but pick any of her New York Novels and settle in for a fun, juicy read full of well drawn characters that toss witticisms that would do Dorothy Parker proud without the latter’s nasty misanthropic streak. Ms Powell’s characters tend to be artists, singers, dancers and lovers, beautiful moths drawn to the dazzling flame they perceive NYC to be, bent on spreading their wings and making a spectacle of themselves in one way or another. These exotic creatures, exiles form banal farming communities, need their imagined New York to be a grand bauble for them to conquer as part of their plan for self aggrandisement. Not that they’re evil, just definitely playing the leading role in their own movies. New York Natives, in Powell’s books, are just like any other small town people, rooted in their familiar communities. DAWN POWELL wrote at least 14 novels about NYC along with stories and plays and some notable novels set in the American midwest. She was friends with Gore Vidal who has written introductions to her recently republished novels. When she died in 1963, none of her work was in print. At one point, she speaks of a woman who “everyone thought had her feet planted firmly n the ground but usually her feet were tangled up in someone or other’s sheets.” This is a funny, moving and highly readable body of work originally published between 1938 and 1962. Each novel is a lovely window into the time when it was written. Curiously, they are terribly sophisticated and utterly provincial at the same time because they were written for a local audience of New Yorkers who would recognize the characters in the novels as their neighbors.

Thanks for bringing Dawn Powell to my attention, Christopher. I have actually never heard of Powell, so I look forward to finding out more about her.

It should be noted, however, that we’re trying to find the American female novelist who is still writing. I find that the best were writing during the earlier part of the twentieth century, and there seemed to have been many. All the same, I am anxious to explore Powell. Thanks!

[…] and I think it might still be my favorite, though it was difficult to choose between this one and American Pastoral (which was definitely one of the best books I read this year, as were many other Roth books, but I […]

Miss America turns bomber. Do you still blame the parents?

H aving spent a good part of two decades scrutinising his imagination, examining its origins and doubting, obsessively, its integrity Philip Roth , now in his mid sixties, seems determined simply to employ his gift in all its extraordinary vigour. Hard at the heels of Sabbath's Theater, and its remarkable whoring hero, the great pretender has, with American Pastoral, produced his second masterpiece within two years.

We open in familiar Roth territory: Newark, New Jersey; and a half-lit age of post-war hopefulness, a time when New York was still a city of old-world craftsmen and new-world chancers, and 'atomic energy was all our own'. The focus of all that optimism, all that energy, at least in Newark's Weequahic High School, rests in the frame of Seymour 'Swede' Levov: a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jew, effortless star of every sport he plays.

Unlike many of Roth's characters, raging for their slice of the American pie, the Swede, with his Waspish looks and his corporeal brilliance, is at liberty to gain access to the nation's dreams by conventional means: through prowess on the ball park. Thus he inherits and expands his father's glove-making business, marries the shiksa Dawn Dwyer Miss New Jersey 1949, buys a smallholding upstate and prepares for the simple successes to which he appears born. But this being a Roth novel 'Simple is never that simple'. And this being a Roth novel at least some of the complexity comes from the rigmarole of unreliable narration.

The story of Seymour Levov is told in the voice of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's long time alter ego. Zuckerman cherishes schoolboy memories of the inscrutable Levov; when he runs into him in post-prostate life there seem to be no cracks in the myth. It is only later, when hem eets the Swede's brother at a high-school reunion, and he is informed how the Swede died in despair, that he begins to imagine below the surface. Thus what we get is archetypal blandness (Levov) viewed by exaggerated consciousness (Zuckerman); a fantasy of threatened innocence as viewed by all-knowing experience. And it would not be Philip Roth (or Nathan Zuckerman) if he did not concoct mental traumas that were at least the equal of his hero's physical magnificence.

The author has long been preoccupied with the tyrannies our bodies hold over us: for Portnoy it was the dictatorship of an over-eager right hand; Zuckerman of The Anatomy Lesson was, like Roth himself, a hostage to worn vertebrae; this time, however, it is the very physical perfection of the Levovs that apparently sets in motion the events that leads to the destruction of all that they love.

For a while though it is the American pastoral dream, the dream that is encapsulated in the Swede, a real-life Johnny Appleseed, who needs nothing more in his life than to 'stride' his own 100 acres, hand-in-hand with his own daughter, Merry, to their own village store. At first the single tiny flaw in this world is that the daughter suffers from a speech impediment, which, according to her therapist, is an expression of her inadequacy beside her all-too-idyllic parents. The personality disorder that creates the stammer, however, becomes something far more alarming, and that pastoral dream is comprehensively dismantled, cliche by cliche, when, at the age of 16, Merry reduces the village store to rubble with high explosives as part of an obscure protest against the Vietnam war.

After the bomb, which kills a family friend, all hell breaks loose for the Swede. His daughter disappears and, in his mind, becomes responsible for all of the Weathermen-inspired mayhem of the late Sixties.

Roth has long been a master of the rip-tide dynamics of mania; but here, for the most part, he details the studied avoidance of conflict: the strategies by which Levov continues to make sense of the world. This, as a result, is a book that, wonderfully, tells you more than you will ever want to know about glove-making. Indeed there is an Updike-like preoccupation with surface and process. But this is also Rabbit Angstrom as conceived by Philip Roth, and eventually his comfort zone of kid leather and calfskin is stripped away to reveal places of unimagined filth (this reaches its apotheosis when, overcome by the stench of the unwashed daughter he has come to rescue, Levov vomits in her face). As the Swede's brother later yells, in a vintage two-page Rothian rant: 'You wanted Miss America? Well, you've got her, with a vengeance she's your daughter! The reality of this place is right in your kisser now! America Amok! America Amuck!' Despite its insistence on the more extreme degradationsof modern America, however, American Pastoral is no simple satire on the bucolic delusions of the suburban middle class; far more of its anger is in fact directed against the freedoms of the permissive society.

And on this occasion, Roth's narrative tricksiness serves to hold our sympathies for these attitudes in perfect uneasy balance. Few writers are capable of raising themselves to the technical heights achieved in the climactic scene here, a 100-page account of a dinner party; hardly any are able with such authority to measure what America has become against what it once seemed capable of. Only this writer, however, would dare to do these things in the voice of a sentimental old Jew, smooching with a high-school sweetheart and reminiscing about his Boy's-Own hero. As a result this momentous novel ends impossibly unresolved, ends in fact with the question 400 pages have been spent exploring: 'And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?' So wonders Philip Roth, all American. (For a day).

Philip Roth

‘American Pastoral’ Review: Ewan McGregor Mis-Adapts Philip Roth’s Novel

You can usually rely on an actor-turned-director to elicit fine performances, but even Jennifer Connelly and Dakota Fanning are ill-used here

“America had won the war. The Depression was over.” Thus, within the first minute of “American Pastoral,” the voice of Philip Roth ‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1997 novel becomes that of an elderly spouse explaining the plot of a movie in a crowded theater. Directed by Ewan McGregor , who also stars as Newark, N.J., resident Seymour “Swede” Levov, the lead-footed version of Roth’s book is an object lesson in the perils of adaptation, a movie that neither expands our understanding of its source nor stands on its own.

