American Pastoral
Philip Roth (1997)
“The most American of fathers raises the most American of daughters — and she builds a bomb.”
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Thematic connections across eras and genres — books that talk to each other.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The foundational American Dream autopsy — Roth picks up where Fitzgerald left off, moving the dream forward a generation and destroying it from the inside rather than the outside
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Another novel about the violence that lives inside the American pastoral, and the impossibility of forgetting what the dream was built on
Underworld
Don DeLillo
The other great late-twentieth-century novel about postwar American mythology — DeLillo's sprawling cultural archaeology versus Roth's intimate family catastrophe
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
Another American family disintegrating under historical pressure — Franzen's Midwest pastoral collapses more quietly than Roth's, but the diagnosis is similar
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller
The direct antecedent: Willy Loman is the Swede without the achievement. Both are destroyed by their faith in a promise America made and couldn't keep
The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides
Another novel about fathers and daughters, pastoral suburban life, and the violence that erupts inside families that look perfect from outside