American Pastoral Themes

We get a whole lot of the good ol' US of A in American Pastoral (just check out the title!). Our tour d'America spans an entire century, from the 1890s to the 1990s. We briefly focus on the World W...

American Pastoral, like a bunch of Philip Roth's novels, is obsessed with miscommunications. We get the stuttering of Merry Levov, Zuckerman's reunion-speech-that-never-was, and the media that help...

One of Tolstoy's most famous quotes is that "Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."It's safe to say that American Pastoral's Levov clan is one of a kind—th...

We go from the "USA! USA!" fervor that followed America fighting the good fight in WWII all the way to the decidedly less enthusiastic response toward American involvement in Vietnam. American Past...

American Pastoral is steeped in politics, and you can find something super-political on nearly every page. Through the eyes of the Swede, the novel questions the extent to which politics impacts ou...

American Pastoral looks at America over a hundred years, focusing primarily on the Vietnam era. When Merry Levov bombs the post office of her small New Jersey town, her dad's life is divided into "...

Aging author Nathan Zuckerman is interested in finding out what goes beneath the "perfect" surface of main character, the Swede, his childhood idol and the hero of their predominantly Jewish Weequa...

At its most basic, American Pastoral asks the question "Why does Merry Levov turn into a bomb-detonating killer and then an emaciated recluse?" What went wrong? Who is to blame?From the point of vi...

American Pastoral is all about worship, from formal religions to greed, wealth, power, and the struggle for freedom. It also tackles the question of Dawn and the Swede's inter-religious marriage.Se...

American Pastoral is both a chronicle of an American family in turmoil and a novel about writing novels. When aging author Nathan Zuckerman (Philip Roth's alter ego) starts obsessing over the inner...