[In the following review of American Pastoral, Cohen critiques Roth's repetitive use of his character Nathan Zuckerman, but praises the author's narrative energies, claiming that age seems to have "enriched [Roth's] perspective."]

I suspect I am not alone among Philip Roth's many readers in finding the prospect of another installment in the Nathan Zuckerman saga about as appealing as a tax audit. Surely by now, at century's end, few depths remain unplumbed in this person fashioned in the sort-of-but-not-quite-though-pro-vocatively-similar image of the creator Himself. It's no accident that the best of Roth's recent books (and they are terrifically good), Patrimony and Sabbath's Theater, elbowed the ongoing tribulations of N. Z. aside to make room for more colorful, more dramatic, and ultimately more moving and revealing subjects—Herman Roth and that putzy poor man's Lear, Mickey Sabbath. You could almost feel the relief in the prose. No leaden reflections, no coy games of peekaboo with the mirror; just a writer of prodigious energies and consummate skill making good on that cliché of the mature artist: working at the height of his powers.

The first section of American Pastoral, concerning the sudden, improbable interest taken by a certain Nathan Zuckerman in a semilegendary figure from his past named Seymour "Swede" Levov, may be off-putting to some. "Ridiculously, perhaps, at the onset of old age, I had only to see his signature at the foot of the letter to be swamped by memories of him, both on and off the field, that were some 50 years old and yet still captivating." Well, maybe not so captivating. For all the memory retrieval that goes on here—the postwar Newark childhood, the Jewish petit-bourgeois milieu, the love of baseball, the many "shards of reality" that attach themselves to the memory of Swede Levov—it's hard not to be aware of the labor involved as the usual Rothian suspects are meticulously rounded up in long, leisurely, wide-body paragraphs that never quite gather momentum.

And yet, going down these not-yet-mean streets once again, fighting to stay alert, it's easy to miss what actually is new here. Or rather, what's so old and enduring a preoccupation for Roth that by approaching it straight on—as he does throughout this strange, complex and extraordinary novel—he makes it feel new: the profound strangeness and remoteness of the American self.

There has always been a deep strand of Chekhovian melancholy in Roth's literary fabric, and it is powerfully and abundantly present in American Pastoral. The inscrutable hiddenness of life ("the knowledge," as Sabbath put it, "that everything subterranean beats everything terranean by a mile"); the tricky disjunctions of self; the failure to understand anyone's intentions fully, including your own, and yet the endless compulsion, if not responsibility, to try to understand them—from the beginning of Roth's career these have provided an undertow of somberness, a countercurrent running below the crashing waves of rage, sex and bravado, asking, What does it mean to be good? And answering, It is impossible to know. And doubly impossible from the outside.

"The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway." So Zuckerman begins to conclude, as he's drawn into the—seemingly—banal, prosperous and uneventful life story of Swede Levov. "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."

If this sounds a touch didactic, a theme baldly in search of an illustration, get used to it—there are easily two dozen such passages in the novel. The schema is foregrounded throughout. As opposed to the geyser-like eruptions of Portnoy or Sabbath, Swede Levov, we see right off, is a "good" son in the mode of Paul Hertz and Gabe Wallach of Letting Go—a man of restraint and responsibility, a factory-owner, a homeowner, a tree-owner (this is a pastoral, after all); most tellingly in the Roth cosmology, a man who does not shtup every young girl he can. "He was our Kennedy," Zuckerman recalls, ignoring this last point. But Swede's trajectory, as tracked by the old Weequahic High gang, shares some of that heady postwar glamour—a Jew who in every visible way, from his athletic prowess to his blond hair to his shiksa wife to his rural estate in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, has climbed as close to WASP heights as one can. In short: an American success story. Also in short: a man headed for The Fall (the capitals are Roth's). "The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man's tragedy."

Jerry Levov, the "bad" (read: multiply divorced) tell-it-like-it-is younger brother, has his own take on Swede's abrupt death. Here's Zuckerman's paraphrase:

"The Swede is nice, that is to say passive, that is to say trying always to do the right thing, a socially controlled character who doesn't always burst out, doesn't yield to rage ever. Will not have the angry quality as his liability, so doesn't get it as an asset either. According to this theory, it's the no-rage that kills him in the end. Whereas aggression is cleansing or curing."

