The American Trilogy 1997–2000: American Pastoral / I Married a Communist / The Human Stain

by Philip Roth, Ross Miller (Editor)

(Em Portugues do Brasil)
Além de escrutinar os meandros da alma humana, Philip Roth retratou seu país, os Estados Unidos, como ninguém. Nesta edição especial, quatro de seus grandes romances americanos estão reunidos em uma belíssima caixa.
No primeiro volume estã Pastoral americana, livro em que o empresário judeu bem-sucedido, Seymour Levov, casado com uma católica, prefere contratar negros em sua fábrica e dar uma educação liberal à filha. No entanto, suas ilusões acabam destruindo o lar que ele imaginava perfeito, à moda dos ideais americanos; e Casei com um comunista, uma história de delação, traição e vingança, em que Ira Ringold, um trabalhador braçal que se tornou ator de rádio, é um comunista exaltado e linha-dura. Sua vida toma rumos inesperados quando a esposa resolve, em plena era do macarthismo, pôr a público as convicções políticas do marido.
O segundo volume A marca humana, que fala da histeria puritana que se apodera dos Estados Unidos em 1998, na esteira do escândalo sexual que envolveu o presidente da República e uma estagiária na Casa Branca. No mesmo ano o professor universitário Coleman Silk vê sua vida profissional e familiar destruída por acusações de racismo e abuso sexual; e Complô contra a América, a fábula em que Roth imagina os Estados Unidos dos anos 1940 governados pelo aviador antissemita Charles Lindbergh, instaurando uma era sombria no país, agora simpático à Alemanha nazista, sobretudo para as famílias judias.

 

Capa 1416 páginas
Companhia das Letras; Ediçã 1ª (22 de outubro de 2018)
Português
8535931627
978-8535931624

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Novels, Literary Fiction, Literature, American

1094 pages, Hardcover

Published September 29, 2011

About the author

Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.
Roth was one of the most honored American writers of his generation. He received the National Book Critics Circle award for The Counterlife, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman, a second National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 2005, the Library of America began publishing his complete works, making him the second author so anthologized while still living, after Eudora Welty. Harold Bloom named him one of the four greatest American novelists of his day, along with Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize in Prague.

Reviews

[Darwin8u · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral



Volume 7: The American Trilogy 1997–2000 or Library of America's N° 220 is perhaps the most perfect book in the Complete Philip Roth Collection (nine volumes). It contains the following three novels:

1. American Pastoral (read Jun 3, 2011)
2. I Married a Communist (read Apr 7, 2011)
3. The Human Stain (read May 6, 2013)

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 5 out of 5]

American Pastoral :
Seymour “Swede” Levov idealizes American success from the time he is a legendary three-sport athlete in high school during the tumultuous years of World War II. Growing up in Newark as a third-generation Jewish American, Swede enlists in the Marines near the war’s conclusion and afterwards takes over his father’s profitable glove factory. In 1949 he marries Miss New Jersey and soon thereafter begins parenthood as what he thinks is the perfect father for his beloved daughter Merry. Then his idyllic life faces disaster when in her teens Merry commits an unspeakable act of terrorism in protest against the Vietnam War.

Few books have enraptured me as does American Pastoral. Chronicling the Swede’s life from his blissful youth through the nightmare of surviving the violence of what his daughter has done, Roth gives us a numbing glimpse of America through the window of one family’s glory and despair. His intelligence and range of knowledge express both his cynicism and concerns for America through a story that rages with sorrow, anger, humor, and compassion. Roth’s mesmerizing prose often achieves an ecstasy with his intensified examinations probing the cerebral depths of his characters.

Few works of fiction contain such a ferocity of vision to address America’s inescapable history of injustice and hypocrisy. Roth leaves me in awe, at once stunned and empowered, and American Pastoral may be his best work. Its ambition is breathtaking, which most definitely enables it to rank alongside other towering literary achievements from the second half the 20th century, such as Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

I Married a Communist :
Ira Ringold returns to Newark after having been stationed in Iran at the conclusion of World War II. Witnessing human suffering during the war ignites Ira’s conscience, and back home in New Jersey he launches his uninhibited energy towards fighting for workers’ rights and for every American’s equality.