It’s almost hard to know where to begin the list of what “American Pastoral” gets wrong, but given that the least one expects from an actor’s directorial debut is sensitive, well-tuned performances, it’s astonishing the extent to which McGregor and his costars, including Jennifer Connelly (as Swede’s beauty-queen wife Dawn) and Dakota Fanning (as their daughter Merry) telegraph every last emotion like they’re acting in semaphore. Their performances are so deliberate and overworked they might as well have the script tattooed on their faces.

Roth’s novel, a kind of fictional history that may or may not have been imagined by his narrative alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, becomes, in McGregor’s clammy hands, yet another tiresome movie about The Sixties, a generational gumbo whose attempts at sweep and scope only underline the production’s pinched imagination.

Will a privileged teenager rail against her parents’ middle-class ways and decorate her room with tie-dyed peace signs? Will her parents tell her to turn that damn music down? Will Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” signify once more the onset of turbulent times? After a while, you know the answers before you can formulate the questions.

“American Pastoral” keeps the novel’s framing device, with Zuckerman ( David Strathairn ) at his 40th reunion recalling the Swede’s glory days as a high school athlete, then learning of the dark times that followed after. But the movie loses almost instantly the idea that this is a story being told, filtered through a writer’s consciousness rather than playing out exactly as it happened. Stripped of its ambiguities, the plot plays like boomer magnetic poetry: a little race riots here, an anti-war bombing there, a dash of sexual liberation and voilà! Cinematographer Martin Ruhe (“Control”) shoots the movie in somber, brown-on-brown tableaux, which only underlines the ponderousness of John Romano’s screenplay.

For a while, the Swede has it all: a prosperous glove-manufacturing business, inherited from his father (Peter Riegert), a loving daughter, a beautiful wife who doesn’t mind calling him “Swede.” But his daughter develops both a stutter and an incestuous crush on her old man, and as she grows into a young woman, her youthful hesitation matures into full-blown rage.

Ideally, her critique of her parents’ upper-class complacency, their claim to be “against the war” while living their comfortable lives in a leafy Republican suburb, ought to have some teeth, but as Merry’s written and as Fanning plays her, her anger is so out of control that every word comes out through gnashed teeth. She adopts, eventually fatally, the Weather Underground’s mantra to “bring the war home,” but the movie never brings it closer than a radio bulletin or a snatch of the evening news. It’s an abstraction inside an abstraction.

“American Pastoral” isn’t an embarrassment in the vein of so many other Roth films, but the first task of any literary adaptation is to justify its own existence. Why do we need a movie when we already have the book? (“Because it’s shorter” is not a good answer.) McGregor’s movie is a half-hearted transcript with no heart of its own, one that commits the ultimate sin of making you wonder whether the book it’s based on could possibly be any good in the first place.

Review of AMERICAN PASTORAL Authored by Philip Roth – 5 Stars

This review is authored by James Victor Jordan and Kathy Ballsun

American Pastoral is Philip Roth’s twentieth of twenty-seven novels. It was published in 1997 and won the Pulitzer Prize the next year. It has 520 reviews on Amazon, mostly five-star but the novel also has a few snarky one- and-two-star reviews, one of which quipped that American Pastoral was the best book of all time on glove making. I loved those portions of the book. I dislike reading instruction manuals but love learning new things if they’re presented in an interesting way. Roth’s research and descriptions are awesome. So I enjoyed learning about glove making as those passages are organically woven into the novel. Throughout the novel the gloves allude to themes both actual and metaphorical. I suppose the glove-making-complaining reviewer would have denigrated Moby Dick as being the best book of all time on cetology, which indeed it is most likely.

A fair question would be, why a new review of American Pastoral now? We begin to answer that question by asking, what makes a novel worthy of induction into the canon of English literature, as American Pastoral has been? Is it because it’s well written? American Pastoral earns this accolade, though some have argued that the interior monologues of its protagonist, Seymour “Swede” Levov, border on endless circuity. It’s our view that the novel examines the thoughts, emotions, and convictions of the Swede from numerous nuanced perspectives without becoming repetitive and that this is a tremendous accomplishment that should be especially appreciated in our time of evolving collective social impatience epitomized by the Twitter limit of 140 characters. But despite the impatience of those unwilling or unable to summon the concentration to absorb what American Pastoral has to say, professional critical praise of its prose has been near universal.

A novel reaches the canon when there is a predominant and scholastic view that its story transcends the era in which it takes place or is told. In this review we observe a present-day example of how, despite the passage of two decades since it was written and five decades since the time in which it is set, American Pastoral proves to be such a novel.

By way of example, consider The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Mark Twain’s masterpiece is considered a classic of American literature because, among other things, it’s a timeless story of the inhumanity of slavery and the humanity of slaves. And it is obvious in this time of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, that the message of the evils of racial oppression in Huck Finn remains, most unfortunately, relevant today, worthy today of literary examination.

Hence a viable review that argues that American Pastoral deserves its place in the canon needs to ask and answer: what is it about the Vietnam-War-era story Philip Roth tells in American Pastoral that makes it relevant today? This is a question we answer in this bifurcated review. The first part of the review is a conceptual analysis. The second part of the review tests the arguments in the first part by discussing the novel in terms of the development of its characters, primarily the Swede, as they are revealed within progressive scenes as the novel unfolds.

At the core of American Pastoral is an act of homicidal violence, a bombing meant to protest the Vietnam War committed by sixteen-year old Merry Levov, the only child of the Swede and his wife Dawn. As a result of this tragedy, Roth deftly shows the Swede transitioning through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and to some extent—but not completely—acceptance of the fact that his dear, brilliant, beautiful, beloved, stuttering and rebellious teenager becomes (eventually) a serial killer.

American Pastoral imagines the repercussions suffered by a parent—a vet, an entrepreneur providing scores of jobs in the inner city of Newark, devoted husband, a civic leader—whose child in the Vietnam War era becomes (in modern parlance) a terrorist. But isn’t the Vietnam War and its protestations, its era of social unrest and distrust of government old news? Post 9/11 we have witnessed Americans—young adults—becoming radicalized in a manner not dissimilar to the radicalization of Merry Levov and the underground bombers protesting the Vietnam War.

And what of those middle-class parents—proud Americans, solid citizens—of sons and daughters who become terrorists today? Are the experiences of those parents different in substance than the tribulations of a parent suffering as the Swede and Dawn Levov did in an earlier era? The answer is that the similarities are remarkable if not virtually identical. As the fictional loss and related experiences of the Swede and Dawn is a story terribly relevant today, American Pastoral meets the criteria of contemporary relevance.

As the passage of years provides new and deeper ways of understanding the Vietnam-War-protest generation, a current review American Pastoral is necessary and warranted.

