In a manner a bit like last week's Pulitzer winner, and a bit like Ragtime from way back in my project, Philip Roth's American Pastoral takes aim at what looks perfect from the outside - in this case, a handsome, popular, star athlete and his beautiful family - might be a much grimier version than what you'd expect.
The vehicle for this narrative is very interesting: that big, handsome athlete's name was Seymour "Swede" Levov. I say "was" because very near the beginning of the story we learn that he has died, by way of the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman finding out from Levov's brother. Zuckerman has only met Swede a couple of times but always admired him from afar, and so begins the rest of the book: Zuckerman's own written version of how he thinks Levov's life unfolded through limited personal knowledge, some newspaper accounts, and the rest is put together by conjecture.
In this way, the caution against trusting an unreliable narrator should be in place, but it's an interesting version of that because there doesn't seem to be any malice in Zuckerman's attempts to recount a life, nor does it even come close to becoming a hagiography as Levov is hardly spared a critical eye nor are we spared some uncomfortable details in the telling.
It's just fascinating to have a narrator who's just kind of doing his best, and to have that passed on to the reader by Roth makes it a sort of passed-down tale.
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