Currently Reading
November 11, 2006
Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. I have written before about how I discovered Roth early on, and have read nearly all of this fiction, and some of his nonfiction. I like it from its opening paragraph (read more of an excerpt here):
The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city’s old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete. The name was magical; so was the anomalous face. Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov.
Posted by Bill Trippe at November 11, 2006 10:09 PM
