American Pastoral
Philip Roth
1997

Introduction

American Pastoral (1997) is the twenty-second book by Philip Roth, one of the leading twentieth-century American writers. This long novel, which is almost mythic in scope, explores the course of American history from the late 1940s, which Roth's narrator and alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, regards as a golden period, to the social upheavals that marked the 1960s and early 1970s. The focal point of the story is a Jewish character called Swede Levov, an outstanding man in every respect—brilliant athlete, successful businessman, devoted husband and father—whose only goal is to live a tranquil, pastoral life in rural Old Rimrock, New Jersey. But his rebellious sixteen-year-old daughter, Merry, gets caught up in the anti-Vietnam War movement and plants a bomb at the local post office, killing one person. Swede's idyllic life is shattered forever, and for the rest of his life, as the novel zigzags its way back and forth in time, Swede tries without success to understand what went wrong. How could such a thing have happened? In his searching examination of how confident, post-World War II America gave way to the violence and disorder of the 1960s, Roth explores, with depth, understanding, and compassion, issues such as the nature of community and belonging, Jewish assimilation, father-daughter relations, familial loyalty and betrayal, and political fanaticism.

Author Biography

One of America's leading novelists of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, Philip Roth explores the conflicts and tensions in American Jewish life. Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 19, 1933, the eldest son of Herman and Bess Roth, who were Jewish immigrants from Europe. Roth was raised in the Weequahic area of Newark, during the Depression. He graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and then earned a bachelor's degree in English from Bucknell University in 1954 and a master of arts degree, also in English, from the University of Chicago in 1955.

Roth served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1956 and married Margaret Martinson in 1959; they separated in 1963. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories (1959), won the National Book Award in 1960. After two novels that received comparatively little attention, Roth wrote one of his best known novels, Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Its portrayal of the overbearing Jewish mother and her repressed son, Alex Portnoy, gave thousands of readers a hilarious picture of growing up Jewish in America in the 1940s and 1950s.

Through the 1970s Roth published a number of successful novels. In 1979, Roth published The Ghost Writer, the first novel in which Nathan Zuckerman appeared. Zuckerman, a writer, is Roth's alter ego, a semi-autobiographical figure, although not everything that happens to Zuckerman also happened to Roth. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Roth used Zuckerman repeatedly as a protagonist. Among the novels in which Zuckerman appears is American Pastoral (1997), which won the Pulitzer Prize. I Married a Communist (1998) may have been inspired by Roth's stormy relationship with his ex-wife, the actress Claire Bloom. They had married in 1990 and divorced in 1994, and Bloom wrote a memoir in which she portrayed Roth in an unflattering light. In the novel, a radio actor's life is ruined by a memoir written by his ex-wife.

Roth continued to write through the 1990s, winning awards repeatedly for his work. As of 2006, Roth's most recent novel was The Plot Against America (2004), an exploration of the anti-Semitism that might have developed in the United States had Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency in 1940.

Roth has also written a number of nonfiction works. Probably the best known is Patrimony: A True Story (1991), about the relationship between Roth and his father during the last five months of

his father's life. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award. As of 2006, Roth lived in Connecticut and continued to write prolifically.

Plot Summary

Part 1: Paradise Remembered

Chapter 1

American Pastoral begins in Weequahic, a middle-class area of Newark, New Jersey. The narrator, Philip Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, recalls his high school years during the late 1940s. In particular, he recalls Seymour Levov, a Jewish boy seven years his senior, who was Weequahic High School's star athlete during the early years of World War II. Everyone called Seymour, "the Swede" or "Swede," and he was widely loved and admired. Swede joined the Marines in 1945 and became a drill instructor. After college graduation, he married Dawn Dwyer, a Catholic woman and former Miss New Jersey.

Zuckerman recalls that in 1985 he went to New York to watch the Mets and happened to see Swede. He introduced him to his companions as the greatest athlete in the history of Weequahic High School. Ten years later, Zuckerman received a letter from the Swede in which Swede said he wanted to meet Zuckerman for dinner in New York. He wanted to talk about his father, who recently died at the age of ninety-six and had "suffered because of the shocks that befell his loved ones." Flattered, Zuckerman agreed, and they met at an Italian restaurant. But the Swede talked mostly about his three sons and did not mention his father. Zuckerman was frustrated at being unable to penetrate the Swede's bland exterior. He wanted to know what lay behind the man's polite, smooth manner.

Chapter 2

Zuckerman reports on an enjoyable forty-fifth high school reunion, for which he drove three hours from his home in western Massachusetts. He meets his old friend Mendy Gurlik, and they discuss the fact that twenty members of their class are now dead, two of them from prostate cancer, which Gurlik fears, and which Zuckerman has already had. Zuckerman also meets Ira Posner and Alan Meisner, and they recall their high school days. Then Jerry Levov, Zuckerman's old classmate and Swede's younger brother, unexpectedly arrives at the reunion.

Chapter 3

Jerry informs Zuckerman that Swede died of prostate cancer only a few days earlier. Jerry speaks appreciatively of his brother's generous nature and his skill at running his business manufacturing ladies’ gloves. But the Swede's life was destroyed, according to Jerry, by his daughter, Meredith, known as Merry. Merry was sixteen years old when in a protest against the Vietnam War in 1968, she planted a bomb in the post office at Old Rimrock, the village five miles from where the Levovs lived. The explosion killed a doctor who happened to be there. After that, Merry was known as the Rimrock Bomber. Jerry says that the Swede brought her up in a permissive way, in keeping with the times, but she resented it. The bomb put an end to the charmed life the Swede had led up to that point.

Jerry recalls a moment two years earlier when he found the Swede, who always maintained his placid exterior, sobbing in his car outside a restaurant. Swede told him that Merry, who had gone into hiding after planting the bomb, was dead. Jerry believed that Swede had always known where she was and had been going to see her. Jerry hated Merry and told his brother he was better off without her.

Jerry tells Zuckerman more about Swede's life. Dawn, in Jerry's view, was never satisfied with what Swede provided for her, and Merry was afflicted with a stutter. Swede took her to speech therapists and psychiatrists, but nothing seemed to help. His reward was that his own daughter started to hate him. Jerry wonders why such a thing would happen to a man like Swede.

Intrigued by Swede's life, Zuckerman decides to write a book with Swede as the main character. He wants to delve into the man's character and discover what he was really like.

As the narrative returns to the reunion, Zuckerman meets Joy Helpern, and they recall a hayride they took together when they were in high school. As they talk, Zuckerman continues to think about Swede. He guesses that what Swede had really wanted to tell him about in the restaurant was not his father but his daughter. This was the great wound in his life that the Swede could not get out of his mind despite the fact that he had rebuilt his life with a second wife and three sons.

Joy tells Zuckerman details of her life as a girl that he had not known about, but then Zuckerman continues his speculations about what went wrong in Swede's life and how his desire to live a utopian, "American pastoral" life had turned into its antithesis, the "violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral." As he dances with Joy, he contemplates the wider historical question of how Swede had become "history's plaything." Zuckerman thinks of the transition in U.S. society from World War II to the 1960s and the chaos created by the Vietnam War.

He begins in his mind to write the book about the Swede, imagining himself into the other man's life. He first creates a scene in Deal, New Jersey, at a seaside cottage when Merry is eleven. Driving back from the beach, Merry asks Swede to kiss her the way he kisses her mother. After an initial refusal, her father kisses her passionately on the mouth. He later wonders whether this one lapse is the cause of their subsequent suffering.

Zuckerman then reconstructs Merry's early life. When attempts to cure her stutter fail, Merry starts eating junk food, and by the time she is sixteen, she is very overweight. She becomes politically minded, opposing the Vietnam War and renouncing her family's middle-class values. She starts to fight with her parents. Swede argues with her about her Saturday afternoon trips to New York, where she sometimes stays overnight. After Merry rebells against the conditions he imposes on her, Swede bans her from leaving the house on Saturdays. He tells her she can demonstrate against the war locally. She does not go to New York again, but one day she blows up a nearby post office.

Part 2: The Fall

Chapter 4

Four months after the bombing and Merry's disappearance, a young woman named Rita Cohen comes to Swede's factory, claiming to be a graduate student doing a thesis on the leather industry in Newark. Swede gives her a tour of the factory. As she is about to leave, Rita tells him that "she," meaning Merry, wants the scrapbook she made about Audrey Hepburn. Swede then knows that Merry has sent her. He meets Rita the next day at the Newark airport parking lot and gives her the scrapbook. The following week he hands over her ballet slippers, her leotard, and a diary she kept about her stuttering. But Rita refuses to tell him where Merry is, and she denounces him as a capitalist who abuses his workers. He tells her she does not know what she is talking about and demands to know where Merry is. He arranges to meet Rita at a room in the New York Hilton and takes five thousand dollars in cash that she has requested, plus five thousand more. When he arrives at the room, Rita taunts him and asks him to have sex with her, after which, she says, she will take him to see Merry. Disgusted, Swede runs from the room and calls the FBI, but by the time they arrive she is gone.

Five years pass. Across the United States, more bombs are being set off by anti-war radicals. Two years after Merry's disappearance, a house in Greenwich Village, New York, is destroyed by a bomb. Swede is convinced that the young woman seen staggering from the building was Merry, and he believes she will show up at their house. Then the woman is identified and is not Merry. After that, Swede thinks that the corpse of a young woman discovered in the house must be Merry, but again, this proves false.

In trying to work out what went wrong with Merry, Swede thinks back to an incident in 1963, when she was eleven. She watched on television as a Buddhist monk immolated himself in South Vietnam. The image frightened her, but when more monks were shown doing the same thing, she became fascinated by it, less horrified than curious.

