PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005, Philip Roth will become the third living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.
The author's alter ego, Nathan Zuckermann, takes a back seat to narrate the story of Seymour 'the Swede' Levov. a blonde-haired blue-eyed (but, of course, Jewish) family man with the most unRothian yearning for a settled life. This being a Roth novel, anyone who longs for a simple, innocent existence free from the turbulence and hate of the American century, is asking for trouble and the Swede gets it in spades; the Eisenhower 1950s turn into the weird 60s and America goes to pieces. The Swede's wife cracks up, his daughter, the anger-fuelled Merry, puts a bomb into a post office, kills a passer-by and goes on the run, all is madness and despair. Roth has never written better as he rages against the slide into nihilism and permissiveness that has characterised life in America in the last 30 years. Reading Roth is not a comfortable experience but it has never been more exhilarating. (Kirkus UK)
