Black Beard’s Review of Books No One Wants to Read: American Pastoral

I like to buy books for people as gifts.  I do this with the awareness that most of the books I purchase will never be finished and most likely not even begun.  I don’t know what it is about me—whether buying books or writing in this space—that instills me with the compulsion to thrust things upon people that they have no interest in.  Perhaps it’s the challenge.  The more esoteric my subject, the more intent I become on exploring its intricacies with my unwilling participants.

Perhaps this is why I enjoy teaching; I can’t think of a group who could be more indifferent about the exquisite crafting of “The Dead” than a class of twenty year old college students, half asleep and hung over on a Thursday afternoon from three straight nights of partying.  Man, that’s funny because it’s true.  Or am I only bitter about having gone to a big, state school?

A book can also be problematic because it’s one of the most suggestive gifts you can buy for a person, right up there with a treadmill or a bottle of liquor.[i] For example, if I buy someone a novel by Dostoevsky, what does that gift reflect about the way I view that person?  (I know, for most of you, the first answer that comes to mind is the gift of a Russian novel can only be meant to say, “I hate you”).  But I’m not the kind of person who would buy an I’m-only-giving-this-to-you-because-you’re-so-ignorant-that-I-feel-I-must-force-culture-on-you-for-your-own-good book as a gift.  Honestly, I never give anyone something to read that I think they won’t enjoy or find too laborious.[ii] I do, however, enjoy giving people books I expect they would’ve never discovered on their own.

This year I gave two such books away as Christmas gifts.  The first was Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, which is probably the best title for an autobiography ever.  I won’t write about Speak, Memory here since I haven’t in fact read it (an admission I don’t mind making because I know you haven’t either).  But the second book, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, I would love to talk about.  Now, I should tell you upfront that I tend to talk about Roth the same way potheads talk about the shape, color, and smell of expensive weed: ecstatically.  But American Pastoral is the best book I’ve read by Roth, who to me, is the best living prose writer, American or otherwise.  This is not something I could’ve claimed fifteen years ago.  Roth’s career is interesting in that he found early success—he was given the National Book Award in the sixties—and then seemed to fade out of the literary scene for a time.  But unlike writers of his generation with similar career arcs—say, Saul Bellow or J.D. Salinger—Roth returned later to publish his self-described “American trilogy” and secure his position as one of the prominent writers of the past fifty years.

American Pastoral, the middle book of the American Trilogy, is an excellent example of the level to which Roth’s writing has risen.  The novel is relentlessly detailed, maintains perfect pace and rhythm, and renders, in Swede Levov, an absolutely perfect metaphor for the slow dissolution of the industrious and promising America that existed post-World War II.

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[i] Perhaps I’m a little too straight edged, but giving someone a bottle of liquor as a gift seems like a pretty damning statement about the receiver.  Here is the exchange that leads to the buying of liquor as a gift:

Guy in my office: Man, I just can’t think of what to get my buddy so-and-so for Christmas.

Me: What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of him?’

Guy in my office (after thinking for a moment): When I think of so-and-so, I think of a whole fifth of whiskey.

Me: Wow, really? Well, I guess you have your answer.

[ii] See Posting dated December 22, 2009: Black Beard’s Review of Books No One Wants to Read: Ulysses.