Desperate to find Merry, Swede becomes convinced that Angela Davis, a political radical on trial for kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy, knows where Merry is. He carries on imaginary conversations with Davis in his kitchen. To her charges that wealthy whites exploit black workers, he tells her of his loyal black employee Vicky, who stayed with him in the building during the Newark riots in June 1967. After the riots, he refused to move his factory from Newark, despite his father's urging. One reason was that he did not want Merry to think that he had employed black people and then deserted them at the first sign of trouble.

Over time, the Swede's torment, of which he is reminded every time he goes to Old Rimrock, increases; his mind is full of "tyrannical obsessions, stifled inclinations, superstitious expectations, horrible imaginings, fantasy conversations, unanswerable questions."

Chapter 5

In September of 1973, Swede receives a letter from Rita Cohen, informing him that Merry is working under the name of Mary Stolz at a dog and cat hospital in Newark. Rita tells him how he may contact Merry. The letter comes at a time when Dawn Levov seems finally to be getting over the tragedy. Since it happened, she has been hospitalized twice for suicidal depression, and Swede had thought she would never fully recover. But her recovery dates from the previous year, when she went to a clinic in Geneva for a facelift. She was delighted with the results. She also managed to persuade Swede to agree to sell their old stone house and have a new house built.

The dog and cat hospital is located in a decrepit old building only ten minutes’ car drive from Swede's Newark Maid glove factory. He waits for his daughter on the sidewalk. When she sees him, she races across the street, and they embrace.

Chapter 6

Merry tells her father that she has become a Jain (the Jains are a small Indian religious sect) and has adopted an extreme philosophy of renunciation. She wears a mask over her mouth because she does not want to harm the microscopic organisms in the air. She cultivates asceticism and self-denial because she does not want to commit violence against any living thing.

Merry has been living for six months in squalor in a tiny room in a wreck of a house on a narrow street where there are only two other houses left. Swede asks her whether she bombed the post office, and she admits that she did, but she also claims that she does not know Rita Cohen and did not send her, or anyone, to her father. Swede starts to think that Rita was nothing but a criminal who tricked him.

Merry then explains what she has been doing for the last five years. For seventy-two hours after the bombing she had been hidden in the home of Sheila Salzman, her speech therapist. Then she left and moved around every few days, taking on fifteen aliases in two months. In Indianapolis, she was taken in by an antiwar minister and assumed the name Mary Stolz. For nearly a year, she washed dishes in an old people's home until the minister told her she must leave immediately and go to a commune in Portland, Oregon. On the way, she was raped and robbed in Chicago. In Oregon, she planted two bombs which killed three people. Assembling bombs had become her specialty. After Portland, she worked in the potato fields in Idaho and planned to go to Cuba. She moved to Miami, Florida, where she only just managed to escape capture by the FBI. Swede asks her to go home with him, but she refuses.

After he leaves all he can think of is the fact that his daughter was raped. Distressed, he calls his brother Jerry, who tells him to go back and get Merry and bring her home. Jerry then criticizes Swede for all his faults, especially for not showing his true feelings about anything, always wanting to be diplomatic and not hurt anyone. He urges Swede to either assert his will and get his daughter or forget about her altogether. He even offers to come and get her himself if that is what Swede wants. Swede says no and is convinced that Jerry's explanations for what went wrong are false, but he can find no reason himself that would explain the tragedy that befell Merry.

Part 3: Paradise Lost

Chapter 7

Swede returns home from his meeting with Merry. He, Dawn, and Swede's parents, who are visiting from Florida, watch the Watergate hearings on television. (Watergate was the scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974.) Lou Levov rails against Nixon and his cohorts. The talk gets round to Merry, but Swede tells them there is no news. He cannot bring himself to tell them the truth because he wants to protect his family.

That evening, the Levovs hold a dinner party. The guests include Bill and Jessie Orcutt, their neighbors. Bill, who is designing the Levovs’ new home, comes from a family that has been in the area since the eighteenth century, and he is an expert on local history. Orcutt once took Swede on a tour of the area, and Swede realized that he could never match Orcutt in terms of the latter's illustrious family history. Orcutt belonged to the area in a way that the Jewish Swede never could.

During dinner, Jessie Orcutt drinks too much, but Lou Levov tries to get along with her and engage her in conversation, even though he has no respect for the Orcutts. Dawn has always claimed not to like Bill Orcutt, either, but when Swede catches sight of her and Orcutt in the kitchen, it is obvious from the way that Orcutt touches her that they are having an affair.

Chapter 8

Swede is stunned by the revelation of his wife's infidelity, and he thinks about it as the dinner conversation centers on the Watergate scandal and the X-rated movie, Deep Throat. Swede is also disturbed by the fact that one of his dinner guests is Sheila Salzman, who, he has that afternoon learned, sheltered Merry after the bombing. The narrative also reveals that for four months following Merry's disappearance, Sheila was Swede's mistress.

Other guests at the dinner are Barry and Marcia Umanoff, Columbia University professors with whom Merry stayed in New York a couple of times before the bombing. Marcia is an argumentative person; she and Dawn loathe each other. As the conversation continues, Lou Levov protests against Deep Throat, asserting that such things should be kept out of the general culture. Orcutt argues that doing so is impossible because permissiveness is a part of the times in which they live. When Dr. Shelly Salzman speaks, all Swede can think of is that the Salzmans had harbored Merry and never told him. Swede had once visited Salzman's office intending to confess his affair with the doctor's wife, but once he was there he remained silent about it. Swede now feels extremely hostile toward Sheila and Orcutt.

As Marcia provokes everyone, especially Lou Levov, into arguing, Swede suddenly realizes that the house that Orcutt is supposedly designing for the Levovs will, in fact, be occupied by Dawn and Orcutt, after Dawn leaves Swede and Orcutt deserts his drunken wife, Jessie.

Chapter 9

Swede takes a phone call in his study from Rita Cohen. She accuses him of telling Merry that he had refused to have sex with her at the hotel. Swede had, in fact, not mentioned this to Merry. He is confused, not knowing what the relationship is between Rita and Merry and not knowing what to believe. When Rita get abusive, Swede hangs up, after which Sheila enters the study, inquiring whether he is all right. He confronts her with the fact that she gave Merry refuge and did not tell him; she replies that she had no choice. Her first obligation was to Merry. Swede insults her, pulls a picture off the wall and throws it at her feet. She leaves the room quietly, still in control of herself. He returns to the terrace, where he talks to Orcutt, full of hatred of him. He is also momentarily overwhelmed by the thought that he should never have left Merry; he thinks he should go back to her and bring her back, but he does not act on the thought. He is also distressed at the thought of life without Dawn, and for a moment he thinks he should not have married her.

The narrative then loops back to the time when Swede and Dawn first got married. Lou Levov wanted to know how they would bring their children up, as Catholics or Jews. Lou summoned Dawn to his factory and interrogated her, and they worked out a compromise in the child's upbringing that would permit limited exposure to Catholicism, although Dawn later had Merry secretly baptized.

Back at the dinner, Dawn tells the Salzmans about the trip she and Swede made to Switzerland when Merry was six. Swede holds her hand and recalls it, also. After a digression about Dawn's days as a beauty queen, the narrative returns to the dinner party, but all Swede can think about is Merry. He convinces himself that Jerry has informed the FBI about Merry's whereabouts. The dinner party ends in disarray when the drunken Jessie Orcutt, who has been talking to Lou Levov in the kitchen, stabs him near the eye with a fork. This action shows how far the rampant disorder of the times has spread.

Characters

Rita Cohen

Rita Cohen is a young woman who comes to Swede's factory, claiming to be a graduate student needing information about the leather industry in Newark. She is tiny and looks younger than Merry but claims to be twenty-two years old. She is polite and interested as Swede gives her a tour of the factory, but as she is about to leave it becomes apparent that Merry has sent her. After Swede gives her some of Merry's personal belongings, Rita asks him to bring cash to a hotel room. When he arrives, she demands that he have sex with her and also roundly abuses him as a capitalist who exploits his workers. Rita then disappears for five years until Swede receives a letter from her in which she tells him where to find Merry. She claims to love and admire Merry as an "incredible spirit" and writes that she never did anything other than what Merry told her to do. But Merry denies even knowing Rita, which makes Swede feel that Rita is a criminal who tricked him and stole money from him. Who Rita really is and what relationship, if any, she has or has had with Merry is never explained.

Angela Davis

Angela Davis was a real-life African American left-wing political activist during the 1960s.

Dorothy Dwyer

Dorothy Dwyer is Dawn Levov's mother. Her life appears to revolve around the Catholic Church.

Jim Dwyer

Jim Dwyer was Dawn Levov's father. He was a plumber who died of a heart attack in 1959. He was also a staunch Catholic, but to everyone's surprise he and Lou Levov used to get on very well, swapping stories about their boyhood.

Mendy Gurlik

Mendy Gurlik is an old high school friend of Zuckerman. In high school, Gurlik was the closest the school had to a delinquent, and he used to take Zuckerman to music events in town. Zuckerman meets Gurlik at the reunion and finds out that he is now a retired restaurateur.

Joy Helpern

Joy Helpern is a former high school sweetheart of Zuckerman; they meet again at the reunion.

Dawn Levov

Dawn Levov is Swede's first wife. As Dawn Dwyer, daughter of Irish immigrants, she was crowned Miss New Jersey in 1949, at the age of twenty-two. She later claimed that winning the beauty title ruined her life. She only entered the contest to win money that would enable her brother to go to college. At the time, she wanted to teach music, and she did not want to marry. But Swede pursued and won her, and for years the marriage of the handsome athlete and the beauty queen looked picture-perfect. Dawn wanted to be more than a wife and mother, so Swede set her up in business raising beef cattle. She worked hard at it, running the business almost by herself and developing an interest in cross-breeding. She showed her strength and determination in other aspects of her life, too. Even at twenty-two, she maintained her poise when she was interrogated by Swede's overbearing father about her Christian faith.

