2010-11-26 - 10:37 p.m.
Once every two years I take a crack at one of Philip Roth's big ones and so now I'm eighty dense, breathless pages into American Pastoral. I could say a lot of things about how good this book is, but I'll just say that he's so good that he's included basically a perfect essay (given as a high-school-reunion speech) about the might and brutality and nervousness of post-war America. And this essay rests, like a Russian doll, inside this big, intense novel, and it fits perfectly. The best writers give you the feeling that perfect paragraphs roll off of their fingers like basketballs and that's how this book is. The whole thing reads like that: the plot is almost beside the point and instead what he's done is to riff, over and over, for 300 pages, on getting older and on raising kids and on this fundamental tragic thing that even post-war American football heroes can't beat. He calls it the "indigenous American berserk." He's borderline ridiculous and I can read only six pages at a time before I get a headache.
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