81. American Pastoral, Philip Roth
A book which I could admire but which I didn't like very much. It's a classic American story - immigrants work butts off in New York to build business, accumulate wealth, children become americanised, reject parents' bourgeois values and patriotism. Result = family schism.
I'll try to articulate the reasons why I didn't enjoy reading this.
Firstly, it is extremely dense. The sentences are long and wandering, you get lost halfway through them and have to go back, sometimes right the start of your paragraph, to remind yourself of what this was actually about.
It never occurred to the Swede, reading the flier, that enough could not be claimed for the paintings just because they were so hollow, that you had to say that they were pictures of everything because they were pictures of nothing - that all those words were merely another way of saying Orcutt was talentless and, however earnestly he might try, could never hammer out for himself an artistic prerogative or, for that matter, any but the prerogative whose rigid definitions had swaddled him at birth. It did not occur to the Swede that he was right, that this guy who seemed so at one with himself, so perfectly attuned to the place where he lived and the people around him, might be inadvertently divulging that to be out of tune was, in fact, a secret and long-standing desire he hadn't the remotest idea of how to achieve except by oddly striving to paint paintings that looked like they didn't look like anything.
Going back and looking for an example, reading individual sentences in isolation, i can see how clever each one is, how controlled and purposeful the writing is. But when you're reading it and the author never uses 15 words when he can use 150, it becomes tiring.
Secondly, the characters love a long diatribe, usually about something related to the story in a tangential and symbolic way rather than about anything in the plot. I found myself skipping these, along with many of the longer and denser paragraphs of narration. If they're not conversing in long rants over several pages, then they're having useless failed attempts at communication in which nobody finds out anything useful and most of the writing is describing the rambling, tumultuous inner feelings of one of the characters while the conversation takes place. And again, that's a technique, it's interesting and skilful - it's also annoying as hell, especially as there is a mystery at the heart of this book which never gets resolved.
Thirdly, I know that criticising a Philip Roth book for being unrelentingly male is like criticising Watership Down for having too many rabbits. It's kind of his thing, right? But it grated here in a way that it hasn't grated for me when reading other books - maybe because Roth seems to be aiming towards expressing something universal : "this is America", "this is the post-war generation". Whereas actually this is the America of white men - women, black people are present but there as props, things seen or experienced by the main characters but things without life of their own. And I think this is done on purpose, because Roth is too clever to have done this without realising, but I didn't like reading it. As I say, you can admire without necessarily liking, and I didn't like this much.