Dawn was devastated by Merry's rebellion and her act of terrorism, and for several years, Dawn suffered from suicidal depression. She sold the cattle business in 1969 since it had become too much for her to handle. However, she managed to pull out of her depression after she went to Geneva for a facelift. It later transpires that she is having an affair with Bill Orcutt, with whom she is helping to design a new house, and it becomes clear that she will soon leave Swede and live in the new house with Orcutt.

Jerry Levov

Jerry Levov is Swede's younger brother, a contemporary of Zuckerman. In high school, Zuckerman was as close as anyone ever got to being a friend of Jerry. Jerry was aggressive and self-assertive and at the age of fifteen would angrily confront his strong-minded father. Jerry was also unusual. In his junior year of high school, he tried to win the heart of a girl by presenting her with a Valentine gift, a coat which he had made out of hamster skins that he cured in the sun and sewed together himself. The girl was horrified. Jerry became very successful and is a cardiac surgeon in Miami who makes a million dollars a year. He has been married four times, each time to a nurse, and has six children, five girls and one boy. Jerry is very self-confident and something of a bully. He always believes he is right. In Zuckerman's view, Jerry "had a special talent for rage and another special talent for not looking back." Jerry berates Swede for his diplomatic nature and thinks he should have been firmer in the way he raised Merry.

Lou Levov

Lou Levov is the Swede's father, a secondgeneration Jewish immigrant. Physically, he is a small man, but he has a strong character with a firm sense of right and wrong. He left school at fourteen to help support the family of nine by working in a tannery. He later founded Newark Maid Leatherware, a business manufacturing ladies’ gloves. He worked prodigiously hard to build the business, and he eventually became rich. Proud of what he had achieved, he handed over the business to the Swede. After the riots in Newark in 1967, he urged Swede to move the business from New Jersey.

Lou Levov is a man of strong views who expresses himself forcefully. He spends much of his life "in a transitional state between compassion and antagonism, between comprehension and blindness, between gentle intimacy and violent irritation." In the 1970s, he rails passionately against President Nixon during the Watergate scandal, and he is also indignant about the permissiveness of American culture, wondering where it will all end.

Meredith Levov

See Merry Levov

Merry Levov

Merry Levov is the daughter of Swede and Dawn Levov. Intelligent and gifted, she was a normal, affectionate child, with the usual childish enthusiasms. For a while, she kept a scrapbook about Audrey Hepburn and then went through a Catholic phase, keeping religious trinkets in her room. Her only problem was that she stuttered. No amount of treatment by psychiatrist or speech therapist cured the problem.

When she was in her mid-teens, a change came over Merry. She became politically aware, developed a violent opposition to the war in Vietnam, and adopted a left-wing philosophy. She developed a hatred for her father, becoming rude and abusive towards him despite his patient attempts to reason with her.

When Merry was sixteen, she planted a bomb that destroyed the post office in Old Rimrock, killing a doctor there. No one could explain why she did it. A newspaper article at the time said that her teachers regarded her as "a multi-talented child, an excellent student and somebody who never challenged authority," although others remembered her "stubborn streak."

Merry then went into hiding, depending on the help of the underground antiwar network. She washed dishes in an old people's home in Indianapolis and then lived in Portland, Oregon, where she developed expertise in assembling bombs. She planted bombs that killed three more people. She moved to Idaho and then to Miami, Florida, where she planned to go to Cuba. After almost being caught by the FBI in Miami, she went to live with a blind woman and took care of her until she died of cancer. She studied religion in libraries and became a Jain. Then she moved back to Newark to work in a dog and cat hospital, living in a tiny, dirty room in a decrepit old house, where she met her father again for the first time in five years. He found that she had adopted an extreme form of renunciation, a position that espouses reverence for all life. She did not wash because she did not want, as she put it, to harm the water, and she did not walk about after dark for fear of crushing tiny creatures beneath her feet.

While Jerry Levov loathes Merry and calls her a "monster," Swede still deeply cares for her.

It appears that he may have gone on visiting Merry regularly until she died in her forties, in about 1993.

Seymour Levov

See Swede Levov

Swede Levov

Swede is the nickname given to Seymour Levov because of his fair complexion and blond hair. He is the principal character in the novel. During his years at Weequahic High School, the handsome Jewish Swede was a star performer in baseball, basketball, and football. Everyone in the Jewish community idolized him. During the uncertain days of World War II, Swede became a symbol of strength and hope. He was also modest, polite, and responsible, with a strong sense of duty. Sailing through life without any apparent difficulty, he seemed in his youth to be perfection itself, Newark's Jewish version of John F. Kennedy. Swede joined the Marines in 1945, too late to see combat, but he became a very effective drill instructor. In 1947, he enrolled in nearby Upsala College, and after graduation he married Dawn Dwyer. Swede went to work for his father at Newark Maid and learned the business from the bottom up. After a while, he took over the company and proved to be an astute businessman. According to his brother, Jerry, Swede was "an absolute, unequivocal success. Charmed a lot of people into giving their all for Newark Maid."

All Swede ever wanted was to live a quiet, unexceptional pastoral life in the countryside of Old Rimrock, devoted to his wife and family. He was always kind and generous, thinking only of the welfare of the family. But trouble comes into his life through his daughter, Merry, who inexplicably turns against him and becomes a terrorist. This change devastates Swede. He is never the same again, although he covers his anguish with his usual calm outward demeanor. He spends the rest of his life trying to understand what went wrong with Merry. His life, formerly so perfect and orderly, becomes a mental hell in which he agonizes over whether it was some failure of his own that caused Merry's rebellion and rejection of everything he stands for. But he never comes to an understanding of why such a thing could happen. According to Jerry, after the bombing he was "plagued with shame and uncertainty and pain for the rest of his life."

Sylvia Levov

Sylvia Levov is Lou's husband and Swede's mother. Zuckerman describes her, when she was still a youngish woman, as "a tidy housekeeper, impeccably well mannered, a nice-looking woman tremendously considerate of everyone's feelings." She manages to quietly endure her husband's cantankerous personality, and the wellbeing of her sons means everything to her. After 1968, she is devastated by Merry's act of terrorism and ages rapidly.

Alan Meisner

Alan Meisner was a high school friend of Zuckerman. His father was a dry cleaner, but Alan grew up to be a superior court judge in Pasadena.

Bill Orcutt

Bill Orcutt comes from a prominent legal family in Morris County, New Jersey, and is a neighbor of the Levovs. He can trace his ancestry in the area back to the time of the revolution. After graduating from Princeton, he broke with family tradition by moving to a studio in Manhattan and becoming an abstract painter. After three years, he moved back to Jersey to begin architecture studies at Princeton. Since then he has made his living as an artist, but he also mounts exhibitions of new paintings from time to time. Orcutt, a smoothly confident man with all the social graces, is married to Jessie, and they have five children. In the 1970s, Orcutt has an affair with Dawn, Swede's wife.

Jessie Orcutt

Jessie Orcutt is a Philadelphia heiress and the wife of Bill Orcutt. As a young woman, she was lively, sociable, and attractive. But later she became an alcoholic, and when she first appears in the novel in 1973, she looks much older than her fifty-four years. At Levovs's dinner party, she is drunk and makes a fool of herself and then stabs Lou Levov with a fork.

Ira Posner

Ira Posner is one of Zuckerman's former high school acquaintances. He came from what he calls a benighted family, and his father's best idea for a graduation present was to buy Ira a shoeshine kit, so he could shine shoes at the newsstand. Posner later became a psychiatrist.

Bucky Robinson

Bucky Robinson is an optician who joins Orcutt and Swede for weekly touch-football games. He remembers and admires Swede for his athletic prowess in high school. He tries to persuade him to become part of the Morristown Jewish community, but Swede is not interested.

Sheila Salzman

Sheila Salzman is a speech therapist who tried to cure Merry of her stutter and who harbored Merry after the bombing. Not knowing this, Swede had a four-month affair with her following Merry's disappearance. Sheila is a dignified, refined woman who always appears in control of her emotions.

Shelly Salzman

Shelly Salzman is a physician and wife of Sheila. A polite, inoffensive man, he is described as a "hardworking family doctor who could not keep the kindness out of his voice." When Swede had an affair with Dr. Salzman's wife, he felt sorry for the man, but when he finds out that the Salzmans harbored Merry for several days after the bombing, he is less sympathetic toward the doctor.

Barry Umanoff

Barry Umanoff is the husband of Marcia. He is a law professor at Columbia and was once the Swede's teammate and closest high school friend. After Merry's disappearance, Swede consults him for legal advice.

Marcia Umanoff

Marcia Umanoff is a professor of literature in New York. She is an argumentative person who likes to provoke and shock people. She is described as "a militant nonconformist of staggering self-certainty much given to sarcasm and calculatedly apocalyptic pronouncements designed to bring discomfort to the lords of the earth." On a couple of occasions before the bombing, Merry stayed with the Umanoffs in New York.

Vicky

Vicky is a black, thirty-year employee at the glove factory in Newark. She showed great loyalty to Swede during the Newark riots of 1967, staying with him in the building round the clock.

Nathan Zuckerman

Nathan Zuckerman is the narrator. He is the alter-ego of Philip Roth, the author, and has appeared in a number of other books by Roth. Zuckerman is a sixty-two-year-old writer living alone and isolated in a hamlet in western Massachusetts. He had surgery for prostate cancer a year earlier, and the treatment left him impotent and incontinent. When he attends the forty-fifth reunion of Weequahic High School, he is intrigued by what he hears from Jerry Levov about the life story of Jerry's brother, Swede Levov, who has just died. As a boy, Zuckerman idolized Swede, his senior by seven years, because of the Swede's athletic prowess. He decides to research and write a book about Swede that will try to explain the tragedy that befell him.

