[In the following review, Gitlin faults Roth's flat prose, sluggish excursions, and sideways motions in American Pastoral, but notes that "Inside this long, viscous book, a solid, serious allegory struggles to get out."]

You have to admire Philip Roth for refusing to repeat himself in his twenty-second book. American Pastoral is a family epic about social breakdown and freakout—Thomas Mann goes Jersey. Roth puts on a straightforward disposition. He goes pre-postmodern. His antics and fantasies are minimal, as if Roth the shtickmeister-magician is just keeping his hand in. The dead stay dead. The protagonists are winners who, after long free rides, can't win for losing. Roth treats these uncomprehending scramblers with a certain troubled distance and intermittent compassion. He's aiming to bag the big saga about the doom in the heart of the American dream—in particular about what John Murray Cuddihy called the ordeal of assimilation.

American Pastoral opens awkwardly, as if a new script had been badly dubbed into the mouth of the familiar bitching god-child Nathan Zuckerman. Nathan exudes lyric nostalgia for his childhood hero, Swede Levov of Newark. Swede was born Seymour Irving Levov, "a boy as close to a goy as we were going to get." blond and blue-eyed, his face a "steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask." This "household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews" starred in football, basketball and baseball. Cheerleaders rendered him special tribute—and then this triple-threat embodiment of conventional responsibility went off to the Marines in 1945.

The contradiction in Jews who want to fit in and want to stand out, who insist they are different and insist they are no different, resolved itself in the triumphant spectacle of this Swede who was actually only another of our neighborhood Seymours whose forebears had been Solomons and Sauls and who would themselves beget Stephens who would in turn beget Shawns.

Swede's glove-manufacturing father, Lou, had worked himself up from a tannery job he took after leaving school at 14 to help support a family of nine. Lou Levov

was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, college-educated Jewish sons: a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn't as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.

Thus Roth at his best, with his gift for miniatures in broad strokes.

But what Nathan is doing here, besides delaying the action for some ninety pages, isn't clear. After the false start. Roth resigns the first-person narratorship, whereupon plot moves and chaos mounts. Swede marries shiksa goddess Dawn, petite and Catholic Miss New Jersey of 1949, and they move to the pastures of bucolic Old Rimrock, there to raise the bright child Merry, while Swede settles into the manufacturing pleasures of the postwar boom. Gloves are a good business in an age of decorum, when a well-dressed woman would own twenty-five pair, one for each of her dress-up colors. And thus into the sixties, when the achieving, believing Levovs, Who Had It All, lose it. The family blows up because Merry, a stutterer who beams heavy sexual vibes at her father, finds herself in 1968 a not-so-sweet 16 who falls in among antiwar terrorists in New York. Although he opposes the war, Swede cannot fathom the depth of his daughter's fury against everything in America that certifies his success. He forbids her to hang out with her radical friends and gets her to a therapist. Surprise! Merry blows up the community store that houses the rural post office—the only federal facility around—killing a local doctor whose specialty is good works.

Merry goes underground, and the family trouble really begins. An emissary from Merry's underground cell offers Swede a sexual invitation. Dawn goes crazy and Swede goes philandering. Merry goes from bad to worse. Swede proves helpless. Events of suburban angst and entanglement follow. Family intrigue smolders. Things fall apart.

The settings are rich enough, the characters vivid enough, that the result ought to be more moving, more propulsive, than it is. The novel is not devoid of rewards but it is bloated, the prose frequently flat, with motion more sideways than forward. The characters Hash ahead and back, but we don't feel them in motion. The plot pauses for stretches so long you can hear the grass grow and brown. A long excursus into the workings of the Levov glove factory is so sluggish it reminds the reader that Roth is no Melville. The prose brightens when Roth larks around (when Swede, trying to figure out his daughter, argues with a phantasmagorical Angela Davis) or when family acrimony ignites.

Here is Roth's real subject: how people horrify the ones they love. The writing comes to life when Swede inveighs against the ungrateful blacks who riot in Newark in 1967. It rises to the quivering point when he encounters his broken daughter, and when his lurid imagination goes to work on the disasters that have befallen her. It rises yet again when he calls up his brother Jerry, a multiply divorced surgeon, to ask advice about what to do with Merry, and Jerry keeps an office of patients waiting while screaming at Swede about everything that he has botched about his life. What Roth catches most convincingly are Jewish males ranting against a whole world that spits in their half-closed eyes.

