Don't read Philip Roth's American Pastoral if you hold any illusions about controlling your own destiny, entertain secret, willowy notions of living out the American Dream, or have kids. Phil will pierce your private ambitions with a deft stroke through the scrotum and keep jamming until he comes out your rectum. It's a circuitous route, but it's a desperately painful one. If Tuna wants books that capture the spirit of the times, well how about the spirit of changing times, most notably, the shift from Eisenhower's America of golden opportunities to LBJ's USA of subversion at any cost. What happens if the perfect illustration of America's special place in God's heart has a daughter who wants to tear down everything about the worldview that created his place and time and standing? It's heart-wrenching and horrifying and hilarious, and it shatters any illusion you might quietly be clinging to about shaping your children's lives. I haven't slept right for days, and I've developed an ugly twitch in my left shoulder that suggests incipient heart trouble. Yes, Phil says, no matter how decent you are or how honestly you play by the rules or how fairly you treat your fellow man, life can shit all over you with such great force that you'll swear the man upstairs has projectile diarrhea. Is the book any good, given that it has landed itself a Pulitzer and a spot in the top 5 of that recent NY Times poll of the best American novels of the last 25 years? Like Sabbath's Theater, it has sections of sustained virtuosity, and sections of repetitious tedium. I'd have cut 100 pages. That said, does anybody have more to say about the second half of the American 20th century? No, says the dude on the couch on Lawton.