Ira’s height, strength, lankiness, and zeal enable him to take on a Lincoln-like persona as he pursues justice for the oppressed and the exploited while also entrenching himself in the maelstrom of union politics. His intimidating physical stature only enhances his even more forceful temperament. Outspoken, relentless, and brash, Ira confronts wrong with fierce determination to initiate right.

His selflessness in working for progress and equality in America leads him towards supporting his version of Communism as a dynamic ideology for changing society to benefit everyone. With a heart as big and passionate as his unrestrained personality, he has no aspiration to destroy America, but rather his vision sets sight on improvement, but in 1950s America the paranoia induced by McCarthyism makes Ira a target of suspicion for wanting to undermine democracy.

Roth delivers a rapturous chronicle of Ira’s personal and public life within the hypocrisy of toxic politics sweeping across America in the 1950s. Through a figure as heroic and flawed as Ira, Roth confronts the startling forces of cruelty, fear, vengeance, and betrayal that ruined countless lives during the mania of McCarthyism.

As expected of a masterful artisan, Roth’s ecstatic prose reaches a feverish pitch with its beauty and intelligence in taking account of one man’s demise during a shameful era in America. With rage, humor, and grace, he examines the tragedy of a decent man who never relinquished his dignity regardless of the unjust forces trying to destroy him. I Married a Communist can leave you spellbound with its extraordinary observations of how history leaves no one unscathed.

The Human Stain :
Coleman Silk committed his adult life to his family and career. While raising four children with his wife, he taught literature and classics for over forty years at Athena College in western Massachusetts. Then in 1998, as the country fixated on Clinton’s impeachment humiliation, Coleman’s university colleagues force him to resign under a false charge of racism. The aftermath of the cruelty and hypocrisy leveled against a dignified and respected professor such as Coleman leaves his family devastated and leaves Coleman isolated with emotions raging from despair to vengeance.

After befriending Nathan Zuckerman, the town’s local writer, Coleman begins to unload details and intimacies about his life. Then tragedy strikes Coleman and his much younger mistress, and it is left to Zuckerman to conduct his own investigation into the circumstances of his friend’s demise and uncover the secrets of his friend’s personal history. Moving back and forth in time between Coleman’s youth and his last days, Zuckerman assembles a gripping narrative that offers an intimate chronicle of Coleman’s lifelong perseverance and his final perilous decisions.

The breathtaking ambition Roth undertakes in The Human Stain spans the entirety of probing every motive and detail of Coleman’s life alongside a cast of other intensely observed characters whose relations with Coleman influenced the tragedy that befalls him. No one examines Americana with more ferocity and compassion than Roth does. His novels bristle with urgency and indignation to confront injustice, and only his brilliance can deliver a seamless blend of scrutinizing history through a heartrending story about an upright man derailed by brutally unfair forces.

[Luciano Zorzetto · Rating 4 out of 5]

This trilogy was a lot to digest.
Roth's writing demands the attention of the reader: it glides historically, through 20th century United States of America, no less; it hops without warning into the skin and point of view of another character and back to the narrator; and jumps through style hoops. I'm a sucker for the first and the last point, so it got me.
American Pastoral was my first contact with the author and his alter-ego narrator Nathan Zuckerman. I plodded through the initial old-age musings of Mr Zuckerman, wondering what I had got myself into, when all of a sudden I found myself decades earlier in a Newark seen through the eyes of the irresistible, hard-working, morally sound and yet doomed to failure 'Swede' Levov.
Time is very fluid in Roth: we already know what will happen, who's dead and who was bad, but it doesn't matter. What matters is the journey of history through people and witnessing the ineluctable downfall of the heroic, if only too perfect, Levovs.
I Married a Communist was dropped around halfway. Despite the occasional gem of an image, it didn't move at all in my eyes. Iron Rinn and his struggle did not click with me. Too much political jargon, maybe, such as the Fourties and Fifties were.
Because of this disappointment, I began The Human Stain with mixed feelings and I am happy to report that I loved it even more than American Pastoral. It is easier to connect with this third book: first of all, it is closer to the flesh and base humanity. There were a few very carnal scenes that almost felt like non sequitur in A.P., whereas sex is important here. Some characters are sensual through and through: that drives them and puts them in stark contrast with the puritan wave of outrage around the Clinton/Lewinsky affair. The second reason for an easier connection is that there is less history than in A.P., or rather that the young Coleman Silk rides it and heroically twists out of it, whereas the Levovs went with the flow, trying to do the right thing. We can't but cheer for Coleman and then Prof. Silk since he does his own thing, but he ends up punished for his hybris: it can't be a coincidence that he teaches Classic Literature.
Coleman Silk would make a hell of a 'hero' as he is, but once we discover the secret he hides in his past, all his actions and his conduct acquire even more depth. Once more, like in A.P., Roth casually dropped into the story a glimpse of the end pages before this, so here we are, halfway through the book, we've just known the big secret and yet we must go on to understand why it ended the way it did.
On top of this there's the meta-story of Zuckerman/Roth writing the very book we are reading. His point of view steps forward every now and then to remind us that we are reading a truth pieced together by the patient, thorough and a tinge dull character/author. Trippy.
What a journey this was.

