Date: 24 June 2018
Location: Bonnie
Meeting at Bonnie’s on a not too hot June late afternoon, allowed us to enjoy the setting of her home in fields of grass and close up flowers. You can always tell at a glance how much Bonnie enjoys establishing the setting, as the inside of the house was even more inviting that the outside – she does set a pretty table that made us want to linger together as we savored our fine meatloaf and each others’ company.
To quote Wikipedia, 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 a manifestation of the “indigenous American berserk“.”
Our memories of the times varied from watching it on television to living it in San Francisco. Roth’s understanding of the period hit us in the gut. The majority of us enjoyed Roth’s prose even if there were a few of us who wanted him to get on with the story. He wandered in his story telling, writing out lots of details- “stabbing the reader in the face with a fork.”
Our group was separated by those who read for the story verse those reading for words. This book spoke to the need for beautifully constructed words. We stayed because we were pulled into the story. It told of a secret personal connection to someone who was worshiped from afar by a 10 year old, and then told of the grownup child’s need to see beneath the perfect looking surface to the imperfection of the grownup’s life. It reminded one that things of vital importance are really hard to handle.
I saw parallels between the terrorists of the 60’s and those of today – but I wanted to see more idealism in the 60’s because I was such an idealist then. Yet, Roth in the scene of Levov with Rita Cohen at the hotel, allows the idealist to spout rhetoric with little basis in fact equal to what I hear today.
One of my favorite quotes was, “No one get through {life} unmarked by brooding, grief, confusion and loss. Even those who had it all as kids sooner or later get the average share of misery if not sometimes more.” Bonnie noted the following quote; “ Thanksgiving is ….the moratorium of all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.”
American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and was included in TIME’s List of the 100 Best Novels. The film rights to it were later optioned, though a film version was not made until 2016. In 2006, it was one of the runners-up to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, in the “What is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?” contest held by the New York Times Book Review.
It was made into a movie in 2016 that can be downloaded from Amazon Prime.
—gina