Some have said that American Pastoral is Roth’s critique if not an outright indictment of the generation of teens and twenty somethings who either protested the Vietnam War or who rioted, burned, and pillaged inner cities in that time: the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Those groups the protestors and the rioter) overlap but mostly they are distinct. Few Americans exercising their First Amendment rights to protest the Vietnam War were looters, rioters, or bombers.

Another theme in American Pastoral is the sexual mores of the times. This is presented in several passages, but perhaps, with respect to the Swede’s generation of the World War II era and Merry’s Vietnam War era, nowhere is the generational gap between shown more vividly than in the scene where Rita, ostensibly Merry’s friend after the bombing, comes on to the Swede by lying on a hotel room bed, raising her spread legs to her knees to reveal that beneath her miniskirt she’s not wearing underwear. The Swede has met Rita in the hotel room at her suggestion as a place to meet where the Swede can give her $10,000 for Merry.

Although the Swede has brought the money with him, Rita doesn’t talk about the purpose of his visit. Instead after raising her knees she urges the Swede to fuck her. It’s commonly understood that rape isn’t about sex, rather it’s about power. And to this reader, Rita’s lude behavior sure felt like a power play. But her intensions aren’t entirely clear, as no part of the story is told from her point of view. But her actions, whether malicious or merely sexual, represent the free-love generation of Merry and her contemporaries. The Swede never looks between Rita’s legs, willing himself not to take his eyes off her face. He runs from the hotel room, leaving the $10,000 behind. Like the great author he is, he does not editorialize, doesn’t tell the reader what he thinks the reader should think.

Just as one cannot reasonably characterize Merry’s generation based upon bombers and looters of the time, so one cannot, without more, characterize the sexual mores of her generation from Rita’s hotel room behavior. But there is more as Roth writes another brilliant scene depicting what could be seen as differences in generational attitudes about sex. But the generations in this later scene include the Swede’s generation but the contrast is to his parents’ generation.

In the final (and lengthy scene), this difference between generational attitudes about sex arise during a hilarious dinner-party discussion—largely a diatribe by the Swede’s father, who argues in favor of condemnation of the recently released adult film, Deep Throat. As we see attitude contrasts among three generations, with each in one fashion or another expressing its values, it cannot be reasonably said that Roth is taking sides.

Further, expert opinion on how fiction works from Henry James to James Wood would not agree that Roth as author of American Pastoral denounces the Vietnam-era generation because there is no evidence, a passage or passages in the novel, that states, let alone suggests, that the story is a condemnation of an entire generation, just as there is no passages in Moby Dick that evidences that Captain Ahab was an archetypical whaling ship captain. To say that American Pastoral critiques a generation would be akin to saying that The Godfather critiques all Sicilians.

Henry James also opined that while a narrator, first or third person, can properly be biased in the telling of a story, the author must be neutral. This view cannot be said to apply to a polemic, such as The Jungle or The Grapes of Wrath. But American Pastoral is not a polemic, it is realistic fiction about a father devastated by his daughter’s participation in a violent subculture, including a fascinating inside view of Merry’s deeply disturbed personality. It is a triumph of realistic literary fiction that is as relevant today as it was when it was first published.

To explicate our views, to test our categorical analysis, we discuss below passages we see as critical to understanding the Swede. We note at the outset of this portion of the review that many of Roth’s novels, the later ones in particular, are organized by the narrator Roth chose to tell the story. Roth’s novels are, therefore, grouped to include the Zuckerman Books, the Roth Books, the Kepesh Books, the Nemeses Short Novels, and miscellany. The narrator of the Zuckerman books is one Nathan Zuckerman, a writer. American Pastoral is one of the Zuckerman books. Some would argue that Zuckerman is a Roth alter ego. That, however, is a topic beyond the scope of this already lengthy review.

We organize our discussion of the text under three headings: The Hero, Heroic Denial, and The Fall After the Fall.

I. The Hero

Early in American Pastoral , Zuckerman discloses that the Swede was his childhood hero and acknowledges the limited ability of an author to capture the essence of an individual, even an imaginary one. Despite his own misgivings, Zuckerman’s fascination with the Swede irresistibly lured him into recounting the Swede’s life and bearing witness to the fall of an archetypical American hero. Zuckerman’s observation also serves as a caution to anyone who reads a discussion about the Swede, including his own.

From the very first pages, Zuckerman intimates that all may not be what it seems with the invincible Swede. Even so, Zuckerman describes the Swede as a representation of the conventionally idealized American male, the critical center of the grand American myth . With his physical prowess and his blond good looks, the Swede was set apart from other members of his Jewish community. He was regarded as god-like, “an Apollo”. From his boyhood until his world was ripped apart, the myth of the Swede remained intact.

Although the shadows existed, the events of the Swede’s life appeared to be almost a reflection of his physical perfection. The Swede imagined himself to be Johnny Appleseed sprinkling apple seeds as he tromped through the bucolic countryside. He fulfilled part of his American dream by purchasing an old and impregnable stone house, his fortification against unpleasantness and discord. His lived an “optimistic and privileged” life. He married a Catholic beauty queen, Dawn, and although in later life she strenuously objected to being objectified as a beauty queen. The Swede saw and loved the multiple facets of Dawn’s character and achievements, yet on some level he clung to his beauty queen image of her. She helped the Swede fulfill another aspect of the American myth, that of the handsome and wealthy young couple. “Out of guilt at his own good fortune [finding the American dream without struggle?], he consistently submitted to Dawn’s wants.”

II. Heroic Denial

The Swede had a simplistic faith in his ability to manage whatever challenges life presented. “He could endure anything, inside and outside.” He was “reasonable, enlightened, and tolerant.” He wanted to be a “bulwark of duty and an example of an ethical and moral life.” “He had a fatal attraction to duty and responsibility.”

Although the Swede did suffer internal discontent and distress from time to time, he hid his misgivings from the world under his “insentient” external, and from himself by a self-imposed myopia that blurred and buried the more unpleasant aspects of the dream. The Swede “had no cause to be introspective”, and for much of his life, he could hold both his feelings and exterior challenges at bay. He avoided confrontation. He “clung to order and calm”. With minor hitches and a few bumps, he managed to maintain his fairy tale, that is, until his daughter Merry literally blew his life to smithereens. “At all costs, he kept chaos at bay. Merry was all chaos.”

III. The Fall and After the Fall

Fulfilling an essential requirement of a tragic hero, the Swede possessed a fatal flaw, but his was really a composite of characteristics. The Swede’s instinct was to be nice, to avoid confrontation, not to see and not listen to what was inconsistent with his construct of the American dream, and to maintain his self-restraint. These qualities of respectability and denial and were root causes of the conflagration that consumed his privileged life.

As with the arch-tragic hero, the Swede was unaware of these qualities could cause catastrophic damage. He believed in and relied upon “decorum and a false image of the United States.” He ignored those aspects of his family and work that were distressing and potentially destabilizing, those that were inconsistent with his views and beliefs. “He was unable to distinguish between cause and effect, so his fallback was tolerance.” “He never showed anything; no one knew who he was. He was unrevealed.” He was afraid of showing the beast and was incapable of revealing himself.” Zuckerman wrote that “this was the tragedy of a man not set up for tragedy, a man who had never asked why.” His fall was compared to Adam’s expulsion from paradise.