Themes

From Glorious Forties to Turbulent Sixties

The main portion of the narrative covers a period of just over two decades, from the 1940s to the late 1960s, a period that saw huge changes in American society, which Zuckerman refers to as "that mysterious, troubling, extraordinary historical transition." For Zuckerman, this period represents a fall from innocence into a confusing, chaotic world in which all the rules of life have changed. He idealizes the immediate post-World War II era, as the title of Book I, "Paradise Remembered," demonstrates, and he looks back on it nostalgically. This attitude is strongly conveyed in the chapters about the forty-fifth high school reunion, in which Zuckerman and his old friends reminisce about times long past. Many of the people at the reunion have emerged from humble backgrounds and difficult childhoods to become successful professionals. There was a work ethic in place then in Newark's Jewish community, as well as a sense of shared purpose and goals. Zuckerman refers to "the common experience that had joined us as kids…. something powerful united us." People in Zuckerman's Jewish neighborhood at that time knew where they were going and how they would get there. They were determined to rise above poverty and hardship and make something of their lives. Everyone knew their role and played by the rules. This newfound confidence was present in the wider society as well. At a time of unprecedented U.S. hegemony throughout the world, there was a release of pent-up energy in the United States. As Zuckerman puts it in the speech he wrote, but did not give, at the high school reunion: "Everything was in motion. The lid was off. Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together." It was an exuberant time when Americans marched forward, "inflated with every illusion born of hope."

Then Zuckerman asks the key question, through the story of Swede, of how the unity, order, and clear sense of purpose of this period gave way so quickly to the disorder, violence, and chaos of the 1960s, embodied in the story of Merry, the nice-little-girl-turned terrorist. In the 1960s, in the discord that accompanied the Vietnam War, the old rules and values were overturned. Children turned against their parents, and urban violence broke out in places such as Newark (the riots of 1967), and even pastoral retreats like Old Rimrock became subject to bombings and violent death. It was a different America altogether, what Zuckerman calls "the counterpastoral … the indigenous American berserk."

Swede spends the rest of his life tortured by the need to find out why this terrible thing happened to his family, but he never finds a satisfactory answer. At first, he assumes that he must have been responsible in some way for it because he believes he lives in an orderly, rational world in which cause and effect can be analyzed and known. But when he finally talks to Merry in 1973, he is forced to recognize that nothing he has ever done could explain what happened. His assumption that if he acted according to his sense of duty and responsibility, everything would work out smoothly, turns out to have been wrong. Merry went her own way, and that was all that could be said. She was never in his power to begin with, he realizes. No one is responsible, not Merry, not the Swede himself, and the same applies to the violence that disrupted society as a whole. He decides that everyone is in the power of "something demented" that cannot be understood. Later that day, he vehemently rejects Jerry's notion that as a parent, he was too permissive, and it was this that caused Merry's rebellion. Jerry believes that things can be connected in a cause and effect way, but Swede rejects such thinking: "But there are no reasons. She [Merry] is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books." The conclusion must be that life is unjust and incomprehensible and must be accepted as such.

Jewish Separatism or Assimilation

Although the book deals with broad issues in American history and culture, it is also focused on narrowly specific Jewish issues. It asks the questions, To what extent should Jews assimilate themselves to mainstream (Gentile) American culture? If they do this, how will they maintain their distinctive characteristics? Zuckerman writes of "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." He comments also on the "generalized mistrust of the Gentile world" felt by the Jews of Newark in the 1940s.

Topics For Further Study

• At the heart of American Pastoral is the conflict created within the United States by the Vietnam War. Write an essay explaining how the United States got involved in the war, why the war created such opposition at home, and what the eventual outcome was. In what ways does the Vietnam War still affect the United States today?
• Roth is sometimes accused of misogyny. What roles do the women play in American Pastoral? Are they presented sympathetically or with hostility? Examine the roles of Merry, Dawn, and Jessie Orcutt. Are they positive or negative figures? Does Merry have any redeeming qualities? Write an essay on the topic.
• orm a group with three other students. Discuss why teenagers sometimes rebel against their parents. What values do you not share with those of your parents’ generation? Make a class presentation that shows the issues underlying generational conflicts such as the ones you have discussed in your small group.
• Investigate race relations in the United States. What conditions produced the riots in the Watts area of Los Angeles; in Newark, New Jersey; and in Detroit during the 1960s? How were those issues addressed by the authorities? Have race relations in this country improved since the 1960s? What issues remain and how should they be approached? Make a class presentation on your findings.

The issue of assimilation is embodied in Swede. To begin with, because of his blond hair and blue eyes, he does not look like a Jew. He also has an "unconscious oneness with America" and seems to lack any of the traits that Zuckerman identifies as Jewish. "Where was the Jew in him? You couldn't find it and yet you knew it was there," Zuckerman writes. For his part, Swede has no interest in Jewish religion or customs; he does not attend services in a synagogue and is astonished when his mother asks him if Dawn is going to convert to Judaism. When Bucky Robinson tries to get Swede to be a part of the Morristown Jewish community, Swede expresses no interest. The ideal life envisaged by this second-generation Jewish immigrant is quintessentially American rather than Jewish. In spite of his position, however, there are frequent allusions to the fact that Swede, his all-American attitudes notwithstanding, does not quite belong to the United States in the way that Gentiles do. This point is made clear to him when Orcutt takes him on a tour of the local area, where there are traces of Orcutt's ancestors everywhere. Swede realizes that "Every rung into America for the Levovs there was another rung to attain." He is well aware that Ivy League universities, such as the one Orcutt attended, "Didn't admit Jews, didn't know Jews, probably didn't like Jews all that much." When Swede first decides to move to Old Rimrock, his father warns him that he will encounter prejudice there, but Swede takes no notice. He feels none of the "Jewish resentment" that his father feels. But the issue of Jewishness lurks in the background for him. At one point, Swede wonders whether the problem with Merry had been foreseen by his father, who had expressed his concern about Swede's marriage to a Catholic because any children of theirs would be raised half Catholic, half Jewish, without a clear sense of who they were. For her part, Merry appears to show no interest at all in her Jewish heritage.

Style

Mythic Framework

This narrative about post-World War II American society is given a mythic and Biblical framework in the titles for the three sections into which the book is divided: "Paradise Remembered," "The Fall," and "Paradise Lost." These are allusions to the book of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve disobey God and are thrust out of paradise, and to the epic poem by John Milton entitled Paradise Lost, in which the fall and the expulsion from Eden are presented. In the novel, paradise corresponds to Zuckerman's recollections of the 1940s and to the Swede's pastoral life in Old Rimrock before the bombing, which is the act that precipitated the fall and the expulsion, in mind and spirit, of the Levov family from the peace and tranquility they had known up to that point. Just as Christian theologians have debated why the fall of Adam and Eve happened and what its consequences have been, so too American Pastoral is an attempt to understand this traumatic period in American history by framing it in mythological terms. This framework gives the story a broader relevance, suggesting not only that something happened in particular decades in American history and to a particular family, but some reversal occurred in the universal experience of collective humanity.

The biblical fall is mentioned late in the novel, at the dinner party at the Levovs's house in chapter 9, when the provocative Marcia alludes to the point made in Genesis that Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge. She implies that this was ultimately a positive act, since "Without transgression there is no knowledge," she says. However, it is hard to see what knowledge emerges from the Swede's transgression. All along, Swede has assumed that it must be some transgression of his that caused the tragedy—unless it is the knowledge that life is suffering, cause or causes unknown.

Point of View

The point of view from which the story is told changes during the course of the novel. It begins in the first-person, as Zuckerman introduces the Jewish community of Newark in the 1940s. It continues this angle as Zuckerman attends the high school reunion. But at the same time, the author prepares his reader for the switch to an omniscient third-person point of view, with heavy emphasis on the mind of the Swede, that will apply to the final three-fourths of the book. In doing so, Roth carefully draws attention to the way the book is constructed as a work of fiction. He explains how Zuckerman conceived the idea for the book through his memories of Swede and his later conversations with Swede and his brother. Imagining himself into the mind of the Swede, Zuckerman (as Roth's mouthpiece) writes, "I dreamed a realistic chronicle." At the same time, further drawing attention to the way the story has been created, Zuckerman freely entertains the idea that he may be quite wrong in his conclusions about how Swede's mind worked. He spends two long paragraphs imagining how Jerry will pick his manuscript apart and say that Zuckerman's portrayals of Swede, Dawn, and Lou Levov are all wrong. In rumination, Zuckerman makes much of the notion that no one can know another person accurately:

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, after careful consideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.

This authorial notion of the unknowability of others and the impossibility of arriving at truth parallels the struggle and the failure of Swede to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of why such tragedy befell his family.

Narrative Structure and Flashbacks

The novel has a kind of looping back structure, in which the telling of the central story is frequently interrupted by digressions and flashbacks. The novel begins with Zuckerman in the present, reminiscing about the 1940s. Then it flashes briefly forward to 1985 and the chance meeting with Swede, then forward again to Zuckerman's dinner with Swede in 1995 and his high school reunion, then flashes back, as Zuckerman begins to create his narrative of the Swede, to Merry and Swede on the beach when Merry was eleven (about 1963). Chapter 4 begins four months after the bombing in 1968, and the narrative then moves slowly, with flashbacks and long introspective sections in which Swede examines himself and the dire situation in which he has been placed. More than half the book, from the final few pages of Chapter 5 to the end, takes place on a single afternoon and evening in September 1973 and is filled out by extensive flashbacks. The non-linear structure of the book seems to imitate the endless back and forth of Swede's own mind as he struggles to understand but gets nowhere.

