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A book review of Philip Roth’s Pulitzer-Prize winning American Pastoral<\/em>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the early 1960s and your life is so good that it is not the stuff of literature.<\/p>\n So you\u2019re a blond-god star athlete, running a factory you inherited from your father (and doing a good job of it). You\u2019re liked and desired by everyone, but faithful to your beauty-pageant-winning wife. You\u2019ve got a great house in the countryside of New Jersey and a little girl who adores you. It\u2019s the early 1960s and your life is so good that it is not the stuff of literature except maybe for pastoral, the genre of poetry that celebrates happy rural life. This is how Philip Roth\u2019s 1998 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel begins.<\/p>\n Unexpectedly, something goes hideously wrong with your perfect universe. Is it cancer? No, everybody dies of something and you are not afraid of death. It\u2019s far worse than cancer. Your daughter, intelligent but stuttering, hits puberty and becomes the adolescent from hell. She is angry about the Vietnam War and about complacent capitalists at home. She back-talks you incessantly. She wants to stay overnight in New York City when she\u2019s 15, crashing with a radical couple she\u2019s just met up with.<\/p>\n But wait, it gets worse. She decides it\u2019s time to \u201cbring the war home,\u201d as New Leftists said about their demonstrations. So at the age of 16, she plants a bomb in the local post office and blows it up. It\u2019s the middle of the night, but what she didn\u2019t plan on was the kindly local doctor being there to mail a letter. He is killed instantly. And now your daughter is a murderer and a fugitive.<\/p>\n Although the book is a little slow getting through Seymour\u2019s youth, once it gets to Merry\u2019s adolescence and misdeed (later, misdeeds), it does not just sizzle, it sears. It takes the agony of this decent but limited man and makes it into art that resonates.<\/p>\n Despite appearances, this is not a tale set in a malevolent universe. It is not saying that happiness is an illusion. Rather, it acknowledges a simple fact of the world that if you have children they are independent beings who will have the power to rip you apart. If you can\u2019t deal with this fact, don\u2019t have children. The ironically-titled American Pastoral<\/em> takes this point and sharpens it like a scalpel.<\/p>\n<\/a>This is the story of Seymour Levov, a second-generation American Jew with looks so Nordic that everyone calls him the Swede. His daughter is Merry. Well, actually, she\u2019s anything but merry; it\u2019s short for Meredith. The Swede spends the rest of his days after the cataclysm trying to figure out what went wrong, to deal with the consequences, to find his daughter and maybe, somehow to get on with his life.<\/p>\n