Funny Yet Tragic

American Pastoral is a 1997 novel by American novelist Philip Roth. Its protagonist, Seymour "Swede" Levov, is a successful Jewish-American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk". It is the first in Roth's American Trilogy, followed by I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). The framing device in American Pastoral is a 45th high school reunion attended by Nathan Zuckerman, who is the narrator. At the reunion, in 1995, Zuckerman meets former classmate Jerry Levov who describes to him the tragic derailment of the life of his recently deceased older brother, Seymour "Swede" Levov. The second part of the novel consists of Zuckerman's posthumous recreation of Seymour's life, based on Jerry's revelation, newspaper clippings, and Zuckerman's own impressions after two brief run-ins with "the Swede". American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1998. Seven years later, the novel was included in Time's List of the 100 Best Novels, a list covering the period between 1923 and 2005. The film rights to it were later optioned, although a film version was not made until 2016. In 2006, it was one of the runners-up to Toni Morrison's Beloved in the "What is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?" contest held by the New York Times Book Review along with Don DeLillo's Underworld, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and John Updike's collected Rabbit Angstrom (consisting of Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest).