American Pastoral by Philip Roth

AMERICAN PASTORAL
Philip Roth
A critical paper by

Anne Ogan

         American Pastoral has all the reader wants and expects in a novel: plot, character, setting, theme, history, politics, emotion, philosophy, psychology, and above all, an absolutely engaging, even engrossing, pull on the reader created by Roth’s smooth, original, clean, tight prose and excellent control over the structure of the novel.

         The plot revolves around a key event, the 1969 bombing of the post office inside the general store in pastoral Old Rimrock, New Jersey.  An innocent bystander, the town’s doctor, is killed.  A teenaged war protestor, Merry Levov, is accused of his murder.  The girl disappears, and her father is devastated. Immersed in “quaint Americana…[H]e took the kid out of real time and she put him right back in.” (p. 68)

Why are things the way they are?  The question to which there is no answer, and up till then he was so blessed he didn’t even know the question existed. (p. 87)

         American Pastoral is “[T]he tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy – that is every man’s tragedy.” (p. 86).

 The novel’s central character is Seymour Irving Levov, nicknamed “The Swede” by his coach at Weequahic High because he was one “[o]f the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in [his] preponderantly Jewish public high school.”  The Swede is, in his brother’s words, “a very nice, simple, stoical guy.  Not a humorous guy.  Not a passionate guy.  … Banal, conventional.” (p. 65)  He had “… the natural modesty of someone for whom there were no obstacles.” (p. 19) Above all, The Swede had a “golden gift for responsibility;” his brother says he was “fatally attracted to responsibility… [a] truly great father.  Good-looking, kind, providing, thinks about nothing really but … his family.” (pp. 72-73) 

Launched by his success as a high school athlete, The Swede moved into mainstream post-war American life, distinguished himself training recruits as a marine commander at Devils Island, and returned to Newark to take over the family business founded by his grandfather and nurtured and grown by his father.  Driven, The Swede makes Newark Maid, a ladies glove-making company, extremely successful, enabling him to move to a 170-year old farmhouse: “He had been dreaming of that house since he was sixteen years old… It was the first house built of stone he’d ever seen, and to a city boy, it was an architectural marvel.” (p. 189)  It was in “tranquil, untrafficked Old Rimrock, New Jersey… countryside where [history] had not put in an appearance that was notable since Washington’s army twice wintered in the highlands adjacent.” (p.87)  In other words, he had completed “the ritual post immigrant struggle for success.” (p. 86)

         Like The Swede, his wife, Dawn, is a third-generation American, an Irish Catholic beauty, Miss New Jersey 1949.  “She had spirit and she had spunk, and she could be cutting in a very humorous way” (p. 195).  Strong enough to stand up to her future father-in-law and answer him truthfully in a prenuptial grilling, she is nevertheless thoroughly at a loss trying to raise her bright, rebellious teenaged daughter, Merry. After Merry’s disappearance, Dawn is twice hospitalized for suicidal depression.  Five years after the disappearance, “…she had indeed begun to age like a woman in her mid-fifties at only forty-five.”  She is “relentless[ly] crying about her shame, her mortification, the futility of her life. … [S]he had run out of psychiatrists to see and medications to try” (p. 187), so The Swede, ever accommodating, took her off to Geneva for a facelift.

         The compelling urge to move on, demonstrated by her desire for the operation and her interest in building a new house and moving may both just be a function of her having started an affair with neighbor Bill Orcutt, who is the architect for the new house.  Hard to say which is cause, which effect, but Roth leaves loops like that dangling throughout.  Often, where a quick, stock explanation springs to mind as a character’s motivation, it is buried later in the acknowledgement that life is not so simple, so easily laid out.  Not solely because it is complex, but because it is chaotic, the “American berserk.”

         So who is the uncontrollable daughter, “murderous Merry,” the Rimrock Bomber? 

… a girl blessed with golden hair and a logical mind and a high IQ and an adultlike sense of humor even about herself, blessed with long, slender limbs and a wealthy family and her own brand of dogged persistence.  (p. 95)

         But “[S]he entered the world screaming and the screaming did not stop.” (p.390)  Alas, “parental good fortune was just too much for Merry,” (p.96) and so she developed a stutter.  Reared in “a highly pressured perfectionist family,” she couldn’t cope.  She became “angry, fat Merry, stuttering with Communist outrage.” (p. 241)  “From the moment she had become old enough to think for herself she had been tyrannized instead by the thinking of crackpots.” (p. 241) 

         She became “the angriest kid in America.”(p. 279) And she threw the bomb that made her a murder suspect and sent her underground, disappearing, creating a parent’s worst nightmare and putting into the foreground Roth’s examination of the age-old conundrum: Is life preordained?  Or are we responsible?  Can we shape events or do events shape us?  The Swede is convinced that it is his fault, even though he told his wife, before the bombing, “This is what teenagers are like.  There are these very turbulent sorts of changes.  It has nothing to do with you or me.” (p. 102)

         Feeling responsible, he spends years searching his past behavior for the cause of Merry’s problems.  “… [H]e must have imagined that it was founded on some failure of his own responsibility… the cause of the disaster has for him to be a transgression.”  (pp. 88-89)

         He toys with the idea that it may have been the inappropriate, full-on-the-lips kiss he gave Merry in a totally out-of-character lapse of appropriateness when she was eleven, but that’s far too tidy, too simple, too small an explanation for deviance so large that it turns life upside down forever. 

