American Pastoral

Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is filled with bile, lyrical bile. Whether in the voice of Seymour Levov, “the Swede”, or his brother Jerry, or his father Lou, or the Swede’s daughter, Merry, or almost any other character, the potential for an excoriating rant is virtually irresistible. The anger, or envy, or contempt, or, sometimes, distorting idolatry, is released shotgun fashion – its spread is wide and indiscriminate and it may not necessarily kill what it hits. Distorting idolatry might sound odd in that list, but love in this novel, whether of Zuckerman for the Swede, the Swede for his daughter or his wife, or various characters for “America”, is often so blurred and overridden with wish fulfilment that it begins to show more feel a bit more like hate for whatever the real object of that love might be.

The novel opens with a long framing device in which Roth’s writerly alter-ego, Zuckerman, introduces us to the Swede. The Swede is almost too good to be true, and not surprisingly cracks in the façade soon begin to emerge. At that point the frame of Zuckerman is dropped and the novel continues in revelatory fashion from the Swede’s perspective. That has the effect of making the frame appear to have been superfluous. No matter. By then the rants are in full flown against LBJ, the war in Vietnam, capitalism, anti-capitalism, Nixon, intellectualism, almost each character, against the narrator (the Swede) himself, and more.

We follow the Swede from his origins in Newark to the superficially idyllic and pastoral setting of Old Rimrock, with his near-Miss-America wife, Dawn, and their stuttering daughter, Merry. Merry’s impulse to rant is nearly matched by her speech impediment. It is an articulate inarticulateness, with explosive consequences, that is mirrored by other characters, and, possibly, by Roth himself. We see pyrotechnical displays of language but I fear it may be mere display. As ever there is no counter-balance, and the reader is left with the suspicion that despite piercing insight, Roth has missed something equally obvious. Or at least that is how this reader reacts. show less

Why was this exceptional? I'm not entirely sure. I certainly never need to hear another thing about how bloody gloves are made. And I definitely understand why people view this as self indulgent; there's absolutely no idea or line of though that Roth doesn't explore to its absolute end.

And I should point out, I listened to it by audiobook, with a performance by Ron Silver that has surely never been matched. So maybe that embued the book with more than it carried on its own.

But ultimately, I thought the way he conveyed lived experience and emotion was exceptional. Could I relate? Not a jot; I'm not a parent, nor a middle-aged male Jew in America, both of which elements are key to the protagonist and his (except not his, I'll get to that) show more experience. But could I feel empathy through how it was presented to me? Absolutely. The writing is both aesthetically beautiful and meaningful; a fine balance.

My only big issue? The novel dresses itself up as a novel about the Swede, but in the first half is cleverly far more about the 'narrator' than the Swede as his subject. It's a clever bait and switch, and enjoyable, and when the transition heads purely towards the Swede, one feels that is entirely fair, because surely the narrative will find symmetry by returning to the narrator (who seems to be the secret, or at least equal protagonist of the novel). But it never does: he is just abandoned half way as we give over fully to the Swede's narrative. That left me consta tky off kilter, and I guess I wanted more conventional symmetry from the book.

Despite that tiny gripe, it doesn't stop me from being bowled over by the book. An easy 5 star. show less

The whole time I was reading American Pastoral I kept thinking that if the name on the cover wasn't Philip Roth, this novel would not have won a Pulitzer Prize nor have gained much recognition. It is an uneven novel written in what I would describe as modified stream-of-consciousness, as though its narrator, Roth's fictional doppelgänger Nathan Zuckerman, suffers from ADHD. He habitually and annoyingly interrupts significant events to have a character dwell on trivialities, such as when a drunken neighbor stabs his father and, just after the initial, unexplained screams, spends two pages writing about fauna and flora before finally returning to the stabbing. Particularly odd is the disappearance of Zuckerman right in the middle of his show more 45th high school reunion while dancing with the insubstantial Joy Helpern. Zuckerman evanesces before our eyes; his first-person ruminations on his childhood hero, Seymour Levov, morph into third-person, single character point-of-view imaginings of the life of Levov, forever known as the Swede, an almost mythical legend of high school sports and a highly successful businessman.

American Pastoral is separated into three parts, "Paradise Remembered," "The Fall" and "Paradise Lost." One can't ignore the obvious allusions to the Bible and Milton's epic poem nor avoid interpreting the Swede and his wife, Dawn, as Adam and Eve. Their daughter, Merry, is Satan, an angel cast out of heaven for bombing the village store in protest of the Vietnam War. Through this act, Merry ends up killing an innocent man and becomes a specter haunting Levov as he tries to figure out what he did to set his daughter on her anarchist path. The remainder of the novel is devoted to stripping away the veneer of the Swede's charmed life and questioning the wisdom of his level-headed approach to life's problems.

Roth is reported to have expended a great effort researching his novel; what this adds in detail is overshadowed by the often unrealistic and at times bizarre thoughts of his protagonist (what devoted father describes his prepubescent daughter's genitalia as a c**t?). Most unsatisfying is that, after spending Parts II and III focused on the noble Swede's search for daughter, Roth leaves her fate unresolved, electing instead to end the novel with a repulsive minor character mockingly laughing at the ideal couple's comeuppance. show less

Seymour 'Swede' Levov is the American ideal- he is Jewish, tall, blonde and handsome. A star athlete, a war hero and thanks to his father’s glove manufacturing business, very wealthy. He also marries a former beauty queen. The facade starts to crack when their teenage daughter, Merry, begins to rebel and she gets involved in political terrorism, which leads to committing a horrendous attack.
I think this novel reflects America perfectly- all the starry ideals, along with all the ugliness, bubbling just under the surface. The writing is absolutely stellar, equal to it’s ambitious scope. I am not an authority on Roth but I would have to say that he is at the top of his game here. Brilliant book.

