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The arresting opening of Philip Roth's latest novel, "American Pastoral," recalls and builds upon his most accomplished self-referential fiction of the past. As in the so-called "Zuckerman trilogy," a famous writer grumbles through scenes that seem shaped from memory and occasionally vengeful.
Roth's high-resolution intelligence and flexible prose draw us into the most mundane of life experiences, from school rituals to failed marriage, revealing fault lines of failure, duplicity, and waste. Bemused, his alter ego decides to explore the seamless life of the golden boy of his mostly Jewish high school, a blue-eyed blond athlete known as The Swede . . .
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