Historical Context

Race Riots in the Sixties

The 1960s was a period of great upheaval in American society. The civil rights movement made solid gains and forced people in the United States to confront centuries of racism and discrimination against African Americans. The landmark Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. In the later part of the decade, the nonviolence advocated by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave way to more militant approaches to confronting racism favored by groups such as the Black Panthers. In 1966, there were race riots in the Watts area of Los Angeles, and in June 1967, serious riots broke out in Newark, New Jersey, as described in American Pastoral. At the time, Newark was a city in which the white population had shrunk by more than one-third since the 1950s. By 1966, blacks found themselves in the majority, but power and influence in the city remained in white hands. In 1967, for example, there were only 150 black police officers in a police force of 1,400. Rioting began on the night of July 12, 1967, after a black taxi driver was arrested and beaten by police. The next day the riots spread across the city. Twenty-six people were killed and 1,500 injured. Arrests numbered 1,600, and there was $10 million in property damage, much of it by fire. Over a thousand businesses were burned or were looted. Most of these businesses did not reopen after the riots, and thousands of whites moved out the city permanently. Whole neighborhoods, including Weequahic, were rapidly transformed from majority white to majority black, with a corresponding drop in economic status. This is the background against which Swede's decision in the novel to keep his factory in Newark should be measured.

Newark continued to decline during the 1970s. In 1975, it was ranked according to twenty-four categories by Harper's magazine as the worst of fifty major American cities. In American Pastoral, Lou Levov's comments made at the dinner party in 1973 sum up the drastic decline of the city:

Streets aren't cleaned. Burned-out cars nobody takes away. People in abandoned buildings. Fires in abandoned buildings. Unemployment. Filth. Poverty. More filth. More poverty. Schooling nonexistent. Schools a disaster. On every street corner dropouts. Dropouts doing nothing. Dropouts dealing drugs. Dropouts looking for trouble…. Police on the take. Every kind of disease known to man.

Violent Protest Against Vietnam War

As the war in Vietnam escalated and the United States committed hundreds of thousands of troops to South Vietnam in an attempt to prevent a takeover of the country by communist North Vietnam, protests within the United States against the war also escalated. Many of the protests were conducted by university students and were focused on resistance to the military draft. Anti-war protesters rioted at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. The decade also saw the rise of the New Left , a movement that was more radical and more militant than the Communist Party of the 1950s. One radical group, which was a splinter group of the organization, Students for a Democratic Society, was called the Weathermen. The Weathermen was a terrorist organization dedicated to fomenting revolution within the United States, destroying capitalism and bringing an end to what it called U.S. imperialism abroad. The Weathermen was made up of young people, male and female, many of whom came from middle and upper middle-class families. They were, as Todd Gitlin writes in The Sixties, "the children of cornucopia par excellence … they came from wealth; they were used to getting what they demanded, stamping their feet if they had to, wriggling away without punishment." According to Gitlin, one of the Weathermen slogans, alluded to in American Pastoral, was "Bring the war home," which was a call to bring the same death and mayhem to the United States as was happening in Saigon, capital of South Vietnam. (Not surprisingly, then, in American Pastoral, it is Merry, a spoiled child of privilege, who brings the war home by bombing the local post office.)

In October of 1969, the so-called Days of Rage riots occurred in Chicago, in which there was extensive property damage, and 250 Weathermen were arrested. On March 16, 1970, three Weathermen died in an explosion in a Greenwich Village, New York, townhouse while they were manufacturing pipe bombs and bombs studded with roofing nails. This incident is mentioned in chapter 4 of American Pastoral. The police later reported that there was enough undetonated dynamite in the house to blow up an entire city block. Gitlin reports that between September 1969 and May 1970 there were at least 250 bombings in the United States, and the figure may have been much more. The main targets were ROTC buildings, draft boards, induction centers, and other federal buildings. The Weathermen was only one of the groups responsible for these bombings.

Compare & Contrast

• 1960s: Affirmative action programs begin during the Kennedy administration (1961-1963). Such programs are designed to redress historic disadvantages suffered by minority groups.

  Today: Affirmative action programs remain in place, although conservatives generally oppose them and even some liberals question their desirability in their present form.

• 1960s: In 1969, American troop strength in Vietnam reaches its peak, with 543,000 troops stationed in South Vietnam. Anti-war demonstrations in the United States also peak. In November 1969, some 250,000 demonstrators march in Washington, D.C.

  Today: The United States enjoys normal trade and diplomatic relations with Vietnam, even though Vietnam is one of the few remaining communist countries in the world.

• 1960s: The feminist movement becomes a force in American society. Thousands of women no longer see their roles solely as wives and mothers and demand equal opportunities in employment, as well as equal pay for equal work.

  Today: Women find employment in a range of occupations that were formerly dominated by men. On average, however, women still earn less than men, even when they are in the same profession and performing comparable work.

Critical Overview

There was near unanimous agreement among reviewers that American Pastoral represented another formidable achievement by one of America's leading writers. Writing in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani describes the novel as "a resonant parable of American innocence and disillusion … a big, rough-hewn work built on a grand design … that is … moving, generous and ambitious." Kakutani interprets the novel in terms of how Roth presents "two contradictory impulses in American

history." The first impulse was the "optimistic strain of Emersonian self-reliance, predicated upon a belief in hard work and progress" that is seen in Swede; the second impulse, embodied in Merry, represents "the darker side of American individualism."

Michael Wood, in the New York Times Book Review, is one of a few critics who have some complaint about the slow pace of the novel, but his overall assessment is enthusiastic nonetheless: "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." In Washington Post Book World, Donna Rifkind praises the novel as "possibly the finest work of [Roth's] career." She particularly admires "the thoroughness and intensity with which he plumbs the souls of his characters. One senses he's not so much writing about them as feeling them, probing every inch of their pain."

Rifkind's praise of Roth's characterization is echoed by R. Z. Sheppard in Time, who comments that "Never before has Roth written fiction with such clear conviction. Never before has he assembled so many fully formed characters or shuttled so authoritatively through time."

Criticism

Bryan Aubrey

Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth century literature. In this essay, he discusses how the character Swede Levov develops the view that life is chaotic and cannot be understood rationally.

American Pastoral, Philip Roth's long lament for an unobtainable pastoral ideal, ends with a scream, a laugh, and a question mark. Each in its own way is significant.

The scream is uttered at the dinner party by Lou Levov, who has been in the kitchen of Swede's home doing his clumsy and inadequate best to stop the drunken Jessie Orcutt from making a fool of herself. Upset at his condescension, she stabs him with a fork, aiming for his eye and missing only by an inch. In wounding the family patriarch, Jessie is symbolically stabbing at the entirety of the old order that is collapsing as a result of the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s. Lou Levov is the character who stands most firmly for the established order, whose uncompromising approach to right and wrong—people must obey God's laws or the consequences will follow them the rest of their lives— is implacably opposed to all the cultural forces that are undermining the values with which he grew up. The scream represents not only the dying of those values, but also the anguish of incomprehension at the passing of the familiar and the trusted. For Lou Levov and what he represents, it is as if a tsunami has obliterated all the landmarks that give life meaning:

We grew up in an era when it was a different place, when the feeling for community, home, family, parents, work … well, it was different. The changes are beyond conception. I sometimes think that more has changed since 1945 than in all the years of history there have ever been.

Lou Levov's scream, then, is the scream of dissolution, and it is followed very quickly, on the last page of the novel, by the laugh that mocks the scream. This is the laughter of Marcia Umanoff, the quarrelsome professor of literature who dismisses all moral absolutes and takes pleasure in watching the edifices of certainty, on which people less enlightened than she base their lives, come crumbling down. For Marcia Umanoff, such edifices were never what they appeared to be anyway, and it is almost a duty to expose them. She revels in a fashionable postmodern ambiguity that disrupts any attempt to reach out for a firm moral ground on which life can be based.

But the laughter that mocks everything explains nothing, and this long, question-filled novel ends appropriately enough with a question, two questions, in fact. One is about why events have turned out so tragically for the Levov family, and the other is about why everything seems so set against their happiness and what they stand for: "And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?"

These are the questions that throughout the novel, the Swede struggles so hard to answer. He entertains one possibility after another but never arrives at a clear understanding. Reviewers and critics of the novel have been quick to offer the explanations that Swede has supposedly missed. Some regard American Pastoral as an indictment of the culture of permissiveness that dominated the 1960s. This view is expressed most forcefully by Jerry Levov: Swede was too accommodating, too indulgent of his errant daughter, and he allowed her to get out of control. An opposing view that has been expressed is that Swede is himself to blame for what happens. He tries to rigidly control his world and shape the women in his life according to his own beliefs and ideals, and he also fails to confront the sources of social discontent: the evils of capitalism and the exploitation of workers. Still other critics have suggested that Roth's target is the violence and shallowness of the New Left that emerged in the 1960s—they are the ones to blame for the disaster that befalls Swede. Others have seized on Lou Levov's opposition to his son's marrying a non-Jew. In this view, the novel becomes a critique of Jewish assimilation.

Swede thinks about many of these explanations, but he rejects Jerry's position absolutely, and although at one point he entertains the possibility that his father may have been correct about the consequences of marrying the Catholic Dawn, this explanation does not satisfy him for long. His mind scurries one way and then another as he seeks to understand the causes of the sequence of events that led him to where he is. But the implications of his search are not easy for him to accept. Humans like to believe that they live in an intelligible, orderly world, but this is a conclusion Swede finds impossible to reach.