Despite his every attempt, he lost control. Stubborn to a fault in defending his worldview, his fallback position was to use his money, his intellect, and his force of character to confront life challenges. As Merry transitioned from her mother’s milkmaid to stuttering rebellious teen, he arranged access to the best professionals to help cure her stuttering. He ignored the root causes of her not-so-silent railings again his perfection, his impenetrable exterior.

Brutal assaults upon his life and insular perspective occurred most vividly through Merry. He could not control her, make her fit within his world.

Unlike his wife or his brother Jerry, he lacked the courage to view his circumstances without filters and to speak uncomfortable truths. Both Merry and Jerry sensed that a disconnect existed between Swede’s placid god-like exterior and his repressed emotions. Although Merry defied him by acting out, both issued blunt challenges for him to find and speak the truth and to show his “inner beast.”

Heroes fall when life presents them with more than even they can bear. The Swede was constantly aggravated by his impotence in controlling Merry; he could not make her fit within his world; he could not silence her demands that truth be spoken. Intolerable, heart-rending, and stunning events that occurred within one twenty-four-hour period caused the Swede’s fall. During that one day and night, he: found Merry who with exquisite quiet shook his very being; witnessed his wife committing adultery; and was the recipient of Jerry’s vitriolic condemnation.

Those twenty-four hours shocked him into abandoning “what appeared to be the good life to get down to his true self: a wholly deluded fuck-up.” “Someone who was abnormal because he was a stranger from real life.” “He confessed that he did not know where the truth lay even though he was seeing more possibilities.” With the entire enterprise of his life shattered, the Swede ranted about “his, and everyone’s lack of control” and that “all live under power of something demented.” Reflecting his intense despair, he spoke his truth: “…all was chaos.” He understood the “battering ram that was the world.”

Once a classic hero has an epiphany that enables him [the hero is almost always a male] to understand some ultimate truth, the hero usually dies. Although the Swede lived, he could not continue to do so with such elevated understanding. Yet something in the Swede had changed. He managed to create some type of understanding with Merry and continued to visit her until her death.

The rest was too much. In reaction to the shattering disorder that had ruptured his life, the Swede did what he knew best, he retreated to his old comfort level. He created another “perfect” and idealized reality, a new blond, younger “perfect” wife with three sons good for bragging rights. But he could not hold onto the ability to speak the truth. At the dinner that he arranged with Zuckerman, the Swede did not tell Zuckerman about Merry. On some level, the Swede might have known that his restructuring was no more than the sheerest of defenses against chaos. Yet no one, not even the heroic Swede, could live in a world where chaos reigned unabated.

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Can We Get Kids Off Smartphones?

By Jessica Winter

Illustration of a child standing on the screen of a cracked phone.

The exact causes of the Gen Z mental-health emergency will be parsed for years to come, but the severity of the crisis itself is, at this point, beyond question. Members of Gen Z, who were born between the mid-to-late nineties and the early twenty-tens, tend to be lonelier than the members of previous generations. They are more anxious and depressed; they get less sleep. They more commonly think that their lives hold no meaning. They are more likely to harm themselves or experience suicidal ideation. (Suicide deaths among children ages ten to fourteen more than doubled between 2007 and 2017.) They are more wary of, or just less interested in, the things that were once milestones of freedom: drinking, dating, having sex, getting driver’s licenses, moving out of their parents’ houses.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 or chat at 988Lifeline.org .

“On average,” the social psychologist and N.Y.U. professor Jonathan Haidt writes in “ The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness ,” “people born in and after 1996 were different, psychologically, from those who had been born just a few years earlier.” From childhood, Haidt suggests, they suffer from a weak “psychological immune system—the ability of a child to handle, process, and get past frustrations, minor accidents, teasing, exclusion, perceived injustices, and normal conflicts without falling prey to hours or days of inner turmoil.” This immunosuppression persists into adolescence and beyond, fostering higher proportions of nervous, avoidant young adults.

For Haidt, the explanation is partly cultural and partly technological. The oldest members of Gen Z were in middle school in 2009 and 2010, when Facebook added the Like button, Twitter added the Retweet option, and smartphones’ front-facing cameras became ubiquitous, launching the age of the selfie. The effect of these tools, Haidt writes, was to attach kids to “a firehose of social comparison” that pummelled their self-esteem at a critical moment of cognitive and psychological development. Studies show that, the more kids use social media , the more likely they are to experience anxiety and depression; girls, Black children, and L.G.B.T.Q. youth are hit hardest. (Boys over all, hypnotized by porn and video games, don’t fare hugely better than girls.) And constant discussion and self-diagnosis of mental-health disorders on TikTok, Instagram, and elsewhere may contribute to what two University of Oxford researchers call “ prevalence inflation ,” in which people mistake everyday stress and discomfort as signs of a serious disorder “in a way that is ultimately self-fulfilling.” As an example, the scholars note that “interpreting low levels of anxiety as symptomatic of an anxiety disorder might lead to behavioural avoidance, which can further exacerbate anxiety symptoms.”

By the time that smartphones and social media were becoming omnipresent, in the late two-thousands and early twenty-tens, children were also spending less and less time engaged in unstructured, largely unsupervised play with their peers. This deprivation owed to their parents’ concerns for their safety—a fretfulness known as “safetyism”—and to a competitive, college-fixated mind-set that prioritized adult-led, résumé-building, and “enrichment” activities. Unaccompanied kids doing normal kid things like walking home from school or visiting a playground became conspicuous, strange, perhaps even the subject of a 911 call or a C.P.S. investigation. The suburban or small-town nine-year-old who, a generation before, would have been running around outside with the other neighborhood kids all afternoon is now indoors, staring at her phone.

Alas, for her, children who miss out on free play are worse at taking risks, reading social cues, making friends, and resolving conflicts. Improvisational, unmonitored play functions as exposure therapy for life itself. In a commentary published last year in The Journal of Pediatrics which summarized the causal links between free play and mental health, the authors declared that “the decline in children’s independent activity and, hence, in mental wellbeing is a national and international health crisis and should be treated as such.”

Of course, fretting about the deficiencies of contemporary youth is an ancient tradition. Elders have always overreacted to the supposedly mind-altering properties of certain technological advancements, from the printing press to the television set. Haidt is one of America’s more prominent hand-wringers about kids these days, owing to a viral Atlantic piece that he co-authored, in 2015, with the attorney and free-speech activist Greg Lukianoff, headlined “The Coddling of the American Mind.” In that article, and in the 2018 book of the same name, Haidt and Lukianoff portrayed a bubble-wrapped generation that had been raised to be “fragile, anxious, and easily hurt,” and railed against what they identified as a student-directed movement “to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.” The corrosive cleaning agents, according to the authors, included trigger warnings, spurious talk of “microaggressions,” and demands for “safe spaces.” Haidt and Lukianoff argued that Gen Z victims of safetyism were also, in higher ed, its most aggressive perpetrators.

