Vintage recently released all 31 of Philip Roth’s novels late in 2016, as film adaptations of Indignation and the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (directed by and starring Ewan McGregor) also surfaced. American Pastoral is an enduring classic from the author who won the International man Booker Prize in 2011.
McGregor played Seymour “Swede” Levov, the one-time high school star athlete turned successful businessman who inherits his father’s glove factory. Sophisticated, benignly tolerant by disposition and handsome to boot, Swede is thus enabled to settle his family in a relatively opulent, reasonably carefree life in the beautiful house in New Jersey.
In the film, Jennifer Connelly played Dawn Dwyer Levov, the former beauty queen who is married to Seymour. Dakota Fanning played Merry Levov, the daughter who goes missing before she commits a grave act of political terrorism. The year is 1968 and several innocent people are killed when they become victims in a bombing campaign in which the 16-year old participates. Merry, so idolised by her father, forces the family out of their respectable comfort zone by her actions and dismantles the idyll, so carefully nursed into being by Seymour and Dawn.
So much for the film which was not universally welcomed, to say the least. “Lax pacing, airless direction and disastrous central casting, “ ran the strap-line for Jordan Hoffman’s review in The Guardian last September.
The New York Times had little mercy either. "The movie is not a desecration but a severe diminution of a complex literary masterpiece, " wrote Stpehen Holden. "This shallow but watchable gloss on a book that conjures a searing image of the disintegrating American dream in the 1960s, especially as it pertains to Jewish identity and aspiration, amounts to not much more than a dutiful checklist of scenes from the novel. And its elegiac tone omits Mr. Roth’s bitterly sarcastic humour."
All the more reason then, given the slating, why discerning fans of American fiction should look to this one for their next choice and if they are in a Book Club, then let it be the choice for discussion, given that we are all talking about America anyway.
In sum, Roth’s novel deserves to be read by anyone interested in contemporary American affairs. It's an object lesson in how the American dream can turn sour, an earlier instalment in that country’s long-running see-saw story of hope and disillusionment.
Paddy Kehoe
