Word: rothã
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Instead of sensing an “aftertaste of tired irony,” I was deeply affected by Roth??s novel and have reflected on it for years after my first reading. Coincidently, I began to read McCarthy’s “The Road” and never finished it; however, I would never write a review without completing it. Give “American Pastoral” a chance and don’t be so lazy...
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...
...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. The overbearing irony of Roth??s enervated vision of America might easily fatigue his reader...