Early in the novel, when Zuckerman describes the series of baseball novels by John R. Tunis he used to read in the 1940s, Roth provides a foreshadowing of the view of the world that Swede is forced to develop. One of the baseball novels was called The Kid from Tomkinsville. The Kid is a young pitcher from rural Connecticut who overcomes an impoverished background to become a star of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He also overcomes a career-threatening injury and then, in a moment of glory, makes a running catch that sends the Dodgers to the World Series. But in doing so, he smashes up against a wall and is carried off inert on a stretcher. At that point the novel ends. Ten-year-old Zuckerman wonders whether the Kid is dead and chafes at the implications of what he has just read: "The cruelty of life. The injustice of it."

It is Swede's fate to suffer not only the cruelty and injustice of life but something perhaps even worse, the feeling that there is no order in the universe. Life is chaos; nothing seems connected to anything else; there are no discernible cause-and-effect relationships that would explain why Merry rejected her upbringing, turned into a terrorist, and brought endless misery to her family. Poor Swede is like Job in the Old Testament, the man to whom misfortune comes for no reason known to him. Job is eventually consoled by his vision of the totality of God's power and mastery of the universe; he is reconciled to his fate, and his fortunes are restored. Not so Swede, who is Roth's Job, without a trace of redemption or hope. Again and again, Swede comes back to this point. "He had learned the worse lesson that life can teach— that it makes no sense," explains Zuckerman just before he plunges into relating Swede's story. The very idea that there could be a "rational existence" is eventually seen by Swede as a "utopia," an unrealistic fantasy. After Jerry has assailed him on the telephone with a list of his faults and failings that in Jerry's view caused the tragedy, Swede expresses the idea that the causes of anything in life are unknowable:

His [Jerry's] idea that things are connected. But there is no connection. How we lived and what she did? Where she was raised and what she did? It's as disconnected as everything else—it's all a part of the same mess!

There are therefore no reasons for anything that happens: "It is not rational. It is chaos. It is chaos from start to finish."

Even as the tale advances, Swede's understanding does not. As the drama intensifies in the final pages, his sense of the randomness of life, its lack of connectedness, increases. As he thinks about Merry, he decides that there is not even a connection between members of the same family. He muses about "how improbable it is that we do come from one another," and decides "that we don't come from one another, that it only appears that we come from one another." Then he reaffirms to himself that he had been wrong when he thought that life was orderly and that only a little part of it was disorderly. "He'd had it backwards," he realizes.

This moment is all the more poignant because it is immediately followed by one of the most moving passages in the entire novel, when Swede recalls how he and Merry, when she was still a fine little girl, would walk the hilly roads in the countryside around their home, observing the wild flowers and the trees in their delightful American pastoral—a pastoral that for them can be no more and will never return.

It might be objected that in his failure to find connectedness in anything or to fathom why things turned out the way they did, Swede is merely being obtuse. As many critics of the novel have implied, perhaps Swede is simply blind to the larger picture of cause and effect. But the more likely possibility, as well as the more alarming one, is that Swede, in his painful awareness of the chaos and randomness at the heart of things, is right and that this is, in fact, the theme of the novel. Life is unknowable and unfathomable, and people who think they have it right are always wrong. Indeed, in an amusing, although also deeply serious passage early in the novel, Zuckerman takes up this very idea as it applies to personal interactions. When two people meet, he says, they try hard to understand each other, but they always get the other person wrong. The interior of another person's mind cannot be known:

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.

So it is also when people try to figure out the endless, unknowable stream of causation. The Swede's continuous effort to find answers to his questions is doomed because it is at root an attempt to control life, to make it conform to his expectations and understanding. Superior to understanding, which always eludes one's grasp, is the wisdom of acceptance, but this is something the Swede never manages to find. He lives and dies as Job unredeemed.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on American Pastoral, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Robert Boyers

In the following review, Boyers discusses Roth's interest in the "ordinary and the virtuous" that is "embodied in a good-hearted man."

In Philip Roth's new novel, his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, alludes in passing to a once famous writer now largely forgotten, whose "sense of virtue is too narrow" for contemporary readers. The writer, no doubt about it, is Bernard Malamud. And what is it that passes for virtue in Malamud? In The Assistant, a grim and slender novel, the Jewish groceryman is eulogized as "a man that never stopped working … to make a living for his family," a man who "worked so hard and bitter," so that for his family there was "always something to eat." Morris Bober was "a good provider," the rabbi says, and, "besides," he was "honest." He assumed responsibilities. He showed up. He is to be venerated, without exaggeration or ceremony.

It is a narrow sense of virtue, to be sure, and not at all peculiar to Malamud among American Jewish writers. Saul Bellow, too, a provocateur who writers in a racy, unstable idiom and sometimes expresses a venomous antipathy toward the milder emotions, nonetheless swells with admiration for those who show and claim affection, who know, as we used to say, how to behave. "I saw now what I had done," says the narrator in Bellow's novella "Cousins": "treated him with respect, observed his birthdays, extended to him the love I had felt for my own parents. By such actions, I had rejected certain revolutionary developments of the past centuries, the advanced views of the enlightened, the contempt for parents illustrated with such charm and sharpness by Samuel Butler …" Susceptible to the allure of subversive ironies and modern ideas, the Bellow protagonist is still responsive to what he calls "the old thoughtfulness."

The narrow virtues have often seemed narrow precisely because they were thought to require little thought. Often they have seemed feeble and gray because they were believed to entail no struggle, no weighing of choices. Habit, it is often felt, is the paralysis of spirit. Ordinariness is the negation of virtue. What is dull and dutiful and comes more or less naturally is not to be prized. But Malamud and Bellow (and in this they were not altogether alone) hoped to identify in the ordinary activities available to any decent and thoughtful person, in social ritual and mundane interaction, a stay against the inhuman, against the brutality that ensures in the absence of the quotidian ideals and restraints.

Now Philip Roth engages this possibility. In his new novel, he examines decency, as it is embodied in a good-hearted man whose life seems for a while "most simple and most ordinary and therefore just great." No reader will be surprised to find that such a life turns out to be neither simple nor just great. No one will wonder at Roth's ability to show what can become of "ordinary" when an orderly life takes an unexpected turn, or the repressed rears its head, or the good and measured life seems suddenly tedious and intolerable. Roth has for a long time, through many books, developed a powerful and unanswerable subversion of the rock-solid assurances around which many people attempt to organize their lives. He has taught his readers to hold their noses when confronted by pious reflections on "the human condition." An expert in apostasy and distortion, he has made of his own occasional attraction to moralizing rhetoric an opportunity for savage contradictoriness and wit. His present interest in the ordinary and the virtuous is new in the sense that they now hold him, tempt him, transfixed and bewildered, on a degree not generally discernible in his earlier fiction.

The ordinary man in American Pastoral is an assimilated Jew with an unlikely "steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask" and the youthful attributes of a demi-god. The young Seymour "Swede" Levov is a star athlete worshiped by everyone in his neighborhood in Newark, a large "household Apollo" of an adolescent who goes on from schoolboy fame to marry a Catholic beauty queen, inherit a thriving business, and move his family to a prosperous farm in rural New Jersey. The Swede is ordinary only in the sense that he shapes his life to the measure of the American dream, aspiring to no more and no less than his share of perfection, which is to say, an existence largely without misgiving or menace.

There is nothing ordinary, of course, about the superb physical grace, or the country estate, or the ravishingly beautiful wife, or indeed the temperament of a man who can seem both mild and confident, resourceful and contained. But Roth is most taken with his character's desire to be ordinary, at ease in his place, without great ambition, without any desire to tear through appearances or to rage against his own limitations. He draws a character who, for all of his success, may be easily condescended to as well-meaning, naïve, blandly idealistic, without force—an average man, disappointing, pleasant, natural, displaying no capacity for irony or wit. Surely such a person—some will feel—deserves whatever can happen to him.

The Nathan Zuckerman who narrates American Pastoral, for whom Seymour Levov is an ostensibly remembered person and a character whose life needs to be imagined, is sorely tempted by the prospect of blasting such a life, stripping away every vestige of attractiveness from the character in all of his impeccable generosity and highly-mindedness. An early reviewer of Roth's novel describes Seymour as a puppet, "mounted precisely for the purpose of being ripped," a figure who exists "to be punished": for his idealism, his grace and his credulous embrace of the good life. Not exactly. Zuckerman is more than a little bit in love with this fellow. Recently recovered from prostate surgery, impotent and in every way more subdued and more thoughtful than we remember him in previous Roth novels, Zuckerman wonders at the Swede the way one wonders at something moving and peculiar, something that defies explanation.

Still, explanations are advanced. Seymour's brother Jerry, a cardiac surgeon in Miami, has no trouble summing him up as the man with "a false image of everything," a man committed to tolerance and decorum, to "appearances" and the pathetic desire "to belong like everybody else to the United States of America." But this diatribe, it is clear, doesn't begin to explain Seymour, and the more he is assaulted by explanations and denunciations, and hears himself maligned and diminished, the more securely he remains a wonder, a man astonished to the end at the continuously unfolding spectacle "of wantonness and betrayal and deception, of treachery and disunity" and "cruelty." Zuckerman wants, like the others, to have done with the crummy goodness of this common man, to dismiss him as a man unable "to understand anyone," a man without a shit detector, a fraud. But he remains transfixed, somehow admiring and exasperated. Against his better judgment, he makes the man so much more appealing than anyone else he can invent.

Not until very late in the novel does Swede Levov understand what Roth insists that he grasp. "He's had it backwards. He had thought most of it was order and only a little of it was disorder." But reality is otherwise. Nothing follows clearly from anything else. Where once there was thought to be cause there is now only chance. A secure home environment can bring forth anything at all. A person blessed with every good fortune may despise her life as surely as a person blasted by fate may remain an optimist. A man with a beautiful wife may be attracted for no apparent reason to a mousy woman deficient in every quality. Those who don't know these things may be virtuous in one degree or another, but they will not know what life is. That is what Zuckerman would have us accept. That is what Roth would seem also to support. But Seymour's capacity to arrive at this knowledge in his own way, his capacity for reluctance and suffering, is a part of what makes him a man we can admire.