[Francisca · Rating 4 out of 5]

¿Qué escribir de este libro? Me lo he pasado entero diciéndole a mi pareja:
1. Qué bien escribe este hombre. Cómo hilvana las cosas. Qué estilo tan depurado.
2. ¿Por qué no lo he leído antes? Supongo que todo tiene su momento y mi momento Roth es este (ya me he hecho también con los libros de Zuckerman)
3. Quiero escribir como él. La manera en que usa las palabras como balas directas a los temas que subyacen bajo el libro (la política, el intelecto, el ser individual y comunitario...)

Este hombre, a fin de cuentas, se convierte en un todo, en súper hombre de Nietschze. Es fantástico.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

They were on their way to lunch, passing within sight of North Hall, the ivied, beautifully weathered colonial brick building where, for over a decade, Coleman Silk, as faculty dean, had occupied the office across from the president's suite. The college's architectural marker, the six-sided clock tower of North Hall, topped by the spire that was topped by the flag -- and that, from down in Athena proper, could be seen the way the massive European cathedrals are discerned from the approaching roadways by those repairing for the cathedral town -- was tolling noon as he sat on a bench shadowed by the quadrangle's most famously age-gnarled oak, sat and calmly tried to consider the coercions of propriety. The tyranny of propriety. It was hard, halfway through 1998, for even him to believe in American propriety's enduring power, and he was the one who considered himself tyrannized: the bridle it still is on public rhetoric, the inspiration it provides for personal posturing, the persistence just about everywhere of this devirilizing pulpit virtue-mongering that H.L. Mencken identified with boobism, that Philip Wylie thought of as Momism, that the Europeans unhistorically call American puritinism, that the likes of a Ronald Reagan call America's core values, and that maintains widespread jurisdiction by masquerading itself as something else -- as everything else. As a force, propriety is protean, a dominatrix in a thousand disguises, inflitrating, if need be, a civic responsibility, WASP dignity, women's rights, black pride, ethnic allegiance, or emotion-laden Jewish ethical sensitivity. It's not as though Marx or Freud or Darwin or Stalin or Hitler or Mao had never happened -- it's as though Sinclair Lewis had not happened. It's, he thought, as though Babbitt had never been written. It's as though not even the most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race -- scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day. . . all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. Here in America either it's Faunia Farley or it's Monica Lewinsky! The luxury of these lives disquieted so by the inappropriate comportment of Clinton and Silk! This, in 1998, is the wickedness they have to put up with. This, in 1998, is their torture, their torment, and their spiritual death. Their source of greatest moral despair...

[Darby Dixon III · Rating 5 out of 5]

I blogged a bit here: http://tdaoc.org/2018/01/14/2018-002-...

[Michael Flick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author’s “The American Trilogy 1997-2000,” American dreams turn into nightmares. Villains are daughters damaged by their mothers. Melodrama. Lapses in voice, transient, which don’t add a great deal.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

These books are so wise and compassionate. I understood my own life's journey and choices better by reading "I Married a Communist" and "American Pastoral." Philip Roth's understanding of the American Century is profound. He is a giant.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This handsome volume from the consistently high-quality Library of America series brings together three of Philip Roth's later Nathan Zuckerman novels—although Roth's fictional doppelgänger is much more self-effacing here than in Zuckerman Unbound. Older and wearier, Zuckerman here just plays observer, a sounding board for three intense character studies of three very different American men: Seymour "the Swede" Levov, in American Pastoral; Ira Ringold, in I Married a Communist; and Coleman Silk, in The Human Stain.

This edition has continuous pagination; page numbers for the quotations offered here therefore do not indicate the length of each individual work.


