So, I just finished Philip Roth's American Pastoral. Hmmm...when I think of "pastoral," I think of Beethoven's 6th symphony, pretty cute cupids flying around, hearts and flowers(yay Fantasia!), of peaceful things like trickling streams...That, of course is the irony of Roth's title...his character Seymour "Swede" Levov is living the peaceful American life: he is a blond-haired Jew, who has fulfilled his bargain in the American dream; he was a sports star in high school, went to college and did very well, inherited his father's business, ran it successfully, married Miss New Jersey(who albeit it is a Catholic) and had a beautiful baby girl. Unfortunately, this bouncing baby girl grew up to build a bomb at the age of 16 and blow up the local post office/convenience store, killing the local doctor. Then the girl disappears, going underground to avoid capture by the FBI...The book is mainly about Swede and his inability to deal with the loss of his daughter and the following destruction of his marriage and his sanity. He is filled with a great deal of hindsight, all the what ifs...it reminds me a lot of my parents, especially my mom, who always seems to propose those kinds of questions, though unlike the Swede who carries out the dialogue internally, my mother asks these questions directly of me, the culprit...You see, it is I who now carries the much tossed around crown of being the black sheep of the family...my sister used to wear it proudly, causing a rift in the family not unlike what will happen to California if we get that really huge earthquake that the scientists are promising...but now that she's cleaned herself up and become the upstanding heterosexual "Jenny from the block" so to speak, it's my job to be the black sheep...my mother is constantly full of the what ifs: What if I had done this differently? Would you be straight? What if I had done that differently? Would you be a lawyer? How annoying is that? Also, she seems to be ignoring who I am and only focusing on the "what should have been." Seymour Levov does much of the same, for over 400 pages. What he seems to not get, even by the end, is the fact that so much of our lives and the ones that touch our own, is completely out of our control, especially when it comes to raising children. We are at the mercy of what we give birth to, it is unfortunately not the other way around. And, giving birth to children is the ultimate Russian roulette...This book portrays an interesting snapshot of America during the Vietnam war and how people may or may not have reacted and how divided the country was. Merry(Levov's daughter) acts before she is legal on her beliefs and protests the war, like many did at the time, in all kinds of different ways. Okay, enough of the plot summary...Philip Roth has written a lot of books(this is his 22nd book), and obviously someone out there likes him, because he's been published...I've heard through the grapevine that his early books include a lot of scenes of male masturbation, so he's never really been high on my list of people to read(because you know how men turn me on;)), and now that I've read American Pastoral, I think I'm okay with not reading any of his others(unless they come highly recommended). The biggest problem with was that to me it seemed like a really good idea for a book that could have been written way better. It dragged on A LOT. It got better by the end, and I can't say I hated it, because I really liked some of the parallels to Milton(the section headings, and the fact that Levov is so figuratively blind to the world around him, much like Milton was literally blind), but I mean, really...The first section is told from the point of view of an unreliable, biased(stars in his eyes) kind of narrator who "imagines" this man's life after he finds out about the terrorist daughter and then proceeds to write a "novel" about it. It took to long to get to the "novel" part. The other thing I was thinking about constantly was how would I react to this book if I was a boy? Would I like it any better? I'm finding that I like books written by men less than books written by women...Overall, I would like to think that I'm pretty even across the board in terms of favorites by both sexes, but lately I've been reading my fair share of books by men and have not really been feeling it. I think if I was a father, maybe with this novel I would have more to relate to(or at the very least a middle-aged male, of which I'm neither of course). My favorite part of the book oddly enough was when, in a flashback, Levov's then to-be wife and his father get into a discussion of religion and how a grandchild will be raised...it's super funny because it's all done negotiation style...and the grandfather to-be insists that his grandchild is not going to "EAT JESUS" over and over again. This, unfortunately came towards the end of the book. So, final verdict on American Pastoral? Meh...Perhaps I'll do better with The Hours. GG's 25, Pulitzers 23...