Word: nether
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...immediately overwhelmed by its heavy fog of exhausted and demoralized irony. “American Pastoral” is replete with characters who lack consequential or connected outer lives, and who also lead hollow and phlegmatic inner lives. These characters are trapped in listless, “nether lives,” in which neither their exterior jobs nor their interior fantasies and dreams inspire them...
...class conception of the “American Dream.” The comfortable amenities of bourgeois existence have drained the characters of meaningful “substrata” as well as worthwhile exterior vocations. While Roth successfully dramatizes how American values leave his characters trapped in hollow nether lives, all the reader is left with is an aftertaste of tired irony. None of the characters share any significant connections with other people. “American Pastoral” shows a bitter landscape of spiritual aridity in which Roth’s sardonic probing almost dehumanizes his characters...