“The Coddling of the American Mind” was a somewhat better book than its reactionary title promised, but Haidt and Lukianoff’s reflexive disdain for left-leaning youth and weakness for caricature had a flattening effect on their analysis. Haidt had risen to public-intellectual fame in the early two-thousands via his work on positive psychology, but “Coddling” turned him into a folk hero in a frequently specious war against cancel culture, winning him fans among the revanchist likes of Joe Rogan, Bari Weiss , and Jordan Peterson. He has often taken a both-sides approach to political conflict that equates leftist activism with deadly right-wing extremism. (A section in “Coddling” that deals with the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally of white supremacists and the counter-demonstrators it drew, in Charlottesville, is an especially egregious example of this tendency.) He has been beset by a troubling fixation on the heritability of I.Q.—a contention widely dismissed as scientific racism—and the purported accuracy of stereotypes. He once argued against a proposal to diversify New York City’s specialized high schools, saying that it would exacerbate racism. On Twitter and Bluesky, I have frequently doomscrolled past the balding, scruff-bearded man who is the visual shorthand of the Clickhole classic “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point,” but I had never felt the heat of his proud, stoic gaze until I found myself nodding along in agreement with much of “The Anxious Generation.”

The cognitive dissonance is especially uncomfortable because “The Anxious Generation” is, to a considerable extent, a reiteration and expansion of “Coddling.” But it is also a vastly superior work. It’s less hung up on campus-outrage stuff, and it benefits from six additional years of research on how smartphones and social media dice the nerves and tamp the spirits of young people, particularly those between the ages of ten and fifteen. These established links are now the stuff of Surgeon General’s advisories , alarming C.D.C. reports , and class-action lawsuits . What was maybe still an educated guess even half a decade ago is now a grim, clinical certainty.

There is also a surprising degree of certainty about possible countermeasures for what Haidt sums up as “ overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world .” In “The Anxious Generation,” Haidt makes four core appeals to parents and educators: more unstructured free play for children, no smartphones before high school, no social media before age sixteen, and no phones in schools. All of these strike me as not just reasonable but irrefutably necessary. What is less clear is whether there is enough collective and institutional will to accomplish them.

During the past year, I’ve been interviewing parents who have attempted to block or strictly limit their tween and teen-age children’s use of smartphones and social media. Conversations with these parents—all of whom live in the New York City area, and whose kids attend a mix of public, charter, and private schools—hit common refrains. Parents worried about their kids saying or doing something foolish that, if captured and circulated via smartphone, would haunt them for the rest of their lives. They were infuriated that tech companies , abiding by federal law, effectively give kids online emancipation from their parents at the arbitrary and absurdly young age of thirteen and, even then, barely bother with age verification. (One talked about falsifying her kid’s birth date on Google’s Family Link in order to keep full control over the service.) They lamented the friction and distrust sown by devices—I heard about kids who kept surreptitiously changing the parental settings on their social media, or who have finstas full of duck face and provocation, or who sneak phones into their bedrooms and stay up with them all night.

A thread of safetyism still prevails among these parents. Some resisted buying their child a device but felt they had no choice once the kid started taking the subway or walking to school without adult accompaniment. And I was surprised by the extent to which G.P.S. location-tracking of kids is treated as a given, as ubiquitous and indispensable as backpacks and sneakers. Several parents said that they weren’t sure how to balance preserving their children’s privacy—their ability to have a sacred space carved out from their parents to grow into themselves—and monitoring their online and offline behavior in order to keep them safe. One told me, “I am definitely a helicopter parent, and my generation is full of helicopter parents, because we’ve given them access to this, like, horrifying void .”

These parents noticed how lonely their kids often seem to be, and how social media simultaneously fills and widens that emptiness. Although online forums can provide some of the togetherness that young people crave, ideally, Haidt writes, most of their interactions should unfold in person, unmediated by screens, which requires emotional effort and investment. In reading “The Anxious Generation” and speaking with parents, I frequently thought about what the late literary and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant called “the inconvenience of other people”—the “affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation. At a minimum, inconvenience is the force that makes one shift a little while processing the world.” Using your mind and body to interact extemporaneously with other minds and bodies is a skill that dulled during the pandemic; it can be boring, or frustrating, or distressing; it demands time, compromise, and accommodation. The inconvenient person, Berlant wrote, is “someone you trip over, even just in your mind.” Kids need to trip over people and ideas, at the risk of scraping up their psyches, in order to learn how to move through the world and how to connect meaningfully with the people in it.

Many teens are aware that smartphones disrupt their sleep, their moods, and their self-image, but they believe, as several parents told me, that giving up their phones would kill their social lives. Research has shown that, when adolescents abstain from social media for a while, their mental health improves even as their isolation from their friends who are still on the platforms increases; a smart, emotionally intelligent kid can recognize the merits of this trade-off and still choose to keep their TikTok and Snapchat accounts. (A University of Chicago working paper published last year found that fifty-seven per cent of college students who are active users of Instagram would “prefer to live in a world without the platform.”) One parent talked about her daughter’s experience at a prestigious summer program, where, not long after arriving, she found herself sitting with a group of other new arrivals; rather than getting acquainted, the rest of the kids were all staring at their phones, and she didn’t have one. She told her mother, “It was so stupid. But, in that moment, I wanted to be stupid, too.”

Several of the parents favorably mentioned the Wait Until 8th movement, which encourages parents to sign a pledge not to give their children smartphones until the end of eighth grade or later. But few parents expressed much hope about forging collective action against phones, in part because they didn’t know enough other families who were sufficiently informed or exercised about the risks. Haidt stresses that his core recommendations require commitment from a critical mass of parents, schools, and communities in order to weaken the network effects of social media and free teen-agers to pursue other means of fulfilling their God-given right to be stupid together. But achieving this threshold seems especially difficult in a large city. “There’s just no way—it’s too big a cohort, there’s no community, you don’t know who the parents are,” one mother told me. “Maybe in a smaller town.” Another mom was looking forward to summer, when her sixteen-year-old would be going to camp with seven friends; the parents all knew one another and had come to an agreement that none of the kids would bring their phones with them.

The overwhelming consensus among these parents was that schools should stringently limit or ban cell-phone use, a measure that has growing legal momentum in some states. Last year, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, signed a law that prohibits students’ use of cell phones during instructional time and curtails the use of TikTok in schools; just this week, he approved a law barring children under age fourteen from holding accounts on social-media platforms. Earlier this month, Indiana ’s governor, Eric Holcomb, signed a law requiring school districts to implement policies banning phones, tablets, and other devices in the classroom, with some exceptions. Last year, Utah sued TikTok and Meta for being addictive and harmful to children, and passed laws tightening age-verification and parental-consent requirements for social-media accounts; more recently, Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, has been urging principals and school-board members across the state to remove cell phones during class. At least three other states have introduced legislation that would require or incentivize schools to go phone free.