This last sentiment, which nicely describes the method of Portnoy and Sabbath, should not be taken at face value here. For none of the aggression in American Pastoral—and there is a great deal—proves even remotely cleansing or curative. It is simply what is the case. Roth depicts a world whose energies of order must forever yield to a counterforce of destruction that erupts without warning. "People think of history in the long term," Zuckerman observes, "but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing."

History arrives in the Swede's life in the form of his teenage daughter, Merry, who amid the benevolent fluency of late '60s American life has been cursed with a stutter. It may be organic, it may be psychological; whatever its origins, it's simply there, as furious and intractable and chaotic as adolescence itself. Roth portrays this affliction and the minor damage it radiates with great specificity and patience. The major damage comes later, when, in the novel's devastating event, Merry's Weathermen-like demolition of the local post office kills a man and sends her underground. Even then, as history crashes the stage, the reader is pulled irresistibly back to that stuttering young girl in that perfect old house. "What the hell happened to our smart Jewish kids?" Swede's father asks. "They have parents they can't hate anymore because their parents are so good to them, so they hate America instead."

Hence, the 1960s. Among the many vigorous if not obsessional currents in the novel is its revisiting of the arguments of that contentious era (and no Roth novel lacks for arguments: He makes more and better use of the exclamation mark than any writer alive). Though Swede and his wife are carefully depicted as antiwar liberals, determinedly keeping the family glove factory in Newark during the white flight years, such "goodness," Roth seems to suggest, was in hindsight a form of denial, a shallow and self-deluding dream. "Tolerant respect for every position," says Jerry. "Always holding things together. And look where the f― it's got you!" Sooner or later the liberal dream must give way to the hot light of nightmare, referred to here as "the indigenous American berserk."

Exactly what's so indigenously American about hating your parents, or for that matter blowing up buildings, is a question the novel, for all its three decades worth of distance on the era, never answers. One might also wonder if in portraying the '60s as an aberrational tear in the American fabric, the writer may be hitting the nostalgia button a bit too hard. Did children really love their parents so much better in older, whiter, more orderly Newark? Roth's social history, for all its heat, is curiously cranky and thin.

Still, despite the book's schematic design (as reflected in the title and in Swede's wife's literally having been a Miss America contestant), its life and force derive from something messier and more subversive—the details. Roth has always had a great eye to go with his great ear, and an obvious passion for research, and they're on full display here. The tactile pleasures of a woman's glove, the behind-the-scenes insecurities that attach themselves to a beauty pageant, the renovations of an old stone house, the inquisition of a young gentile fiancée by her prospective Jewish father-in-law—all are rendered with such care and precision, such sheer authorial investment, that the effect is singularly powerful and contagious.

As is, finally, the inner turmoil of Swede Levov, as imagined by Nathan Zuckerman, as imagined by Philip Roth. Call it his own bleak version of Secrets and Lies. "What kind of mask is everyone wearing?" Swede wonders during the book's long, bravura third section (consisting entirely, like a Chekhov play, of a dull summer dinner party, and recalling the end of Roth's other frankly Chekhovian work, The Professor of Desire). "What was he, stripped of all the signs he flashed?"

No one can know anyone else, least of all themselves; they can only imagine, and even then they are doomed to fail. Systems will break down, personal or national, psychological or ideological. Whether you embrace order, like Swede Levov, or ruin, like Mickey Sabbath, in the end, Roth argues, it will come to the same thing. "He had thought most of it was order and only a little of it was disorder. He'd had it backwards … He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach: that it makes no sense."

That American Pastoral does make sense is a tribute to Roth's narrative energies. If age has failed to mellow him—his work retains its heat and thrust, its furious accumulations, its unruly obsessiveness—it does seem to have enriched his perspective. There is a feeling for human inadequacy that is more intimate and devastating than we have seen before, and perhaps more forgiving. It is no accident that this novel full of attempted answers ends with a question. A reminder that the true fall, always, is into knowledge. And it goes on and on.