October 2013 Guest Editor Linwood Barclay on American Pastoral by Philip Roth... Okay, not a crime novel. I came to Roth late. Everyone else was reading him back when he wrote the outrageous Portnoy's Complaint, but I only discovered him about ten years ago, with The Plot Against America. But American Pastoral is, for me, his masterwork, and maybe one of the best books I've ever read. Roth packs more into a paragraph than other writers pack into an entire book. I'm glad you don't have to be this good to get published.
Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, grows up in the booming post-war 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. His teenage daughter has become capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism, wrenching Swede out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American beserk.
'Full of insight, full of sharp ironic twists, full of wisdom about American idealism, and full of terrific fun...A profound and personal meditation on the changes in the American psyche over the last fifty years' Financial Times
'Utterly tragic and compelling. It’s one of the greatest modern American novels.' - Tatler
Author
About Philip Roth
In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years 'for the entire work of the recipient'. In 2011 Philip Roth was awarded the International Man Booker Prize.
