American Pastoral

This book by Philip Roth came up once on Lex Fridman in the episodes we index. That mention was a genuine on-air recommendation, not just a passing reference. The people who brought it up: Lex Fridman. Every occurrence below links to the episode page and to the exact second it was said on YouTube.

American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel published in 1997 concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk". American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Seven years later, the novel was included in Time's List of the 100 Best Novels, a list covering the period between 1923 and 2005.