American Pastoral
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel published in 1997 concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk". American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Seven years later, the novel was included in Time's List of the 100 Best Novels, a list covering the period between 1923 and 2005. In 2006, it was one of the runners-up to Toni Morrison's Beloved, in the "What is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?" contest held by the New York Times Book Review.
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What Hacker News says
- Got any recommendations?
I don't really have any complaints about this list, but I would include:
The Castle - Franz Kafka
American Tabloid - James Ellroy
The Inheritors - William Golding
American Pastoral - Philip Roth
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
- Not sure if Michael Roth is related to Philip Roth, but it somehow reminds me of American Pastoral and that era of protests against the Vietnam War and its aftermath. I'm not entirely sure how those demonstrations compare to the ones we’re seeing today, but the parallels are striking
- There's something awfully tone-deaf about a conservative magazine using John Updike, Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth to bemoan the decline of country clubs. These men's works (American Pastoral, Rabbit, Run) excoriate the culture of the 50s and 60s rat-race-to-the-country-club.
The fact that the literature of the period employs the country club is not evidence of the country club's positive aspects -- it's frequently evidence of the exact opposite.
- > Dr. Knuth has gone so far as to argue that some computer programs are, like Elizabeth Bishop’s poems and Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral,” works of literature worthy of a Pulitzer.
I'd love to know which programs he's thinking of.
Any ideas?
- The sentence is more correct than it is wrong. Here it is with the context of its paragraph:
> He is known for introducing the notion of “literate programming,” emphasizing the importance of writing code that is readable by humans as well as computers — a notion that nowadays seems almost twee. Dr. Knuth has gone so far as to argue that some computer programs are, like Elizabeth Bishop’s poems and Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral,” works of literature worthy of a Pulitzer.
Note this part specifically:
> the notion of “literate programming,” emphasizing the importance...a notion that nowadays seems almost twee"
"literate programming" is the notion
emphasizing* the "importance" of writing code readable by humans. And this "notion" The word "which" would make it even clearer that the subject of the clause is "literate programming", but the sentence is still grammatically correct as is. Everyone thinks it's important for code to be readable, but Knuth is the one who is radical about how important it is -- to the point that he thinks programs should be "literature worthy of a Pulitzer".In any case, the NYT author is more accurate than the previous HN commenter, who seems to have jumped to a conclusion without knowing anything about the concept "literate programming", or how and why Knuth is known for it. The NYT author is not "basically just pulling this statement out of her behind to embellish Knuth's reputation", but it seems the commenter is not as familiar with Knuth and/or computer programming as he thinks he is.
- “You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.” ― Philip Roth, American Pastoral
