Nathan zuckerman, another self of Philip Roth in the past forty years, is uneasily entering old age. Now, zuckerman, like E.I. Lonoff, his young mentor in The Ghost Writer, has become a literary hermit. He has survived prostate cancer (though it is not without ironic complications in view of his notorious past). As mentioned at the beginning of the novel, he has once again returned to his schooldays in Newark, New Jersey. The equipment here is a class reunion, a gathering of former athletes, beautiful women and outsiders, which has been transformed into an incredible snapshot of their own immigrant grandparents by time. Zuckerman was most surprised to find Jerry Levov there. Now a heartless Miami surgeon who has been married four times, Jerry used to be very important to Nathan, just because their friendship let him enter the private world of Jerry's brother Seymour "Swede" Levov. He is the best athlete in Wiquisic High School and Nathan's lifelong hero. From their brief conversation, Nathan learned that Swedish life was changed forever in 1968, when his teenage daughter, Merry, and a local doctor blew up the local post office to protest the Vietnam War. The rest of the story is left to Zuckerman.

American Pastoral's form is based on two earlier paragraphs. After meeting Jerry, Zuckerman became fascinated with the Swede and locked himself up to restore the life of his fallen idol. Typical Ross, this moment was captured in the mirror: "Everyone should be like a lonely writer, close the door, sit in a soundproof room, call people out of the words, and then propose that these writers are closer to the real thing than the real people we destroy every day because of ignorance?" After once again pouring out several "facts" he had, zuckerman/Ross retreated to the novel and added, "I must make up anything I want to know." That's what he did. In the middle of a fifth of the novel, Zuckerman disappeared completely and gave his voice to the Swedish sad lament.

American Pastoral also found a structural precedent in Children in tomkins, a children's book that young Nathan found on the Swedish bookshelf. It tells the story of a baseball phenomenon, whose life is full of amazing success and heartbreaking tragedy. "When I was ten years old, I had never read such a book," Nathan said. "The cruelty of life. It's unfair. " For Ross, this device may be too literary-too simple-but this 400-page story of the fall of the Swede follows a similar trajectory, and Ross implies that the same is true of modern American history. Because Swedes are the best embodiment of Ross's postwar American dream and all the complicated realities that hinder the American dream. "Three generations. They are all growing. Work. Save money. It worked. Three generations were intoxicated in America. Three generations integrated with the people. Now there is a fourth one, and everything goes up in smoke. The complete destruction of their world. " The Swedish E Long d- American pastoral became its grotesque counterpart, "Native American Berserker."

What attracts me most about this novel-and of course Ross's beautiful prose-is that it can't understand the Swedish tragedy in the end. Those readers who turn to the last page, hoping to find solutions, answers and elegance, will once again find that there is only the question that lingers in the previous chapters: "What's wrong with their lives? What is more reprehensible than the life of the Levs? " Although the Swede is occasionally accused of lacking the necessary self-awareness, he is a good man: hard-working, respected, a loving father and husband, a kind-hearted liberal who opposes Vietnam and actively participates in the civil rights struggle. However, he can't escape violence, the destruction of his family and the rape of his daughter-this kind of rape is more unforgettable than death, explosion or decay. He can't escape the mysterious and unspeakable pain that has become his life. After being reunited with Merry, the Swede went home to attend a dinner party, and was injured by his weak and dirty daughter, but could not speak. "He should do this forever," Ross wrote. "No matter how much he longed to go out, the moment he was in that box was still dead. Otherwise the world will explode. "