Mark Twain said about Wagner's music that it was better than it sounded. The cruel thing to say about Roth would be that American Pastoral is better than it reads. Inside this long, viscous book, a solid, serious allegory struggles to get out. Roth has hung his family antiromance on the varieties of sixties experience, so his story depends on whether he can bring the wildness of that time to life and make his characters live their doom. Mainly, he doesn't. The family arguments feel forced and sometimes clunky. The reader never penetrates Merry's radical circle but comes to it by hearsay, through her fights with her father, when she says things like, "They were students. Now they organize people for the betterment of the Vietnamese." Merry has gone from golden-haired maiden of ballet class and speech therapy to avenging angel of the Third World in fifteen minutes, and not only docs Swede not seem to grasp what has happened to her, Roth doesn't either. The writer who would bring Merry to life would have to bring to life more than Merry, would have to re-create the milieu that reached out and snared the Merries out of their Old Rimrocks—the movements, media, raptures, hopes, rages, entitlements, moral defaults.

Given all his effort to get social details right, from family histories to Watergate hearings, Roth's sixties are chronologically odd. Merry bombs the store on February 3, 1968—before the Columbia occupation, before the Chicago Götterdämmerung and during the Tet offensive, when the antiwar movement was only just turning (in a phrase of that time) "from protest to resistance." The militant vanguard wasn't anywhere near bombing. Two years would pass before the Weather Underground's 11th Street townhouse in New York City blew up, killing three of their own. Two and a half would pass before a cell bombed the army math research center in Madison, Wisconsin, costing the life of a graduate student working late. Merry explodes prematurely.

Moreover, her mother, who obsesses about the Miss America pageant of 1949, doesn't notice its successor of 1968, when feminists organized their first visible demonstration. Six months after their daughter had gone underground in a cloud of ranting against her sellout liberal bourgeois parents, you might have thought the Levovs would be paying closer attention to the upheaval going off around them.

But then Roth offers a clue that the sixties might be only a backdrop to his private plot and not its dynamic at all. Merry, he writes late in the game, "entered the world screaming and the screaming did not stop." Long before the Vietnam War and the counterwar, she was an infant out of control. Her darkness was presumably bred in the bone. The Levovs' journey toward light is cursed by fate, not history. If so, then the moral point of the family saga grows dim, and Roth's Levovs come to resemble the hapless parents of Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, whose grotesque son is a Neanderthal throwback, not so much evil as clueless. This piece of fatalism makes Roth's anachronisms less consequential, but also renders much of the story's atmospherics redundant.

Could it be that Roth's failure to bring the sixties to life is more than Roth's? Is there some larger cultural blockage, a case of clogged cognitive arteries? Precious little realistic fiction has brought the movements of the sixties to light. There are exceptions: the early chapters of Rosellen Brown's Civil Wars invoking the civil rights movement; the flashback chapter in Marge Piercy's Vida on the organizing of a demonstration in 1967; the Boston commune sequence in John Sayles's Union Dues; Sol Yurick's The Bag; and, in more lurid vein, sections of Updike's Rabbit Redux, Malamud's The Tenants and John Gardner's Sunlight Dialogues. Why, with all the scribbling through and after this period, with so much cultural baggage riding on this freight, is there so little fictional invention to show?

Roth saw the problem coming even before the self-inventions of Richard Nixon and Lee Harvey Oswald: Reality puts fictionists to bashful shrugs and shame. And it's not only the first-magnitude stars who make Jay Gatz look banal. In the second tier of the famous, consider only the truelife confidence men and women Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and Bernardine Dohrn.

Norman Mailer once observed that a novelist needs a sense of the real. And that sense is exactly what shook, rattled, rolled and eventually blew up in the sixties. The ground of what was taken for granted liquefied. Feelings were volcanic, and the lava rolled all over the land. The recognizable stopped being recognized. Plausibility? Cause and effect? By the standards of normality, means were peeling away from ends. Vielcong winning territory? Drop napalm. Suburbia dull? Drop acid. Demonstrations don't stop the war? Declare fealty to Albania and build antipersonnel weapons. When ordinary people think extraordinary thoughts, realistic imagination runs aground.

Even most of the great social novelists were best in, and on, the interval between revolutions. Balzac avoided the 1789 revolution itself. Dickens's French Revolution is most evocative when it tracks the course of wine through the cobblestoned Paris streets, not the course of ideas through the synapses. Raskolnikov is an emblematic schemer of the run-up to revolution, not a cadre. Malraux's China and Spain were overheated inventions—great in moments, but mainly abstract. There remain, of course, the achievements of the Dostoyevsky of The Possessed, of Babel and Silone, the Rebecca West of The Birds Fall Down, Lessing of The Golden Notebook and the Martha Quest books—a short list for a long history of radical politics. Many a critic has rightly observed that the large social canvas is not the forte of American writers in the first place. Then Philip Roth's failure looks overdetermined, and the odds against the realistic novel of American radicalism may be insuperable.