Name: American Pastoral
ISBN: 9780525432838

Philip Roth

"Now a major motion picture"--Front cover.

American Pastoral

Emmett

'He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one's history.'

This monumental account of the erosion of hard work and American-made industry and the descent into 'fast fashion' and violent radicalism in the name of pacifism would, perhaps, resonate with many Americans in 2019. To call it plainly nostalgia would be an injustice to Roth's immersiveness; the the reader encounters the deep knowledge of glove-making and the retail business, no theory but the craftsman's sort of know-how that is inseparable from respect and love of the work of one's hands, like an art. He gets close to the heart, to skill that is at last shaped like instinct because this is how deeply it has been embedded in the man who practices it. And through that minute dedication to detail in all things, he gets to the heart of man. It is page after page of earth-shattering beauty in every occasional meander, whether it is about sport, or leatherwork. Roth is the close cousin of William Carlos Williams (quoted) or Seamus Heaney, returning the pin-pricks of pain and yet dignity to the small, reviving the complex threads of regret and guilt.

'American Pastoral' conjures up two things. One, the centralisation of place; this is a story that is unique and responds to America; it is rooted in that particular time and space, formed out of that political and economic climate, and its trajectory (from bliss and innocence that once shattered turns only to horrible clarity) obtains perfect coherence only in that particular people. Two, the pastoral as symbolic both of a lost and recreated, beautiful past, but also of its illusion, something recreated seeking to be perfect based on something that may have never existed. The pastoral exists in a mist of idealism and yearning but also ironically, a place to plant oneself and one's ideals. The pastoral brings to mind also the Fall, from grace, from glory, into an uncertain, treacherous, permanently broken present.