American Pastoral (read 7/18/2012)

American Pastoral is relentlessly elegaic... It is in outline (though by no means in specifics) a real American Beauty of a novel, as one could perhaps have guessed from the deceptively peaceful title. Roth uses beautiful prose on increasingly ugly things, dissected scientifically and with acute discernment—but also with world-weary sympathy. The recurring word "duteously" is—well, I don't think it's really a word, but at the same time it's the only word for the Swede, a character "who, like most other men, endeavors to secure for himself a life beyond the reach of history's sweep, bound to and by a business, a family, and the greater society's shared ideals." (from the Notes, p.1082). How the Swede fails at this endeavor is the plot of American Pastoral; that he fails, though, is the universal experience.

"Even a monster has to be from somewhere—even a monster needs parents. But parents don't need monsters."
—Jerry to Swede, p.262

Zuckerman—Roth—knows better than to be distant, and his analyses often struck chords directly from my own heart. For example,

As a brother:

[...]it's no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania.
—p.54

And as a father:

Memories particularly of when they weren't being what parents are nine-tenths of the time—the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you're-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines—memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family's life when they could reach one another in calm.
—p.189

American Pastoral ends with an ending like life itself—and that's no ending at all, really, just a caesura, a final moment of drama, a piece of the seamless whole.


I Married a Communist (read 7/23/2012)

More complex than one might think from its inflammatory title, I Married a Communist digs deeply into the darkest parts of the American dream, the Red scare of the mid-Twentieth Century... but that's not all. Never doctrinaire (though many of its characters are), this book examines all sides of America's flirtation with Communism—and its eventual subjugation by capitalists instead—through the perspective of decades later and the objectivity of narrator Nathan Zuckerman's old teacher Murray Ringold, who muses:

To lose your job and have the newspapers calling you a traitor—these are very unpleasant things. But it's still not the situation that is total, which is totalitarianism. I wasn't put in jail and I wasn't tortured. My child wasn't denied anything. My livelihood was taken away from me and some people stopped talking to me, but other people admired me. My wife admired me. My daughter admired me. Many of my ex-students admired me. Openly said so. And I could put up a legal fight. I had free movement, I could give interviews, raise money, hire a lawyer, make courtroom challenges. Which I did. Of course you can become so depressed and miserable that you give yourself a heart attack. But you can find alternatives, which I also did.
—pp.412-413

Murray Ringold's view of his persecution by anti-Communists is much more mellow than his brother Ira's. Ira has more reason to be angry, though—his glamorous wife Eve has published a tell-all book called, oddly enough, I Married a Communist, a book which, while not especially accurate, contains enough of the truth to be damaging. Ira is "the revolutionary spirit undone by maddening incursion into his historical struggle of marital and household mayhem" (from Notes, p.1082), in contrast to the Swede of American Pastoral, for whom marriage and home are the struggle into which other elements intrude.

I Married a Communist gives us the clearest fictional critique I've seen yet, not just of how Communism failed in the U.S., but also of why it would have appealed in the first place.


The Human Stain (read 7/23/2012)

Don't ask; don't tell. It's a policy much, much older than the recently-rescinded U.S. military's version, and much, much more widespread in application. Coleman Silk, Roth's protagonist for this third volume in the American Trilogy, is in hiding—has been all his adult life—and his success depends on precisely this reluctance on most people's parts to peek below the surfaces we choose to present. As is foreshadowed very early in, however, the end of Silk's concealment is pretty much inevitable.

Neither as bourgeois as Seymour Levov, nor as radical and uncompromising as Ira Ringold, Coleman Silk is yet a third type of man. He is a tenured professor and long-time administrator at Athena College in Massachusetts... at least until he lets slip a word that could be construed as a racial epithet while calling roll one day. Deans make enemies, and soon Silk is trying to defend his choice of words in a forum where he has already been convicted and sentenced. His wife dies, and Silk resigns from the college. Which seems to be for the best—after all, Silk is a dinosaur, a classicist in a postmodern age whose teaching methods are old-fashioned and uncompromising. Students today, and their diction, get savagely imitated:

"They know, like, nothing."
—Coleman Silk, mid-rant on p.882

Silk had already had one run-in with postmodernist professor Delphine Roux; Silk's second gaffe, however unintentional, is a golden opportunity to oust the old guard—an old guard who did, by the way, hire Roux herself.