         The central plot – what happens to Swede, his wife and his daughter – is set among smaller but nevertheless interesting sub-plots or partial plots: the story of the Swede’s brother, their parents’ story, the narrator’s story. The central plot is also placed among much larger, sweeping events of twentieth century history: the assimilation of immigrants, World War II, the Vietnam War, upward mobility, social deviance.

         The Swede’s self-inquiry is the novel’s specific look at the general theme central to the book: can a man, or mankind, influence his own life, or the social order, or do fate and chaos dominate our lives?

         On the one hand, Roth beautifully presents the case for individuals’ control over their own destiny, from The Swede’s achievements as a high school athlete to the success over 70 years and three generations of the Newark Maid glove company.  How does it happen?  “You work at it,” according to Lou Levov.  “The goal was to have goals.” (p.41)  By example as well as in marvelous compre-hensive overviews, Roth gives us the story of immigrants in America, succeeding by having “good sense and the classic restraints … serving as barriers against the improbabilities.” (p.81)  Family, duty, hard work. The Newark neighborhood of the Swede’s boyhood is well ordered, a place where the American dream is, if not a reality, within reach. As Roth eloquently puts it: in 1945 “ ..the Swede, his neighborhood, his city, and his country were in their exuberant heyday, at the peak of confidence, inflated with every illusion born of hope.” (p. 87)

         On the other hand, again brilliantly described, there is the senseless “… chaos.  It is chaos from start to finish.” (p. 281)  Over dinner in 1995, The Swede describes “beloved old Newark, butchered to death by taxes, corruption, and race. … the worst city in the world … where [kids steal cars and] killing pedestrians means nothing to them.  Killing motorists means nothing to them.  Killing themselves means nothing to them.” (p.24-26)

         In the end of course, it’s existential.  All the hopes of youth – that of the nineteenth century immigrants right through to their post-war grandchildren – are dashed.  It all comes to

the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense.  And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again.  It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one’s history. (p. 81)

Roth’s writing is a marvel.  He puts decades in a paragraph; he writes pages about a minute or two.  Artful omissions, skipping over years and years, holes great and small (what is the name of The Swede’s second wife?  Who is Rita Cohen?), contrast brilliantly with reiterations of particular moments (the kiss, the throwing of the bomb, “Basketball was never like this, Skip.”)  Illustrations from over 100 years of history – 1880’s immigration, post-war exuberance, the country’s divisive turmoil over Vietnam, inner city poverty and the devastation of America’s inner cities, Watergate, obscenity and permissiveness – present the underlying subjects: hopefulness, frustration, and disillusionment.

         Line by line and scene by scene, without a lot of external commentary, Roth makes the characters and the events emblematic of a whole much larger than the tale itself. Here we have the Forties, through the Weequahic High students and their parents; the Fifties, through Newark Maid’s growth; the Sixties, through Merry’s violent protest; the Seventies, through Newark’s devastation, Merry’s becoming a Jain, Lou Levov’s ramblings at the Swede’s dinner party.

         Roth has a flair for writing about emotions in a very unemotional way: the forty-fifth high school reunion scene that opens the novel sets a tone that works throughout. Often just a few facts evoke the reader’s full understanding and sympathy for years of struggle: the cancers, the divorces. Who can’t feel both young Merry’s and her father’s frustration in the recapitulations of their conversations about her wanting to go to New York to see friends? (pp.104-113)  It is so easy to see why “Night after night now Dawn went to bed in tears.” (p.102)

         American Pastoral is a tremendously poignant novel, exploring as it does so many unsatisfactory relationships that start out well and come to such painful conclusions. Not just the Swede and Merry, but Merry and her grandfather, the Swede and his brother Jerry, Jerry and his several wives, or the Swede and Dawn, his first wife, whose early years of happy marriage are so warmly drawn.  The way Roth writes it, there is poignancy, too, in events: seeing the hope that pervaded post-war America sink into despair as the inhuman and destructive violence of the Vietnam War tears the country apart and urban decay and its concomitant senseless violence makes people wonder what on earth the world is coming to.

         This is a book about social dynamics and family dynamics, about history and politics, about right and wrong, about fate and volition.  It has text and subtext, sweeping observations applicable to all mankind, specific quirks making characters absolutely real.  American Pastoral has all that the reader wants and expects in a novel.

American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Discussion Questions for The Novel Club Meeting April 2, 2002

1. Roth clearly sets up the novel to depict a particular period in history. Do you think the novel presents a legitimate view of the Sixties and the anti-war movement?
2. What is Zuckerman’s role? Why is this a Zuckerman novel?
3. Last month, in discussing  Light Years,  we discussed the validity of Salter’s opinion that parent-child relationships may be more satisfactory than marriages. In American Pastoral, several parent-child relationships are examined and found wanting. Are the marriages or affairs (the Swede and Dawn, Dawn and Bill Orcutt, the Swede’s affair with Sheila Salzman, Jerry’s marriages, the marriages mentioned at Zuckerman’s high school reunion) any better? Is the view of marriage presented Roth’s or Zuckerman’s?
4. Is Jerry a real force in the novel, or just a literary device enabling Roth to present disparate views of the same situation?  Do you share Jerry’s view of the Swede?
5. Is Merry believable?