Individual schools that already enforce ironclad no-phones policies seem to be ecstatic about their results. Last year, the School of the Future, a public school in Manhattan, began requiring students to use Yondr phone-locking pouches for the entirety of the school day. In March, the administration sent an e-mail to parents describing the policy as a “massive success,” citing “increased student engagement in the classroom, less time spent in the bathrooms and hallways, more genuine connections within the community and a decrease in reports of cyberbullying.”

Surprisingly, though, the biggest opponents of the movement for phone-free schools are parents. In a truly apocalyptic essay for Slate titled “The Parents in My Classroom,” a ninth-grade English teacher in Evanston, Illinois, describes, among other abominations, a mother who expected her kid to text her every class period, a mother whose kid sent her a photograph of a quiz he was in the middle of taking (she immediately e-mailed the teacher to ask if her son could take it the next day), and parents who ran surveillance on their children’s classes via their school-issued Chromebooks. (One mother, during a discussion of “ Romeo and Juliet ,” fired off an e-mail with the subject line “I CAN HEAR EVERYTHING AND I DON’T LIKE IT.”)

Despite the general consensus about kids and phones, the increasing reliance of schools on tablets and laptops means that most students are simply trading one screen for another, with many remaining glued to some permutation of social media, video games, and their hovering parents. One mother told me that she smashed a laptop to pieces when she discovered that her daughter, who was forbidden to go on Instagram, had been using the platform to message friends during classes. “There is not one adult who will say, ‘Social media and constant phone use is good for our kids,’ ” this parent said. “And we’re not doing anything about it. It’s crazy.”

My children are seven and nine, not yet at the age when all of their friends have smartphones. My perhaps naïve hope rests in providing them enough freedom in the real world now so that they never lose their taste for it, lessening the chances that I will eventually lose them to the horrifying void. Last year, my older child began running errands around our Brooklyn neighborhood on her own: picking up a few items at the grocery store, dropping off a picture at the framing shop. She didn’t carry a phone or a G.P.S. tracker, and I didn’t worry about her getting lost or kidnapped. She was surrounded by what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street.” I considered the chances that a nosy stranger might call the cops about a solo child, but those odds struck me as low—mostly because my daughter is tall for her age, but also because the guys at the Dominican bodega knew her, and the guys at the Yemeni bodega knew her, and so did any number of neighbors she would pass on the sidewalks. The only possibility that really bothered me was the risk of her getting hit by a car. Sometime during the pandemic, the streets surrounding our apartment building had turned into a homicidal four-wide drag race. I warned her about an especially chaotic intersection, and she promised that she’d cross it only if other people were crossing at the same time—an ad-hoc buddy system.

The collective task of giving younger kids more physical and psychological space to roam is daunting. It would involve somehow loosening the grip of time-intensive competitive-sports programs on entire communities. It would require reversing decades-long trends not only in the privatization of public space but in housing, municipal planning, roadway design, and traffic-law enforcement, which have rendered the U.S. one of the least walkable developed countries in the world. It would also demand undoing the safetyist mind-set. However laissez-faire a parent might wish to be, if you drop off your capable third grader for an afternoon of free exploration around the Prospect Park ravine, you can expect some questioning from an officer of the Seventy-eighth Precinct later that day.

In “The Anxious Generation,” Haidt suggests one relatively easy remedy, realizable in the short term, that schools could take on themselves: opening their playgrounds after school for “mixed-age, ‘loose parts’ free play,” in which kids don’t have access to phones but otherwise have “nearly complete autonomy.” During these sessions, adults, like lifeguards, would “intervene only in the case of an emergency.” These play clubs are, of course, geographically constrained, and structured in their unstructuredness. Many schools may lack the right sorts of playgrounds or may be scared off by liability concerns. But it’s an idea—a start.

Haidt also praises “adventure playgrounds,” such as the Yard , on Governors Island, in New York City, a no-parents-allowed zone where children and teen-agers are provided with tools and materials such as wood, saws, hammers, nails, tires, paint, and fabric and given near-free rein to create and destroy. The Yard, which implicitly asks the question “What if ‘ Lord of the Flies ’ had worked out?,” was one of my kids’ favorite places in the whole city—my son would have gone every weekend if we could have managed all the ferrying—and I’ve never been inside it. A sign near the entrance reads “ YOUR CHILDREN ARE FINE WITHOUT ADVICE & SUGGESTIONS .”

Last summer, my kids and I moved away from the city, into a big house in a small town. As in many other American places, the residential streets are eerily quiet, even on the nicest afternoons, and much of family life revolves around organized sports. There’s an unfinished attic space above our garage, and, bored one afternoon in early spring, the kids wandered in and started tinkering. They ran the Shop-Vac over the floor and laid down a rug with a rainbow on it and hung a paper lantern from the low rafters. They found a pile of old wooden boards and some nails and started hammering the boards into the walls where insulation was exposed—a kind of discount shiplap. A friend who fixes up and sells houses for a living came over to make sure the space was properly ventilated. From time to time, he drops by and leaves little offerings at the attic door—a crate full of loose tools, a standing fan. I don’t go into the attic unless I’m invited.

The best day was when the kids found a bunch of old paint samples and painted the exterior attic door with a splotch of International Klein Blue that you can see from way up the street. There were still some loose boards lying around, so they painted those green and yellow and then hammered them into place—not the order of operations that I would have recommended, but I am not the one in charge. They banged away at it for hours while I sat inside, mostly undisturbed, reading about what comes next. ♦

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“American Pastoral” is a staggering misfire on two discrete levels. As an adaptation of the 1997 novel by Philip Roth , it is lead-footed and inept. The screenplay, by John Romano , treats the narrative in a way that strongly suggests what I hope was a willful misreading of the book. But even considered entirely separately from its source material, “American Pastoral” is hopelessly weak. It is a period piece with no sense of place, one whose sense of time is suggested only be vintage-store knick-knacks and staggeringly on-the-nose-musical choices. It is a movie that strands its excellent cast, which includes Jennifer Connelly , Peter Reigert, Dakota Fanning , Uzo Aduba and Molly Parker , in a series of emotional scenes that, linearity of narrative notwithstanding, seem to bear almost no relation to each other.

Which is the fault of the film’s director, Ewan McGregor , who also plays the male lead of the piece, Seymour “The Swede” Levov, a fellow whose seemingly charmed life falls apart in the social upheaval of the American ‘60s, during which time his troubled teen daughter Merry (Fanning) plants a bomb in their rural Jersey general store, kills a man, and goes on the lam. In Roth’s novel, The Swede’s sad story is begun by Nathan Zuckerman, a Roth surrogate, who spins a detailed tale of the industrious, striving Jews of 1940s Newark, New Jersey, and how The Swede, a star high school athlete whose light hair and blue eyes helped earn him that nickname, always did the right thing by everybody. Enlisting in the Marines when he didn’t have to, taking over his father’s glove business instead of turning pro, and so on. There were some gestures of rebellion: marrying a Gentile beauty queen, for instance. But in so many respects The Swede’s life was of the kind meant when one refers to “the American dream,” and in Roth’s book what that means for an American Jew is given very particular emphasis.

