American Anti-Pastoral - (Ceres: Rutgers Studies in History) by Thomas Gustafson (Paperback)

About the Book

Combining literary analysis with historical research, Thomas Gustafson examines how Philip Roth's acclaimed 1997 novel American Pastoral draws upon the history of Brookside, New Jersey as its model for the fictional hamlet of Old Rimrock. American Anti-Pastoral peels back myths about the bucolic Garden State countryside to reveal deep fissures within the heart of American democracy.

Book Synopsis

One of the best-known novels taking place in New Jersey, Philip Roth's 1997 American Pastoral uses the fictional hamlet of Old Rimrock, NJ as a microcosm for a nation in crisis during the cultural upheavals of the 1960s-70s. Critics have called Old Rimrock mythic, but it is based on a very real place: the small Morris county town of Brookside, New Jersey.

American Anti-Pastoral reads the events in Roth's novel in relation to the history of Brookside and its region. While Roth's protagonist Seymour "Swede" Levov initially views Old Rimrock as an idyllic paradise within the Garden State, its real-world counterpart has a more complex past in its origins as a small industrial village, as well as a site for the politics of exclusionary zoning and a 1960s anti-war protest at its celebrated 4th of July parade. Literary historian and Brookside native Thomas Gustafson casts Roth's canonical novel in a fresh light as he studies both Old Rimrock in comparison to Brookside and the novel in relationship to NJ literature, making a case for it as the Great New Jersey novel. For Roth fans and history buffs alike, American Anti-Pastoral peels back the myths about the bucolic Garden State countryside to reveal deep fissures along the fault-lines of race and religion in American democracy.

Review Quotes

"Retraces Philip Roth's steps in the historical unincorporated community of Brookside, New Jersey, which inspired the fictional Old Rimrock, the setting of his most notorious novel American Pastoral (1997). The main strength of the book is the author's perspective on the subject. Born and raised in Brookside, Gustafson combines his first-hand experience as a local with his expertise as an historian, offering an in-depth regionalist and historical reconstruction that not only provides new insights into the novelist's research materials but also broadens the scholarship of Roth Studies from a fresh perspective."-- "New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal"

"Thomas Gustafson's American Anti-Pastoral, a study of Philip Roth's literature through the prism of Brookside, New Jersey, is a well-written, intriguing, and accessible work of literary criticism. It is both an excellent contribution to 'Roth Studies' and at the same time something much more than that, a literary excursus into the relationship between place, myth-making, and literary creativity."--Michael C. Kimmage "author of In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy"

About the Author

THOMAS GUSTAFSON is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776-1865. Born and raised in Brookside, he now calls Echo Park in Los Angeles his home.