American Pastoral
Philip Roth • 1997
Devastation Rating
America family political violence 1960s
Our Take
The Swede is the perfect American — handsome, successful, decent — and his daughter plants a bomb. Roth uses this catastrophe to examine the entire mythology of postwar American happiness, the lie at its center. There is no explanation for what Merry does that satisfies. That is precisely the point.
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