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Tragedy and Farce in Roth's: The Human Stain

2002; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 43; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00111610209602181

1939-9138

Elaine B. Safer,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Abstract Philip Roth has called his recent three novels “a thematic trilogy.” They all deal, he explains, with the “historical moments in postwar American life that have had the greatest impact on my generation”: the McCarthy era, the Vietnam War, and 1998, the year of Bill Clinton's impeachment (McGrath, “Interview” 8).1 In American Pastoral (1997), a handsome, honest, hardworking businessman and Jewish athletic hero, Seymour (“Swede”) Levov, is ruined by the actions of daughter Merry, an anti-Vietnam War activist, who “brings the war home” to folks in New Jersey by setting off a bomb in the local post office.