Word: novels
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...contrast to “American Pastoral,” Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” has room for love, purpose, and human heroism despite being set in a post-apocalyptic world. “The Road” centers on a father and son who try to survive while traveling through a ravaged American landscape that has been destroyed by some unspecified disaster. Both the inner and outer lives of the father and son are essential to the novel’s message. The external scenes where the pair hide from...
Though I only read the first section of Roth’s novel, I was 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...
...novel is narrated by Roth’s authorial alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who examines his high school’s star athlete—a man nicknamed “the Swede” (although he, like the narrator, is Jewish). On the very first page Roth explains that the Swede gave the neighborhood the chance to “enter into a fantasy about itself and about the world.” Zuckerman explains, “Our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopes...
...dinner conversation dramatizes Roth’s self-destructive tension between the inner and outer life, which paralyzes the novel. Ironically, Zuckerman himself lacks a self-sufficient inner life and must search for the nonexistent inner life of the Swede to justify his own mental existence. While the Swede hopes to resolve the troubles of his inner life with the accomplishments of the outer life, the remaining characters are cut off from meaningful action...
...warming. Riding on the coattails of his own youthful contribution to Einstein’s groundbreaking work, Beard is thoroughly dissatisfied with his life and disillusioned with the society that continues to laud him for the sole professional achievement he made decades ago. Ian McEwan’s latest novel introduces Beard just as his fifth marriage is dissolving, when an accident provides him with a final chance at personal and professional redemption as an advocate for the health of the planet. While providing a comedic portrait of global warming as a political issue, “Solar?...