SOURCE: "The Irony and the Ecstasy," in New Yorker, Vol. LXXIII, No. 12, May 19, 1997, pp. 88, 90-4.

[In the following essay, Menand analyzes many of the themes in American Pastoral and compares it briefly to several other works by Roth.]

Philip Roth's new book is a historical novel about the period from the Second World War to Watergate. The hero is a high-school sports star and ex-marine who marries the Miss New Jersey of 1949, takes over his father's business, buys a big house in the country, and becomes a prosperous, liberal, post-ethnic mid-century American. He has what he thinks is the perfect life. What do you imagine happens to it? The novel is called American Pastoral, and no reader of Roth's fiction is likely to miss a guess about the way a story with a title like that is going to turn out. But what makes the book difficult and...