A review of American Pastoral
In 1960 Philip Roth wrote, "The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meager imagination." It's hard now to imagine what horrors Roth had in mind during what now seems the halcyon Eisenhower epoch. In his 22nd novel, Roth looks back on the transition from what his characters nostalgically remember as the "American pastoral" of the '50s to what they often experience as the "American berserk."
In American Pastoral Roth's alter ego, novelist Nathan Zuckerman, tries to make sense of the life of his high school hero, Seymour "Swede" Levov, a grandson of Jewish immigrants who has made good in America: "all-city end in football; all-city, all-county center in basketball; all-city, all-county, all-state First baseman in baseball." A good-looking blond, Swede married the dark, petite and marginally Catholic former Miss New Jersey. He became a successful CEO of the glove business his father built from scratch, owner of a dream house in the New Jersey countryside and devoted father of the bright, talented Meredith "Merry" Levov.
So much apple-pie achievement is really not something Zuckerman finds interesting—until he learns that at age 16 Merry exploded her father's life by setting off a bomb in the local general store and post office in protest against the Vietnam war, killing the family doctor and then vanishing from her parents' lives.
For Zuckerman, Swede represents the Jewish boy who has successfully assimilated to American culture and captured the American dream. Swede embodies the hope of each generation to achieve more than its forebears. Merry, his only child, was to have received the benefit of all the good he could provide. What went wrong? Zuckerman wonders. He imagines Swede incessantly worrying, beneath his strong, calm exterior, that all the hard work, right living and good parenting of three generations has produced a generation of monsters. Is it possible that all the achievements of the Depression-era generation have somehow engendered the violent protests of the baby boomers in the '60s and '70s? Has the "flight of the immigrant rocket" begun its inevitable descent?
Though Swede isn't a religious man, shortly before Merry plants the bomb he experiences a sense of "something shining down on me," of being blessed. Such moments of joy, the novel suggests, are merely the calm before the storm, paradise before the fall. Revising Milton's version of Genesis, the novel is divided into three sections: "Paradise Remembered," "The Fall" and "Paradise Lost." It is not sin but goodness that has led to this fall in a world that offers no promise of redemption and no contact with God except through religious rituals that seem more and more obscure to each generation.
Swede's story will also remind readers of Job's. After his child, marriage, work, home and health have all suffered or been destroyed, Swede, like Job, experiences the joy of a new family. His second try at creating the ideal American family produces three smart, athletic, good-looking boys. Perhaps this perfection can remain unassailed. Yet, unlike Job's this is not a story of restitution through reconciliation with God. The snake is always lurking in the garden.
Roth's snake is not so much the active presence of evil as the persistence of chaos despite our best attempts at creating order, our propensity to "get it wrong" despite our efforts to understand and act rightly, and the inevitable decline and decay of our lives, not only physically but in our inner selves. Observing a neighbor who became an alcoholic after her children grew up, Swede realizes, "What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for."
While these are timeless concerns, this novel expresses the particular perspectives of its 60-something author, narrator and hero as they look back over their lives. At a 40th high school reunion, Zuckerman and his classmates lament the number who have died and remind each other to be tested regularly for prostate cancer. Zuckerman himself has been left impotent and incontinent by prostate surgery. The sense of decay in the American way of life articulated in the novel parallels the experience of physiological decline and the looming reality of death.
The impossibility of achieving the American dream of the '50s and the sense of betrayal during the Watergate years may not be compelling themes for younger readers. But American Pastoral is engaging not only because Swede appeals to our nostalgia for earlier, seemingly simpler times, but also because Roth uses his story to examine the failures of American idealism in public life.
At a time when many contemporary writers focus on the experiences of ordinary life, Roth narrates a life that both fulfills and destroys the possibility of perfection even as he suggests that a happy ordinariness is ultimately impossible. "No one gets through unmarked," Zuckerman realizes. Yet while Swede experiences evil for which he can find no clear explanation and while Zuckerman acknowledges that novelists, like all of us, inevitably "get it wrong," both characters embody that strain of American optimism that keeps trying to get it right.
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