For the Scottish McGregor to play an American Jew, even one whose appearance did not fit the stereotype/norm, would be challenge enough on its own. That he is also making his directorial feature debut with this material is, well, curious. The opening scenes are handled with a certain conventional competence. David Straithairn, as Zuckerman, shows up at a high school reunion and runs into Jerry Levov, the Swede’s younger brother. He’s played by Rupert Evans , and in this scene he wears terribly unconvincing old-age makeup. Flashbacks to The Swede’s high-school glory follow. Then follows the introduction of McGregor’s young adult Swede, presenting his beauty-queen sweetheart Dawn (Connelly) to cantankerous father Lou (Reigert). So far, so adequate. Things begin to head south around the point The Swede and Dawn settle into the fictional town of Old Rimrock. “We can live where we want,” The Swede proclaims. “This is America.” Alexander Desplat’s score at this point starts sounding like phoned-in Aaron Copeland.

Roth’s book is a little more complex than most accounts of it will tell you. After the first couple of chapters, in which Zuckerman relates what he personally knows about The Swede and the events in his life, the remainder of the book subsists of material that Zuckerman admittedly makes up about the man and his story. It’s a form of meta narrative, and it goes a long way to making sense of characters that actually make little sense in a realistic narrative. One such character is Rita Cohen, a young radical who contacts The Swede after Merry has gone on the lam, and tortures the decent man with radical rhetoric and vehement sexual gameplaying. Rita makes sense as a Zuckerman projection: as a “real” character in this tragedy, she does not, but that doesn’t stop Romano and McGregor from presenting her as such. ( Valorie Curry , who plays the role, works hard to make her credible.)

By the time Rita shows up, the false notes have begun to drown out the true ones. Such as an argument between The Swede and Merry (Fanning) about politics that’s underscored by Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” a song that has by now lost all meaning as a signifier of the ‘60s or anything else for that matter. Similarly, the movie downplays the father-daughter relationship, throwing their verbal exchanges away and instead signaling Merry’s rebellion by having her play Jefferson Airplane records in her room too loud. Romano’s scenario gives more heft to the character of Dawn, but transforms her into something of a hateful harridan in the process. People who accept the contemporary caricature of Roth as a misogynist might not believe it, but the portrait of Dawn in the book is both more sympathetic and more empathetic to her resentment of having once been a beauty queen.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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American Pastoral (2016)

Rated R for some strong sexual material, language and brief violent images

126 minutes

Ewan McGregor as Seymour 'Swede' Levov

Jennifer Connelly as Dawn

Dakota Fanning as Merry Levov

Uzo Aduba as Vicky

David Strathairn as Nathan Zuckerman

Valorie Curry as Rita Cohen

Peter Riegert as Lou Levov

Rupert Evans as Jerry Levov

Molly Parker as Dr. Sheila Smith

Hannah Nordberg as Merry Levov (age 12)

Ewan McGregor
John Romano
Philip Roth

Original Music Composer

Alexandre Desplat
Melissa Kent

Director of Photography

Martin Ruhe

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Trump promotes Lee Greenwood's 'God Bless The USA Bible': What to know about the book and its long journey

Former president Donald Trump encourages supporters to buy Lee Greenwood's "God Bless The USA Bible," a project inspired by Nashville country musician's hit song.
Resurgent version of Greenwood's Bible project a modified version from original concept, a change that likely followed 2021 shake-up in publishers.

After years with few updates about Lee Greenwood’s controversial Bible, the project is again resurgent with a recent promotion by former President Donald Trump.

“All Americans need to have a Bible in their home and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump said in a video posted to social media Tuesday, encouraging supporters to purchase the “God Bless The USA Bible.” “Religion is so important and so missing, but it’s going to come back.”

Greenwood — the Nashville area country musician whose hit song “God Bless the USA” inspired the Bible with a similar namesake — has long been allies with Trump and other prominent Republicans, many of whom are featured in promotional material for the “God Bless The USA Bible.” But that reputational clout in conservative circles hasn’t necessarily translated to business success in the past, largely due to a major change in the book’s publishing plan.

Here's what to know about the Bible project’s journey so far and why it’s significant it’s back in the conservative limelight.

An unordinary Bible, a fiery debate

The “God Bless The USA Bible” received heightened attention since the outset due to its overt political features.

The text includes the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, Pledge of Allegiance, and the lyrics to the chorus to Greenwood’s “God Bless The USA.” Critics saw it as a symbol of Christian nationalism, a right-wing movement that believes the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation.

A petition emerged in 2021 calling Greenwood’s Bible “a toxic mix that will exacerbate the challenges to American evangelicalism.” From there, a broader conversation ensued about the standards by which publishers print Bibles.

Gatekeeping in Bible publishing

Greenwood’s early business partner on the project, a Hermitage-based marketing firm called Elite Source Pro, initially reached a manufacturing agreement with the Nashville-based HarperCollins Christian Publishing to print the “God Bless The USA Bible.”

As part of that agreement, HarperCollins would publish the book but not sell or endorse it. But then HarperCollins reversed course , a major setback for Greenwood’s Bible.

The reversal by HarperCollins followed a decision by Zondervan — a publishing group under HarperCollins Christian Publishing and an official North American licensor for Bibles printed in the New International Version translation — to pass on the project. HarperCollins said the decision was unrelated to the petition or other public denunciations against Greenwood’s Bible.

The full backstory: Lee Greenwood's 'God Bless the USA Bible' finds new printer after HarperCollins Christian passes

A new translation and mystery publisher

The resurgent “God Bless The USA Bible” featured in Trump’s recent ad is an altered version of the original concept, a modification that likely followed the publishing shake-up.

Greenwood’s Bible is now printed in the King James Version, a different translation from the original pitch to HarperCollins.

Perhaps the biggest mystery is the new publisher. That manufacturer is producing a limited quantity of copies, leading to a delayed four-to-six weeks for a copy to ship.

It’s also unclear which business partners are still involved in the project. Hugh Kirkman, who led Elite Service Pro, the firm that originally partnered with Greenwood for the project, responded to a request for comment by referring media inquiries to Greenwood’s publicist.

The publicist said Elite Source Pro is not a partner on the project and the Bible has always been printed in the King James Version.

"Several years ago, the Bible was going to be printed with the NIV translation, but something happened with the then licensor and the then potential publisher. As a result, this God Bless The USA Bible has always been printed with the King James Version translation," publicist Jeremy Westby said in a statement.

Westby did not have the name of the new licensee who is manufacturing the Bible.

Trump’s plug for the “God Bless The USA Bible” recycled language the former president is using to appeal to a conservative Christian base.