But American Pastoral is more than an examination of virtue, more than an attack on the delusoriness of liberal good intentions. Roth means it also to be a portrait of America. It moves gracefully from one quintessential American setting to another, from factory floor to rolling hills, from beauty pageant to high-school reunion. Conversations turn on standard American themes, from assimilation to athleticism, from business ethics to sexual fidelity. Characters correspond to familiar American types, including WASP gentry, old-style Jewish liberals, and therapeutic intellectuals armed with fashionably advanced views. Historical markers—the Second Worlds War, Vietnam, Joseph McCarthy, race riots, Weathermen, and so on—routinely identify the public landscape within which Americans of the pertinent generations move. The novel is eloquent in its evocation of vanished American neighborhoods such as Jewish Newark, and it allows characters to be sweetly or fiercely defensive about "what this county's all about."

The story line takes many turns, but in essence it is a fairly simple narrative. Zuckerman remembers the Swede, meets up with him late in life, learns what he can about him, and constructs a narrative of the Swede's life that occupies most of the novel. Seymour is the son of Lou, a prosperous glove manufacturer who looms large in his son's life until his death at the age of 96. Seymour tries to live the good life in an expensive WASP suburb, but he has to contend with a teenage daughter who develops from elfin companion to tormented stutterer, from antiwar protester to underground terrorist and bomb-throwing killer of innocent civilians.

Merry Levov remains, throughout the novel, a source of enormous agitation and distress for both of her parents. Seymour thinks about her incessantly, rehearsing various episodes in her life and reliving in his imagination all that she does and suffers. He recalls their acrimonious debates and her withering New Left invective. Most especially, he thinks about her setting off a bomb at a local post office and thereby killing an elderly man. He is contacted by a young companion of his daughter, who grotesquely exposes herself to him and offers to lead him to Merry if he will sleep with her. When he learns that Merry has been raped by someone in the terrorist underground, he cannot drive the fact from his mind, he seems almost mad with grieving and pity for his savage little lost girl. Though there are numerous opportunities for the novel to move in for a closer look at the terrorist operation, Roth is satisfied to focus on Merry and her revolting companion, emblems of the ravening ferocity of their kind.

In Merry's final incarnation, she is a fanatic of non-violence, a Jain who wears a mask over her face to avoid doing damage to delicate micro-organisms in the air. Her father cannot bring himself to turn her in when he has the chance, and he torments himself about what has happened to her, about his responsibility for having produced a monster. Though he cannot abandon his attachment to America and all that it has represented to him, he is sorely tried in his relations with his wife, his brother, and his father—particularly his father, a powerful man who periodically erupts in outbursts of colorful invective against degradation and indecency.

The dust jacket of Roth's novel promises a work that will take us back "to the conflicts and violent transitions of the 1960s." It invokes, in Roth's language, "the indigenous American berserk," "the sweep of history," "the forces of social disorder." It describes, in short, a novel with large ambitions. The narrow virtues celebrated by earlier American Jewish writers were often played out in settings do circumscribed that one could feel the pressure to forget the world and to refine the perspective to a metaphysical essence. But Roth's novel is absorbed in worldly matters, in history. He wants to know how things happen, how places and events leave their mark on people.

There are instances, here and there, of the profligate extravagance that consumes so much of our attention in novels like Sabbath's Theather and Operation Shylock, with their verbal energy and their compulsive recourse to every variant of shtick and artifice. But American Pastoral strives mightily to situate its characters in a more classical manner, to insist that their passions are shaped, constrained, and exacerbated by circumstance. It worries about probability and verisimilitude, and it asks, again and again, how this can be and how that can be when reality so manifestly declares what is and what is not allowable. Questions of virtue and responsibility are complicated in this novel by what Henry James called the "swarming facts." It is not simply that nothing Roth imagines quite adds up; it is that he does not expect the facts to add up, that he supposes reality to lie in their multiplicity, their thickness of texture, their bewildering resistance to dreams of order.

So what is Philip Roth's America? It is a place where some people work and build and thrive while others fail and destroy and suffer. It is a place where everyone is increasingly aware of vast differences in wealth, and where those who feel guilty about their own successes are increasingly made to feel foolish and irrelevant. It is a place in which radical ideas about fundamental change are held almost exclusively by lunatics and by intellectuals so divorced from fellow-feeling that they can only laugh at deterioration and disaster, "enjoying enormously the assailability, the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things."

There is a side of Roth that likewise revels in the tendency of things to fall apart and to expose the illusoriness of order and optimism. But he is also susceptible to fellow-feeling. Roth appreciates, however reluctantly, the satisfactions that are sometimes generated by those who believe literally in the American dream. When Seymour Levov mourns the Newark destroyed by riots and decay, the Newark "entombed there," its "pyramids … huge and dark and hideously impermeable as a great dynasty's burial edifice has very historical right to be," Roth invests with weight and dignity the sense of loss for things hard-won and precious. His America, after all, is the place where immigrants not only make fortunes as a result of often despised virtues such as hard work and persistence, but in which those same immigrants often bring forth children endowed with vision and compassion.

What Do I Read Next?

• Roth's novel The Plot Against America (2004) is an alternative history that imagines what the United States would have been like, especially for Jews, if the Nazi sympathizer, Charles A. Lindbergh, who became a national hero after flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, had defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election.
• Doris Lessing's short novel The Fifth Child (1988) presents a situation that in some respects is not unlike what happens to Swede and Dawn in American Pastoral. In this novel set in England in the 1960s, Harriet and David Lovatt raise a large family. Their lives are perfect until the birth of their fifth child, who is altogether strange and brings anxiety and confusion into their lives as they try to cope with him through childhood and adolescence.
• Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (2004), by Jeremy Veron, is an analysis of left-wing violence in the United States and West Germany during the period in part covered by American Pastoral. Veron attempts to answer the question of why so many young middle-class people took to violence and attempted to overthrow their democratic governments.
• Fugitive Days: A Memoir (2001), by Bill Ayers, is a memoir by a former member of the Weather Underground. Ayers went underground following the accidental bombing of a house in Greenwich Village in 1970. Ayers describes his New Left involvement as a result of the Vietnam War, inner-city race relations, and police brutality, especially in Chicago during demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention. After going underground, Ayers traveled continuously under different aliases to avoid police and FBI. He gave himself up in 1981; most of the charges against him were dropped. As of 2006 Ayers was a professor of education at the University of Illinois.

It is possible, of course, to suppose that what Roth calls "the indigenous American berserk" has more to tell us about the country than the stories of immigrant success and the building of viable political institutions. Or at least it may tell us what Roth himself regards as fundamental to the American spirit: a propensity to violence, conspiracy, and irrationality. This propensity is not at all times and places obvious. Americans are adept at convincing themselves that it is a limited propensity, that it belongs to lunatic fringes that cannot in the long term threaten our collective commitment to reasonableness and tolerance. Yet Roth seems to believe that violence and irrationality are never very far from the surface of American life, that we deny it at our peril, and that our optimism is purchased in the way the individual purchases tranquility, through repression and willful blindness. The daughter of Seymour Levov is not simply a lunatic. She is to be understood, insofar as we may presume to understand her, as an important expression of our collective unconscious. If this is not easy to accept, any more than we would find it easy to accept, say, that the Bader Meinhof gang in Germany or the Red Brigades in Italy expressed the deeper selves of the societies they terrorized, well, as the novelist would seem to say, there it is.

Merry Levov is Roth's exemplification of our impatience with limits, our hatred of the gradualism and the decorum that we profess to prize. As an adolescent growing up in the first days of the Vietnam War, she finds her opinions confirmed by her parents and her grandfather, but she grows impatient with their support. Like other young people involved in antiwar activities in the ‘60s, she finds a way to turn the epithet "extreme" against her own family, as in: "No, I think extreme is to continue on with life as usual when this kind of craziness is going on … as if nothing is happening." Those who are opposed to America's involvement in Vietnam must bear witness—so she insists—by turning against their own comfortable lives, if necessary by throwing bombs. Just so, those who profess concern black people going to pieces in urban ghettos must refuse to persist in business as usual, must refuse to insist upon profits, even if their refusal should cause their factories to fail and jobs to disappear. The worst is not to be feared if it may be a prelude to drastic change. The American berserk, as embodied in the figure of Merry Levov, is associated with ideas that were pervasive in the ‘60s and it is in part the burden of American Pastoral to suggest that these views really do express an important feature of American life.

The strangest thing about all of this is that Merry Levov never emerges in this novel as anything but a pathetic figure. as a child she is appropriately lovable and childish, but she rapidly grows into a fearful thing, twisted and angry, a caricature of herself. She becomes a type. She is, in fact, precisely the type pilloried by those critics for whom opposition to the Vietnam War and participation in the civil rights movement were mainly psychological expressions, the work of rebellious adolescents acting out their mostly impotent rage against authority. This tendency to reduce the movements of the ‘60s to an undifferentiated cartoon of adolescent rebellion is given new life in Roth's novel. By contrast, writers such as James, Conrad and Vargas Llosa, in their novels of politics and society, mounted a savage attack on bomb-throwers and ideologues while permitting them their misguided idealism and a sometimes adult grasp of power and injustice. To place Vargas Llosa's wild-eyed Alejandro Mayta alongside Merry Levov is to appreciate at once the dignified passion for radical renovation that the Peruvian novelist permits his character and the utter puerility and one-dimensionality of the American novelist's radical figures.

