American Pastoral

Wow -- okay, it isn't exactly the review that you came here for, but this was a wow read, and completes my "Journey Into the World of Roth" for this vacation. American Pastoral is one of the few Pulitzer winners in past years that I let slip by me, and I let my negative feelings for Roth get in the way of a great and powerful book. The thing that really got me today was the role of the narrator -- I'd love to teach how this narrator establishes himself and then works to establish the world of the novel. By the end, we forget that the world that he has been reporting is a fiction; he states that he can only hope to understand the world of Swede and then spends the novel replacing the idea of Swede in his mind with this fiction. A profound piece of writing!