I love reading stories of the American experience and Philip Roth continues to be one of my favorite at telling those stories. This is another of his books that expertly weaves in a fictional life as part of the historical narrative of the USA. I felt as if I was on that porch listening to Murray Ringold tell the captivating story and didn't want him stop for rest for either of us as well. The phrase from the book that feels the best life advice to me - "Beware the utopia of isolation."

Everyone is an intellectual in this book and for a non intellectual as myself it’s exhausting!

Didn’t finished. American Pastoral (book #1 of this series) was a lot better

I forgot how much I really love Philip Roth. This is my favorite book of the series—why did I let someone convince me to skip it?

After a seriously sluggish start, this turned into my favorite Roth so far. The resonances with today’s politics, the presentation of multiple points of view, the personal tragedies, the intellectual coming of age and failure to fully arrive, the novel’s construction was a deft threading of the personal and the ideological.

I marked so many passages but this one bears some updating:

“McCarthy understood better than any American politician before him that people whose job was to legislate could do far better for themselves by performing; McCarthy understood the entertainment value of disgrace and how to feed the pleasures of paranoia. He took us back to our origins, back to the seventeenth century and the stocks. That’s how the country began: moral disgrace as public entertainment.”

We have passed from that world into one that harks even further back in time. A significant portion of the American people have moved on from the stocks to the coliseum. They cheer for the amoral emperor to feed the righteous to the lions.

“Occasionally now, looking back, I think of my life as one long speech that I've been listening to. The rhetoric is sometimes original, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes pasteboard crap (the speech of the incognito), sometimes maniacal, sometimes matter-of-fact, and sometimes like the sharp prick of a needle, and I have been hearing it for as long as I can remember: how to think, how not to think; how to behave, how not to behave; whom to loathe and whom to admire; what to embrace and when to escape; what is rapturous, what is murderous, what is laudable, what is shallow, what is sinister, what is shit, and how to remain pure in soul.”

Philip Roth’s tragic tale of marital betrayal amidst the Red Scare of postwar America is a work that seems to attempt to surpass David Cronenberg’s ‘The Brood’ in ex-wife spite.

Roth was writing from a place of unhealthy cognitive dissonance or disturbing self-awareness (or both).