The Human Stain contains, for me at least, the most emotionally powerful moment in the entire trilogy; on p.941, forty-one empty chairs... one for each of the soldiers Pittsfield, Massachusetts lost to Vietnam. This image appears just before—is instrumental in precipitating, even—the climax.

I thought it was interesting that every one of these novels features at least one rebellious daughter—Merry in American Pastoral; Sylphid in I Married a Communist; both Delphine and Faunia in The Human Stain. In that last, though, Roth does give the greatest wisdom to an unrebellious daughter, at least, and I will give her the last quote for this review. Ernestine Silk says (on p.1008), "...the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop. I don't know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate. And that is saying something."

I read The Human Stain in one sitting—literally, as I was bound to Seat 12B for the duration of a transcontinental flight. These Library of America editions, by the way, make excellent traveling companions for anyone who has not already abandoned the book as physical object. Compact and sturdy, with large crisp type on high-contrast paper, they pack a lot of words into a convenient package without compromising readability.


And the words on these pages? They, too, are carefully chosen for lasting strength and appeal. The American Trilogy is perhaps not as exuberant and hopeful as Roth's earlier Zuckerman novels, but it is worthwhile, insightful, literature in the truest and most positive sense.

[Daniel Palevski · Rating 5 out of 5]

“All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes as knowing.”

Nothing was more appropriate leading into the Fourth of July as ‘American Pastoral.’ An apparent commentary on the Jeffersonian agrarian, democratic ideal, the story of ‘The Swede’ Levov proposes that the ideal - the shining beacon on the hill - is never as pristine as it seems.

“Why shouldn’t I be where I want to be? Why shouldn’t I be with who I want to be? Isn’t that what this country’s all about? I want to be where I want to be and I don’t want to be where I don’t want to be. That’s what being an American is - isn’t it? “

‘I Married a Communist’ is a story entrenched in what can be the best of America as well as the worst. A couple of rags-to-riches stories - Zelda and Lex - emerge out of the Great Depression, the earliest days of Hollywood and the glory of radio days, only to find themselves taken down in a stripping down of cultural facades, accumulated masks and fall victim to McCarthyism.

‘The Human Stain,’ finally, tells a story of what it is to live in this shining story of America. Like the first story, nothing is as seems, yet we are all unsurprisingly aware of this disconnect and we continue to live it, indulging ourselves both in the fantasies but also in the undercover truisms.

[Clarke Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have nothing but praise for all three of these novels. Reading the ending to The Human Stain, after everything that went before it, was a powerful emotional and poetic experience such as you only have when you are reading the very best literature. The scope of Roth's concerns, his detail, his language, are utterly compelling, magnificent.

In all three novels, Roth presents a topical or recent-historical theme as a backdrop for his stories that, for me, adds to the interest. He has his customary interest in Jewish life and in Newark, NJ and environs, but he connects them to a larger American idea by means of these backdrops. So, here we have fifties McCarthyism, the rebellious 60s, and the late 90s, with the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, as the backdrops. The Human Stain (90s backdrop) is still quite relevant today, including, as it does, not only high-profile sexual scandal, but ideas of racism and of political correctness raised to the level of defamatory weapon.

[Ryan Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phillip Roth deserves his place as one of the best American writers of all time. This collection of mid-later work is far less playful but more polished than Portnoy’s Complaint or The Breast, both of which are outstanding. The Human Stain is my favorite of the three. I have rarely read a scene more humorous, dramatic, and insightful than that of Delphine Roux’s ill fated attempt to compose a personal ad. This is Roth at his finest.

One habit irks me though. I really don’t care for the device of the first person authorial narrator. I have not read the Zuckerman novels, so perhaps that would lend a greater appreciation. As of now though, it just seems a little weak.

[John Arango · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tres grandes novelas reunidas en un solo libro. Me gustó mucho La mancha humana. Le sigue Me casé con un comunista y por último, Pastoral americana. Esta última historia me costó terminarla, por los grandes bloques de información, pero, sin duda, es una obra maestra.

[Mark Burris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Specifically, The Human Stain, one of the three books in this volume.

[Jolie Fleming]

Second time to read The Human Stain and I liked it more on rereading.

[Jesper Österstrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hittade inte sista delen separat så får logga ”Skamfläcken” så här.

