[In the following review, Wood berates the slow pace of American Pastoral, but praises its prose and combination of rage and elegy. Noting similarities between Pastoral and John Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies, Wood comments on both novels' treatments of national history and their "mind-numbing realism."]

Who would have thought Nathan Zuckerman would fall in love with normality, with the all-American life? With the old idea of the melting pot as order and progress, a pacified history in which resentment and misunderstanding fade away across the generations? With Thanksgiving as a form of ethnic truce, where the Jews and the Irish hang out together as if no one had ever crucified anyone? This is, after all, the garrulous, manic hero of five Philip Roth novels, and the subtle fictional critic of Mr. Roth's autobiography, The Facts. His alter id, as you might say, the man whose business is to get out of control and give offense. "I am your permission," Zuckerman tells Mr. Roth in that book, reproving him for lapsing into the tame decencies of the uninvented life, "your indiscretion, the key to disclosure." "The distortion called fidelity is not your metier," Zuckerman insists. And Mr. Roth himself says he is pleased to have escaped the constrictions of the Jamesian tact and elegance he once admired, liberating his talent for what he calls "extremist fiction."

Yet here is Zuckerman attending a class reunion of veterans from Weequahic High in Newark, checking out the prostates and remarriages and high-powered jobs and the dead fathers; having dinner in New York with a former star athlete from the same school, a nice guy called Seymour Levov, alias the Swede, and wondering at the fellow's sheer likable ordinariness. "Swede Levov's life, for all I knew, had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore just great, right in the American grain." The little clause ("for all I knew") gives the game away. Of course Zuckerman is wrong about this—there wouldn't be a novel here if he weren't, let alone a Philip Roth novel. "I was wrong," Zuckerman says handsomely. "Never more mistaken about anyone in my life." But what's interesting about the book is that Zuckerman could have thought, even for an instant, that he was right; and that we can't, in the end, know how right or wrong he is, since he is making everything up, dreaming "a realistic chronicle," as he says, quoting the old Johnny Mercer song ("Dream when the day is through"), and taking off into history as he imagines it. It's true that the imagining is grounded in the most meticulous reconstructions of old times and places—the Levov family glove factory, the spreading acres of west New Jersey, a Miss America competition in Atlantic City, the beat-up neighborhoods of what used to be the city of Newark—and it gets easier and easier to forget that Zuckerman's industry and imagination are providing all this. He gives us plenty of clues, though, before he vanishes for good on page 89, off into fiction, in the middle of a dance with an old schoolmate named Joy Helpern. "You get them wrong before you meet them," Zuckerman says of "people" in general, "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." How could the writer of fiction be exempt from this contagion? Zuckerman/Roth would reply that there is no exemption; only the need, whether you're a novelist or not, to keep imagining other people, and the hope that guesses may give life to the dead and the fallen and the lost.

Zuckerman attributes his attachment to the romance of ordinariness to a cancer scare of his own, but he offers a subtler diagnosis in The Facts. "The whole point about your fiction (and in America, not only yours)," he tells Mr. Roth, "is that the imagination is always in transit between the good boy and the bad boy—that's the tension that leads to revelation." Swede Levov is the good boy for whom life is just great—except that he's not. He is the good boy whose life turns to disaster—as if that's what good boys were for, and only the bad boys go free. Or he is the good boy whom Zuckerman can imagine and mourn for only in this way.

Swede is alive when the story opens, dead soon after. Zuckerman picks up a few details of his life at the reunion, notably from Swede's ferocious brother, a bullying cardiac surgeon in Miami. The rest is his dreamed chronicle. In and out of Zuckerman's mind the story hinges on Swede's 16-year-old daughter, Merry, an only, pampered child, who has fallen in with a section of the Weathermen and blown up a rural post office, killing a doctor who happened to be mailing his bills. The time is 1968. Merry goes into hiding, is raped and becomes destitute, gets involved in further bombings in Oregon, winds up back in Newark, stick-thin, filthy, a veil over her face, having become a Jain [a member of a fanatical version of a Hindu sect], dedicated to such extremes of nonviolence that she can scarcely bring herself to eat because of the murder of plant life involved. The novel stages an encounter between Swede and his derelict-looking daughter, and the scene manages to be both shocking and discreet.

But the novel revolves not so much around this scene as around what Merry has done, the deaths she has caused, and the absurd, irresistible question of how this respectable Jewish athlete and his Irish, former-Miss-New-Jersey wife could have given birth to this once angry, now dislocated, apparently reasoning, weirdly unthinking girl. The question can't be answered, of course, but causalities keep shaping themselves in the mind. Is it because the parents are so respectable, so decent and so liberal, as much against the war in Vietnam as their daughter, that the girl has to turn out this way? Is there an American allegory here, immigrant generations rising to prosperity only to fall into violence and despair? Or have the parents done everything they can and should have, and is it Merry the changeling who reminds us that the inexplicable exists? "And what is wrong with their life?" the novel ends. "What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?"

This is an answer to Zuckerman's own merciless portrait of the (female) intellectual who laughs with delight at the sight of historical disorder, "enjoying enormously the assailability, the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things." But the answer itself still seeks to moralize the wreck of a world, as if Zuckerman had never heard of Job, as if the Levovs' virtue ought really, after all, to have been a protection for them, rather than an invitation to damage.

American Pastoral is a little slow—as befits its crumbling subject, but unmistakably slow all the same—and I must say I miss Zuckerman's manic energies. But the mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable, and you have only to pause over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated, to see that Mr. Roth didn't entirely abandon Henry James after all. A sentence beginning "Only after strudel and coffee," for instance, lasts almost a full page and evokes a whole shaky generation, without once losing its rhythm or its comic and melancholy logic, until it arrives, with a flick of the conjuror's hand, at a revelation none of us can have been waiting for.

Because both novels are hefty and self-consciously American, trying to rethink national history, because both deal in painstaking and slightly mind-numbing realism, because both begin in New Jersey and end in hell, American Pastoral invites comparison with John Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies, The chief difference is that Mr. Updike's novel ends in a secular apocalypse, the last act in the story of the death of a Christian God, while Mr. Roth's ends in the imagination of ruin, the death of a Jew's dream of ordinariness. The difference is not extreme, although both stories are.