American Pastoral

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Roth, Philip	4-week checkout	Due 04-23-2024
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Roth, Philip	4-week checkout	Due 05-07-2024

"Originally published in hard cover in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, in 1997"--T.p. verso.
An ordinary man finds that his life has been made extraordinary by the catastrophic intrusion of history when, in 1968 his adored daughter plants a bomb that kills a stranger, hurling her father out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

thought provoking submitted by EJZ on July 21, 2018, 1:36pm Very interesting book. Two books really, the first 1/4 of it about a writer searching for meaning, looking back on his life, and the last 3/4 telling up the story of a family that is torn apart by the steep generational divide of the late 1960s. through the family, we see an insight into the massive shift in values and beliefs that America underwent.

But the message I really came away with is just how little we know each other, or even ourselves. Roth repeatedly emphasizes how, over and over again, the characters misjudge the content of each others' inner selves, and are living inner private lives wildly different than their outer appearances and actions show. It was something I've certainly thought about in the past, and Roth puts it in focus, and gives words to the gaps between existence and understanding that we come across on a daily basis.