American Pastoral

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction 1998

American Pastoral is perhaps Philip Roth’s masterpiece. Slipping into his Zuckerman sequence (briskly followed by I Married a Communist in the following year), the novel charts the slow-motion destruction of a once-ideal life.

Narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, American Pastoral focuses on Seymour "Swede" Levov, the son of a successful glove manufacturer whose business he eventually inherits. Handsome, wealthy, his story is the American Dream made real.

However, all that is shattered by the political radicalisation of his daughter, a girl outraged by the horrors of the Vietnam war. To his abject horror, her role in an act of extreme, home-turf terrorism rips his life apart: American Pastoral unpicks that downfall, the Swede’s story partly seen through the prism of his younger brother Jerry and Zuckerman’s own encounters with this most tragic of figures.

Sweeping in the political anarchy and sadness of post-Vietnam America, Roth vividly captured the end of a certain innocence, when 60s idealism was swept aside by dark and unstoppable forces.