American Pastoral

What a masterpiece! It is on every list for American fiction. It has some brief unsavory sexual parts, but overall, it is such a reflective historical novel. The main character was born in New Jersey the same year my mother was born in Chicago. So, I could have been the daughter in this story, but thank the Lord I was not. I think it should be on the list. 

"An unexamined existence no longer serves his needs. He wants something recorded." Chapter 1

Another significant quote:

“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

The meaning of the title that is quoted toward the end of the book:

“And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff--no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people--one colossal turkey feeds all. A moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion of the Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year. A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

What Wikipedia says about the title and conclusion of the main character: 

Seymour sadly concludes that everyone he knows may have a veneer of respectability, but each engages in subversive behavior and that he cannot understand the truth about anyone based upon the conduct they outwardly display. He is forced to see the truth about the chaos and discord rumbling beneath the "American pastoral", which has brought about profound personal and societal changes he no longer can ignore. Simultaneously, the dinner party underscores the fact that no one ever truly understands the hearts of other people.

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

It’s easy to begin talking about American Pastoral by noting its central place in the Zuckerman Saga, a series of nine novels that follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist who shares an awful lot of characteristics with his creator (make that ten fictions if you count The Facts, from 1988, an ostensible autobiography that opens with a letter from Roth to Zuckerman and closes with one from Zuckerman to Roth). But what’s most memorable about this 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner is the way the author engages the subject of America with a fervor few novelists have dared since World War II. Passages of American Pastoral, especially those describing what was destroyed in the 1967 Newark riots, have a fierce and grieving majesty seldom matched in our literature. In telling the Swede’s story, albeit in the voice of Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth embraces his past with an almost penitential reverence, honoring the world that made him—and is now forever gone—with nostalgic, rueful, angry tenderness.