[Lynn Demarest · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Human Stain is probably my favorite of the three, and the one I read first.

[Nicolas Gomez Ardila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pastoral americana 5/5, Me casé con un comunista 4/5, La mancha humana 5/5.

[Shira · Rating 4 out of 5]

🌞American Pastoral Sun
🌜I Married a Communist Moon
⬆️The Human Stain Rising

[Amparo]

Pastoral americana
Me casé con un comunista
La mancha humana

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

These three books (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain) all deal with how the terrible burdens of lies and secrets destroy peoples lives. They evoked many seemingly contradictory emotions in me. I loved Roth's lyrical evocations of growing up in East Coast urban Jewish enclaves between the wars and his often very romantic depictions of the rugged rural landscapes of upstate New York. I thought his portraits of men (and sometimes women) struggling to find meaning in lives filled with contradictions and duplicity were compelling. On the other hand, his cardboard caricatures of feminists and the New Left infuriated me. He has real sympathy for the working class partisans of Old Left, even if he portrays them as wrong-headed, but little empathy for the privileged daughters (in particular) of the New Left who also fought for a better world. He also has zero empathy for poor blacks trapped in urban poverty. In fact, he blames them for the collapse of Newark. Roth is a good writer, but not a great novelist because he seems unable to empathically portray people with whom he fundamentally disagrees.

[Evelyn Bramhall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm still in process of digesting all I have covered in this truly remarkable series. So much to be reread and reread again. These books are of such importance to understanding America starting at the end of the first world war and ending with the beginnings of the madness brought on by Vietnam, The overworked cliche that goes something like, "If you don't know where you've been, how will you know where you're going. The madness of the late sixties predicated by a former Big LIE that sent 58,000 young men off to die and the impact it had on so many millions of families, seems tame in comparison to what the US is faced with today. American rage has just festered and spread since the closing chapter of American Pastoral. How was Phillip Roth to predict what we have to contend with today?

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

American Pastoral is a wonderful description of a great guy, who is cursed with the kid from hell. It also does a great job of describing the 1960s and the cultural revolution of the time.
I Married a Communist is another one of those Roth novels where he has a younger character who looks up to an older relative. In this case, the older character is an uncle, who is noble and yet is blinded by his politics. This also has a young woman, a step daughter, from hell.
The Human Stain creates two wonderful characters -- the professor with a secret who runs afoul of PC attitudes -- and the blue collar gal who he falls in love or lust with.

[Eva Exeni · Rating 5 out of 5]

La Trilogía Americana, de Philip Roth, está compuesta por tres novelas de gran extensión: 'Pastoral Americana', 'Me casé con un comunista' y 'La mancha humana'.

Para algunos, el estilo grandielocuente y la voz narradora omnisciente -que en realidad es la voz de un personaje que se 'imagina' los hechos- resulta molesta o genera dudas (por ejemplo, en mí), es innegable la maestría que Roth alcanza mientras las historias avanzan.

Gran trilogía literaria.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each book is a story separate from the others, though the narrator Nathan Zuckerman is a sort of pseudo-character walking through a dozen or so of Roth's books, not excluding these three. Roth's writing is as good as I've found, and his subjects are my subjects, American subjects: the Vietnam war, the Cold War, Judaism in America...

[Rob Tapper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Completed the last 2 in the trilogy -
- "I Married a Communist"--- this became heavy going, repetitive, perhaps too much of a social documentary or maybe too much an author's personal history.
- "The Human Stain"---- excellent to finish this trilogy with this one -- loved the simplicity of life and living the author depicts in the final chapters.

[Helene Coorsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I forgot how beautifully Roth writes and creates a story. The whole time I'm reading it, however, I feel that I'm not clever enough or smart enough to get all of the meanings and themes that thread through this book. I would have to read it again to delve deeper. So much to think about. A good discussion book.

[Maurice J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Based on my 5-star regard for the first two of the three, I give the trilogy five stars. Human Stain is not up there with the other two, but ...Communist and ...Pastoral were so great that the trilogy gets the five-stars. See my reviews of the three books.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Painful, yet beautifully written! (I wish I'd read it before I watched the film.) I will certainly read more Roth novels -- I've enjoyed the ones I've read, especially Nemesis. That one would be an exceptionally good read today, during the pandemic, as it is set during a polio summer.

[Sean]

Only read "The Human Stain"