Volume 44, Number 10 · June 12, 1997
Paradise Lost
By Elizabeth Hardwick
American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, 423 pp., $26.00
American Pastoral is Philip Roth's twentieth work of fiction—an accretion of creative energy, a yearly, or almost, place at the starting line of a marathon. But his is a one-man sprint with the signatures, the gestures, the deep breathing, and the repetitiveness, sometimes, of an obsessive talent. Roth has his themes, spurs to his virtuoso variations and star turns in triple time. His themes are Jews in the world, especially in Israel, Jews in the family, Jews in Newark (New Jersey); fame, vivid enough to occasion impostors (Operation Shylock); literature, since the narrators, or, if you like, the performers are writers, actually one writer, Philip Roth, winking under whatever dark-glasses alias. And sex, anywhere in every manner, a penitential workout on the page with no thought of backaches, chafings, or phallic fatigue. Indeed the novels are prickled like a sea urchin with the spines and fuzz of many indecencies.
Review, 5043 words
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