The Review of Contemporary Fiction
American Pastoral by Philip RothJohn O'Brien
Philip Roth. American Pastoral. Houghton Miffiin, 1997. 423 pp. $26.00.
I have never been a great Roth fan, with the exception of Portnoy. American Pastoral contains most of what I don’t like in him, but what a dumbbell like Tom Wolfe would like: the big story, the big slice of American life, the panorama, the story, the story, the story, the flesh and blood, a big novel with big themes, the humanness of it all! Four hundred plus pages to explore at leisure the life and times of a high school sports hero from New Jersey, or the decline and fall of same, or whatever, as narrated by Zuckerman himself. Did I mention that this is told to us at a very leisurely pace? A great deal of leisure. If Roth cannot get his Manhattan right, God only knows how he might have butchered Jersey. But why should this matter in a novel of such breadth and depth? And real human feeling? And sophistication? [John O’Brien]