American Pastoral

American Pastoral has one of Philip Roth’s most contrived plots (involving Zuckerman's investigation into the tragic life of a high school classmate). But it is held together by some of his most personal themes, including partly-autobiographical parent/child relationships: “the daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counter-pastoral — into the indigenous American berserk.”