That Merry Levov is depicted as something of a lunatic is not especially objectionable, for it is surely true that there were lunatics and obsessives in the radical movements of the ‘60s. But she and her more luridly drawn companion are, in Roth's novel, the primary exponents of oppositionist and critical views. The conditions that aroused so many mature adults to participate in the antiwar and civil rights movements are barely mentioned in a book committed to examining the period. For American Pastoral, recent American radicalism is to be associated with irrationality and the unconscious. In fact, it was both more dangerous and less dangerous than that. There is no effort in Roth's novel to link it to the genuine tradition of American radicalism that goes back at least to Emerson and Thoreau and, in this century, to Randolph Bourne, Paul Goodman and Bayard Rustin. Merry Levov and her companions in extremism are all we need to know, apparently, when we come to consider what blasted the social order.

The failure of Roth's novel, in this respect, is quite considerable, however unmistakably particular passages are the work of a master. If there is such a thing as the indigenous American berserk, then surely it must entail a good deal more than a lunatic fringe largely limited to deranged adolescents acting out fantasies of retributive violence. And if these adolescents, who usually grow up into pinstripes, tweeds and cappuccino bars, can be so readily dismissed and condescended to by their elders, including Nathan Zuckerman, then how can they be said to represent an enduring and significant feature of American life, a tendency to which even the best of us are regularly susceptible? This novel wants to have it both ways. It wishes to develop an apocalyptic vision of the real America, the underside of our characteristic optimism and bland goodwill, but it wants also to propose that what we refuse to acknowledge in our pusillanimous American selves is pathetic, adolescent, laughable, and decidedly marginal, however terrible the occasional consequences associated with this "other," truer reality.

Consider Roth's presentation of the facts involved in the destruction of Newark. The dominant perspective belongs, more or less equally, to Zuckerman, to the Swede, and to his father. According to them, there was once a "country-that-used-to-be, when everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously, the acculturating back-and-forth that all of us here grew up with." Of course there were conflicts in that one-upon-a-time land, but they were usually manageable, they conformed to something about which you could make some sense. And Newark was very much a part of the "country-that-used-to-be," a place where pastoral visions may not always have been easy to come by, but where "the desperation of the counterpastoral" was also not much in evidence.

In Roth's reasonable Newark of Jewish and other immigrants, there are factories and businesses that produce well-made goods and turn reasonable profits. They employ people "who know what they're doing," who are pleased to do good work and more or less content with what they are paid. At least they do not complain. They are loyal to their employers, and they may well remember gratefully how things have changed for the better since the bad old times 100 years earlier when factories were places "where people … lost fingers and arms and got their feet crushed and their faces scalded, where children once labored in the heat and the cold …" The factory owners are also apt to have a vivid sense of their own origins, to remember working "day and night" and living in intimate contact with working people at all levels of manufacturing and selling. Their stubborn celebration of everything American has much to do with how well things can go when people believe in the system and rely on each other.

Given this account of reality, it is no wonder that the eruption of civil strife in the ‘60s should seem so incredible not only to the Levovs but, apparently, also to Zuckerman. The nostalgia for the "country-that-used-to-be" is so palpable in this novel that it virtually immobilizes the imagination of reality and leaves the reader susceptible to a rhetoric for which the deteriorating urban landscape is a "shadow world of hell" and predatory blacks roaming the Newark streets are part of a "surreal vision." Once, not long ago, according to this narrative, everybody had it good, or good enough. But many Americans suddenly went unaccountably crazy, and what "everyone craves" came to pass, "a wanton free-for-all" in which what was released felt "redemptive, … purifying, … spiritual and revolutionary." However "gruesome" and "monstrous" what followed, something real happened in Newark, something irresistible and deeply implicated in the American grain.

So we are to believe. Though the Levovs watched with horror, and deplored, and most other Americans presumably recoiled as well, we are asked to accept that somehow "America" spoke its deep, revealing truths in the intoxication of riot and mayhem. We are also asked to accept, as befits this pattern, that those who set the cities on fire, who beat on "bongo drums" while their neighbors looted and sniped and left behind a "smoldering rubble," were actually in flight from the good life. We are to accept—so the logic of the novel dictates—that the blacks of the inner city must have been incomprehensibly dissatisfied with their wonderful jobs and turned on by the prospect of liberating something vital and long buried in their otherwise admirable lives.

The problem is, Roth's book offers us no way to think about such a view of things. Its elegy for the dead city and its old ways is affecting, but it is also disconnected from anything like a serious account of what the old ways actually entailed, and what were the varied motives and desires of the inner-city residents who were caught up in the destruction of their own communities. To read Roth on the Newark riots is to suppose that just about everyone participated in the looting and the carnage, and that no one can have had good, concrete reasons for loathing the conditions in which they lived. To understand the ‘60s is, again, to invoke individual and group psychology, to refer to something deep and peculiarly American, to deplore what happened while at the same time suggesting that it had to happen and cannot be accounted for by citing social, political or economic factors.

Roth's novel is finally not an adequate study of social disorder. It does not tell us what we need to know about America, what a novel can tell us about the complex attitudes and allegiances of a time and a place. It laments the denial of reality on the part of middle-class suburbanites such as Seymour Levov, while offering as the alternative to illusion "surreal" and "grotesque" eruptions such as few Americans are likely to encounter. It sets up as representative figures of disorder and "reality" persons who are mad, and whose attachment to disorder is so pathological that they make it impossible for us to consider seriously the actual sources of discontent in American society. When violence breaks out in this novel, it seems more like an inexplicable convulsion than an expression of feelings shaped by complicated individuals responding to the actual conditions of their lives.

And yet Roth's interest in an idea of simple virtue is an impressive achievement. For if the world, as he understands it, is a place of chaos and

contradiction, in which order is fragile or even illusory, then virtue, too, may seem like a figment of someone's wishful thinking, a willed fantasy with nothing to sustain it. But Roth finally suggests that it is not. Like the rest of us, he wonders what virtue can be worth when it is rarely effectual in worldly terms. And he refuses to allow goodness to sweeten anything, to distract him from what we are and what we do. Yet his triumph in American Pastoral is the portrayal of persons who are unmistakably good and genuine. They understand no better than he does what to make of events that astonish and assault them, but they do not give up on their sense of how to behave.

Seymour Levov is no paragon of perfect virtue, and his father can seem shrill and forbidding in his vehemences. But these are men who continue to display thoughtfulness, however much reason they have to be disappointed and to flee in bitterness from the decencies that make them seem irrelevant to their contemporaries. The father may have absurd ideas about how to deal with disorder—"I say lock [the kids] in their rooms"—but he is strangely appealing in his insistence that "degrading things should not be taken in their stride." That is right. And the son, who suffers greatly, who does not know enough, who takes "to be good" everyone "who flashed the signs of goodness," retains in Roth's hands the capacity to be appalled—not thrilled, but appalled—by transgression, to be tormented by the spectacle of needless suffering, and to think, ever to think, about "justification" and "what he should do and … what he shouldn't do." His humanity is intact. And it is, Roth seems to be saying, the only thing we can rely on.

Source: Robert Boyers, "The Indigenous Berserk," in the New Republic, Vol. 217, No. 1, July 7, 1997, pp. 36-41.

Todd Gitlin

In the following review, Gitlin comments on Roth's attempt to bring the sixties to life as well as his endeavor to paint the "large social canvas."

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 flash 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 anti-romance on the varieties of sixties experience, so his story depends on whether he can bring the wildness of that time of 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 does 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 a 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 true-life 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. Vietcong 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. Dicken'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.

Source: Todd Gitlin, "Weather Girl," in the Nation, May 12, 1997, pp. 63-64.

Sources

Gitlin, Todd, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Bantam Books, 1987, pp. 385, 403.

Kakutani, Michiko, "A Postwar Paradise Shattered from Within," in New York Times, April 15, 1997, pp. C11, C14.

Rifkind, Donna, "The End of Innocence," in Washington Post Book World, Vol. 27, No. 23, June 8, 1997, pp. 1, 14.

Roth, Philip, American Pastoral, Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Sheppard. R. Z., Review of American Pastoral, in Time, Vol. 149, No. 17, April 28, 1997, p. 74.

Wood, Michael, "The Trouble with Swede Levov," in New York Times Book Review, April 20, 1997, p. 8.

Further Reading

Alexander, Edward, "Philip Roth at Century's End," in New England Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, Spring 1999, pp. 183-90.

Alexander, a neoconservative, regards the novel as a critique of the radical New Left of the 1960s, which became fascinated by violence. Merry is an embodiment of their naïve political creed.

Gentry, Marshall Bruce, "Newark Maid Feminism in Philip Roth's American Pastoral," in Turning Up the Flame: Philip Roth's Later Novels, edited by Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel, University of Delaware Press, 2005, pp. 160-71; originally published in Shofar, Vol. 19, No. 1, Fall 2000, pp. 74-83.

Gentry argues that far from being the wronged, innocent man, Swede is himself responsible for his own troubles. He accepts the injustices of capitalism, he tries to mold Dawn and Merry into conventional gender roles, and he does not think for himself.

Gordon, Andrew, "The Critique of Utopia in Philip Roth's The Counterlife and American Pastoral," in Turning Up the Flame: Philip Roth's Later Novels, edited by Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel, University of Delaware Press, 2005, pp. 151-59.

Gordon regards Roth as an anti-utopian and antipastoralist, but in American Pastoral, although he demolishes the American dream, he clings to certain pastoral ideals, as shown in his nostalgia for the 1940s.

Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto, "Mourning the ‘Greatest Generation’: Myth and History in Philip Roth's American Pastoral," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 51, No. 1, Spring 2005, pp. 1-24.

Stanley reviews the conflicting interpretations of Alexander and Gentry and argues that the novel supports both readings. Roth portrays the 1940s "greatest generation" sympathetically but also critiques the myths by which they lived, which helped to create the rebellions of the 1960s.