Recently I read three vintage American novels ( American Pastoral, The New York Trilogy and Invisible) by two great American novelists, who have been pioneers and influential figures for making the American novel prominent in the world of fiction in the last quarter of a century. The first novelist, Philip Roth is considered the greatest living American novelist and the other, Paul Auster is considered a pioneer who has reinvented the genre of ‘mystery’ novels.
Roth’s ‘American Pastoral’ can be considered a vintage ‘American novel’ portraying the construction of an American identity with its dilemmas. The story is a critique of the so called ‘American Dream’. The novel revolves around Swede Levov, who in a sense epitomizes the American Dream. He is an accomplished sportsman, has a very beautiful wife ‘Miss New Jersey’, is rich with his own business and is still a humble person and a devoting son. He has been a sort of a poster boy for many kids around, including Nathan Zuckerman, who is also the narrator of the novel. Nathan is sort of an alter ego of Roth.
American Pastoral illustrates that cliched phrase 'all that glitters is not gold.' The novel shows the crumbling of the American pastoral of Swede Levov due to the disastrous actions of American political class in Vietnam. It is a sharp metaphorical portrayal enunciating that by destroying others joyful pastoral, the Americans would also have to face the repercussions. Here the Levov’s become one of the victims. The American Dream crumbles.
The end which is not conclusive, poignantly states “'And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”
American Pastoral is considered Roth’s masterpiece and deservedly is also in every list of top novels of this century.
The other vintage American novelist I read was Paul Auster, who comes as the avant garde, postmodernist, mystery writer but surprisingly also a compulsive page turner. It might seem inconsistent, that a writer who applies the postmodernist concept of blurring the writer and the text would be a lucid narrator. This is where the charm of Auster comes, the text, the author, narrator, story and realism are also subverted to such an extent that the potpourri that arises is something truly post-modern.
I read his two quite interesting works- The New York Trilogy and The Invisible.
The New York Trilogy which is also hailed by the critics as his best work was a great treat to read.
One defining character that can be found in New York Trilogy is the fluidity in the identity of characters and the only constant character in all the three stories is the city of New York. The postmodern character in his novels, takes us into a new class of mystery novels. We find a baffling interplay of fact and fiction, but this doesn’t make it abstruse such as Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’, rather what makes Paul Auster special is the usage of this seemingly complicated techniques but providing us a lucid real page turner.
Invisible- It is not that easy to review Auster where many shells are there to be uncovered. So I will just provide some excerpts from a review from the New York Times ,
“Invisible” is his 15th novel, and I was afraid that this would be, as I felt with his recent work, another instance of Auster playing Auster — a kind of arch exercise in the clever but cloying metaphysics of textual irony, a cat-and-mouse toying with the fiction and the reader reminiscent of German Romanticism and falling victim to what both Hegel and Kierkegaard called “infinite absolute negativity” (this attack on the German Romantics was one of the few times those two were ever in agreement). One leaves the text and feels that one has been left with nothing. The irony vacuums out the content and, with it, our interest. Like the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a dragon swallowing its own tail, the book consumes itself, and disappears. But “Invisible” — however the title might threaten the contrary — suggests a new Auster.
It’s a love story, or a series of intertwined love stories, with one young man, Adam Walker, at the center of them all...
Love is always invisible, and in our world of hard-nosed materialists it’s important to remember that our highest good is something we can never really see or grab hold of, much less understand by passing enough people through an f.M.R.I. machine to look at their brainwaves. What we take as the real world is not the world that matters most to us: the substance of our lives takes place in an invisible realm.
For years now there have been two Austers waiting to embrace: the psychologist/storyteller of novels like “Leviathan,” and the metatextual trickster of “The New York Trilogy.” Freud once claimed that our greatest frustration was that we could never kiss ourselves — well, Auster has knotted the pretzel, he has brought his two loves together (it is, after all, a novel about incest). So if, like me, part of why you read is the great pleasure of falling in love with a novel, then read “Invisible.” It is the finest novel Paul Auster has ever written.”
Roth’s ‘American Pastoral’ can be considered a vintage ‘American novel’ portraying the construction of an American identity with its dilemmas. The story is a critique of the so called ‘American Dream’. The novel revolves around Swede Levov, who in a sense epitomizes the American Dream. He is an accomplished sportsman, has a very beautiful wife ‘Miss New Jersey’, is rich with his own business and is still a humble person and a devoting son. He has been a sort of a poster boy for many kids around, including Nathan Zuckerman, who is also the narrator of the novel. Nathan is sort of an alter ego of Roth.
American Pastoral illustrates that cliched phrase 'all that glitters is not gold.' The novel shows the crumbling of the American pastoral of Swede Levov due to the disastrous actions of American political class in Vietnam. It is a sharp metaphorical portrayal enunciating that by destroying others joyful pastoral, the Americans would also have to face the repercussions. Here the Levov’s become one of the victims. The American Dream crumbles.
The end which is not conclusive, poignantly states “'And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”
American Pastoral is considered Roth’s masterpiece and deservedly is also in every list of top novels of this century.
The other vintage American novelist I read was Paul Auster, who comes as the avant garde, postmodernist, mystery writer but surprisingly also a compulsive page turner. It might seem inconsistent, that a writer who applies the postmodernist concept of blurring the writer and the text would be a lucid narrator. This is where the charm of Auster comes, the text, the author, narrator, story and realism are also subverted to such an extent that the potpourri that arises is something truly post-modern.
I read his two quite interesting works- The New York Trilogy and The Invisible.
The New York Trilogy which is also hailed by the critics as his best work was a great treat to read.
One defining character that can be found in New York Trilogy is the fluidity in the identity of characters and the only constant character in all the three stories is the city of New York. The postmodern character in his novels, takes us into a new class of mystery novels. We find a baffling interplay of fact and fiction, but this doesn’t make it abstruse such as Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’, rather what makes Paul Auster special is the usage of this seemingly complicated techniques but providing us a lucid real page turner.
Invisible- It is not that easy to review Auster where many shells are there to be uncovered. So I will just provide some excerpts from a review from the New York Times ,
“Invisible” is his 15th novel, and I was afraid that this would be, as I felt with his recent work, another instance of Auster playing Auster — a kind of arch exercise in the clever but cloying metaphysics of textual irony, a cat-and-mouse toying with the fiction and the reader reminiscent of German Romanticism and falling victim to what both Hegel and Kierkegaard called “infinite absolute negativity” (this attack on the German Romantics was one of the few times those two were ever in agreement). One leaves the text and feels that one has been left with nothing. The irony vacuums out the content and, with it, our interest. Like the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a dragon swallowing its own tail, the book consumes itself, and disappears. But “Invisible” — however the title might threaten the contrary — suggests a new Auster.
It’s a love story, or a series of intertwined love stories, with one young man, Adam Walker, at the center of them all...
Love is always invisible, and in our world of hard-nosed materialists it’s important to remember that our highest good is something we can never really see or grab hold of, much less understand by passing enough people through an f.M.R.I. machine to look at their brainwaves. What we take as the real world is not the world that matters most to us: the substance of our lives takes place in an invisible realm.
For years now there have been two Austers waiting to embrace: the psychologist/storyteller of novels like “Leviathan,” and the metatextual trickster of “The New York Trilogy.” Freud once claimed that our greatest frustration was that we could never kiss ourselves — well, Auster has knotted the pretzel, he has brought his two loves together (it is, after all, a novel about incest). So if, like me, part of why you read is the great pleasure of falling in love with a novel, then read “Invisible.” It is the finest novel Paul Auster has ever written.”
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