“Our founding fathers did a tremendous thing when they built America on Judeo-Christian values,” Trump said in his video on social media. “Now that foundation is under attack perhaps as never before.”

'Bring back our religion’: Trump vows to support Christians during Nashville speech

Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him at [email protected] or on social media @liamsadams.

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Book review: “American Pastoral” by Philip Roth
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COMMENTS

The Fierceness of Philip Roth
Photograph by Philip Montgomery. The summer before last, Philip Roth left his house in rural Connecticut to make one of his periodic raids on Babylon. He visited a few friends, got his hair cut ...
What Is Philip Roth's Best Book?
Tom Perrotta. Tony Luong for The New York Times. Philip Roth's final novel, " Nemesis ," is one of his somber masterpieces — smaller, more austere novels, composed in a minor key — a ...
The Secrets Philip Roth Didn't Keep
"American Pastoral" (1997) was a book about the way history, in this case, the chaos of the sixties and the Vietnam War, descends without notice on an upstanding citizen of a small New Jersey ...
Jane Smiley: 'I couldn't finish Philip Roth's American Pastoral. I
The Strays of Paris by Jane Smiley is published by Mantle on 18 February (£16.99). This article was amended on 11 February 2021. In American Pastoral it is the daughter who asks her father to ...
AMERICAN PASTORAL
Roth's elegiac and affecting new novel, his 18th, displays a striking reversal of form—and content—from his most recent critical success, the Portnoyan Sabbath's Theater (1995). Its narrator, however, is a familiar Rothian figure: writer Nathan Zuckerman (of The Ghost Writer, et al.)—and in case you're wondering whether he still seems to be his author's alter ego, Nathan is now in his ...
American Pastoral
University of Chicago Press, 359 pp., $30.00 (paper) Jonathan Raban. Jonathan Raban's books include Surveillance, My Holy War, Arabia, Old Glory, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Bad Land, Passage to Juneau, and Waxwings. His most recent book is Driving Home: An American Journey, published in 2011. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics ...
American Pastoral by Philip Roth: Summary and reviews
The New York Times Book Review, Michael Wood American Pastoral is a little slow--as befits its crumbling subject, but unmistakably slow all the same--and I must say I miss Zuckerman's manic energies. But the mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable, and you have only to pause over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated ...
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
3.94. 79,825 ratings5,921 reviews. Pulitzer Prize Winner (1998) 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 ...
American Pastoral
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 ...
The Trouble With Swede Levov
The rest is his dreamed chronicle. In and out of Zuckerman's mind the story hinges on Swede's 16-year-old daughter, Merry, an only, pampered child, who has fallen in with a section of the Weathermen and blown up a rural post office, killing a doctor who happened to be mailing his bills. The time is 1968.
in Philip Roth's American Pastoral
12Todd Gitlin, "Weather Girl," review of American Pastoral , The Nation, 12 May 1997, pp. 63-64. 13Louis Menand, "The Irony and the Ecstasy: Philip Roth and the Jewish Atlantis," review of American Pastoral , The New Yorker , 19 May 1997, pp. 88, 90-94; here p. 94. 14Edward Alexander, "Philip Roth at Century's End," review of American Pastoral ...
Philip Roth: American Pastoral
Demob Happy, I'm afraid to say that my experience with Roth is limited to the "Zuckerman Bound" books and American Pastoral and Everyman, so while I can pick my favorite, it might change when I've made it through the rest of his books. As for now I'll give you my three favorites: The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Bound, and American Pastoral.
Michiko Kakutani on Philip Roth's 'American Pastoral'
Three of his novels, The Ghost Writer, Operation Shylock: A Confession and Letting Go, had been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction before American Pastoral won the 1998 prize. Anyone who read Michiko Kakutani's review of the novel in The New York Times on April 15, 1997, might have known the prize was coming. She praised the book as ...
American Pastoral
Rob Nixon reviews book The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg; drawing (M) ... American Pastoral. Share full article. By Rob Nixon. Dec. 1, 2002 ... as well as a few from The New Yorker, GQ and ...
A Postwar Paradise Shattered From Within
By Philip Roth. 423 pages. Houghton Mifflin Company. $26. (C14) Back in 1960, Philip Roth gave a speech in which he argued that American life was becoming so surreal, so stupefying, so maddening ...
Review: 'American Pastoral,' Philip Roth's Fiery 1960s at Low Heat
Richard Foreman/Lionsgate. American Pastoral. Directed by Ewan McGregor. Crime, Drama. R. 1h 48m. By Stephen Holden. Oct. 20, 2016. First, the half-good news about Ewan McGregor's streamlined ...
Miss America turns bomber. Do you still blame the parents?
Do you still blame the parents? Tim Adams reviews American Pastoral by Philip Roth. Jonathan Cape, £15.99, pp432. Sun 25 May 1997 11.55 EDT. H aving spent a good part of two decades scrutinising ...
'American Pastoral' Review: Ewan McGregor Mis-Adapts Philip Roth's
The Depression was over.". Thus, within the first minute of "American Pastoral," the voice of Philip Roth 's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1997 novel becomes that of an elderly spouse explaining ...
Amitava Kumar and the Novel of the Translated Man
By James Wood. April 1, 2024. Kumar's details have the vitality of invention and the resonance of the real; the novel's recounting of life is also its justification of its own existence as a ...
American Pastoral Book Review
American Pastoral is Philip Roth's twentieth of twenty-seven novels. It was published in 1997 and won the Pulitzer Prize the next year. It has 520 reviews on Amazon, mostly five-star but the novel also has a few snarky one- and-two-star reviews, one of which quipped that American Pastoral was the best book of all time on glove making.
Can We Get Kids Off Smartphones?
Haidt is one of America's more prominent hand-wringers about kids these days, owing to a viral Atlantic piece that he co-authored, in 2015, with the attorney and free-speech activist Greg ...
American Pastoral movie review (2016)
American Pastoral. "American Pastoral" is a staggering misfire on two discrete levels. As an adaptation of the 1997 novel by Philip Roth, it is lead-footed and inept. The screenplay, by John Romano, treats the narrative in a way that strongly suggests what I hope was a willful misreading of the book. But even considered entirely separately ...
Book Review: 'The Anxious Generation' by Jonathan Haidt
Imagine that your 10-year-old daughter gets chosen to join the first human settlement on Mars. She's ready to blast off but needs your permission.
The Trouble With Swede Levov
Swede is alive when the story opens, dead soon after. Zuckerman picks up a few details of his life at the reunion, notably from Swede's ferocious brother, a bullying cardiac surgeon in Miami. The ...
Trump Bible: Journey behind Lee Greenwood's 'God Bless the USA Bible'
A new translation and mystery publisher. The resurgent "God Bless The USA Bible" featured in Trump's recent ad is an altered version of the original concept, a modification that likely ...
Trump's Newest Venture? A $60 Bible.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, added a new item to the list: a $60 Bible. Days before Easter, Mr. Trump posted a video on his social media platform in ...

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American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997) Vintage (1998) 432 pp

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