American Anti-Pastoral

Brookside, New Jersey and the Garden State of Philip Roth

Thomas Gustafson

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781978838024
  9781978838031
• eBook ISBN:
  9781978838048
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

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.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Map
• Prologue
• Part I: Dismal Harmony
• Part II: Babel
• Part III: Pentecost Remembered and Lost
• Epilogue: “The Great New Jersey Novel”: American Pastoral and the Garden State of Letters
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Series List