The sad downfall of a serious man. Meet Seymour "Swede" Levov, who is living the postwar apotheosis of the American Dream, but is still pleased to meet you and really cares about what you have to say. The Swede is running the multimillion-dollar glove business bequeathed him by his father, married to a former Miss New Jersey, living in a 170-year-old house in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, and the father of a girl named Merry who was born for--forced into, judging by the name--joy. Joy is their birthright as Americans and the only fitting life for a sports hero and big man on campus, a Marine drill instructor, the scion of hardworking Jewish immigrants whose unstinting pursuit of the middleclass dream has come somehow to fruition in the blond show more WASPiness that gives Seymour the nickname Swede. He is omnicompetent, omnidiligent, omnirighteous, and omnikind. And his family is lovely.


What on Earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?


Only that their American Pastoral is bought at the expense of the "indigenous American Berserk", and their touchpoints--God, country, the conscientious capitalist, rock-ribbed decency and the blameless refusal to develop their own depths--cannot possibly withstand the physical stresses of the geopolitical, psychosocial, and sexual sexual sexual tensions brought home to roost by the old techniques of control finally hitting hyperspeed. Vietnam confronts the Swede Levovs of America with their hypocrisy, and they can swallow the blow--it's in their nature to be happy, to be okay.


But the children can't. Not the children of this world of boundless promise. They are entirely incapable of accepting the price in hate and blood and neo-imperialism. Too spoiled, you know. Never got the chance to work out their fucked-up guilt with a world war. It all unravels with the children. And so Swede Levov's child starts to stutter, starts to crack, and then she goes and blows up a mailbox and a decent country doctor and her family and the suburban dream and the promise of infinite growth. And that's where this story begins--in human hell.


And the scary thing is that it's not just the historical moment. With deftness, Roth marshals repressed sexuality and miscegenation and being a Jew in America and the tension between the social contract and building something for yourself and . . . the simple decline of age, and just overwhelms the reader with these shockwaves of chaos. There is so much chaos. And with tenderness he embraces his poor Levovs and says, How could they have been other than what they were? And with burning sardonic eyes he says, They were doomed from the start.


I'll never forget that reunion moment with Nathan Zuckerman, the narrator, and the girl who wouldn't let him take off her bra in high school. They fall into each other's arms in tears and she says she should have let him do it and you think, We're all just humans in this together and all we can do is cling to each other in the valley of the shadow of death. And for me--I was no sports hero, but in my own quiet Canadian way I've skirted the valley of the shadow of golden-boyness and the gift for decency and joy that is the result of everything coming easily. And like the Swede, ignored the darkness under this blond life for so long, the need to support and underpin your loved ones and friends and take their pain into you, the impossibility of coming to terms with your own ineffectuality in the face of the chaos, the chaos, and the inability to hate anyone for it except yourself for failing . . . how does the man built to help and care come to terms with the irreducible kernel of satanic rage?


I don't want to end like Roth does, with a question. I want to blink back tears and proceed on an assumption, and not an integrated grand-narrative assumption like the Swede's, which the slightest shock--or tiniest mortal blow--can bring down. I look at the women who dominate the denouement here--the demonic Marcia Umanoff, the sunny, hollow Jessie Orcutt, and the speech pathologist Sheila Salzman, whose role in the plot is pivotal and whose actions have a complex mix of good and ill effects upon which no summary judgment can be passed. But what she does? She doesn't run or hide or lie. She thinks, and resolves, and tries.


I'm gonna be a speech pathologist too. But broader than that: I think to be a healer is the highest human calling. To heal the specific ill is a prayer against the unhealable infinitude of human pain. show less

I read this with the Thursday night group in Lincoln Park. The story tells of Swede Levov, whose life is cast into the fires of the nineteen-sixties. The narrator is a familiar Rothian figure: writer Nathan Zuckerman (of The Ghost Writer, et al.). Nathan is now in his early 60s, essentially retired, Nathan is approached by a high-school classmate's older brother—and the well-remembered hero of his youth: Seymour "Swede" Levov, once a blue-eyed athletic and moral paragon who strode through life with ridiculous ease, now nearing 70 and crushed by outrageous misfortunes. Swede asks his help writing a tribute to his late father, and soon thereafter dies himself. Piqued by the enigma of a seemingly perfect life (superb health, a successful show more family business, marriage to a former beauty queen) inexplicably gone wrong, Zuckerman "dream[s] a realistic chronicle" that reconstructs Swede's life—compounded of information gleaned from others who knew him, and centering in the 1960s when Swede's life began to unravel. His only daughter Meredith ("Merry") had rebelled against her parents' and her culture's complacency, protested against the war in Vietnam, claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing in which innocent people were killed, and gone "underground" as a fugitive.
The Swede's glove factory almost did me in as I had an overwhelming desire to never read another sentence about the leather trade. But perhaps this over the top presentation was necessary to persuade the reader that Swede is unable or has insufficient means to comprehend the Newark riots of 1967. Many of the scenes are intensely emotional conversations in which the conflicting claims of social solidarity and individual integrity are debated with pained immediacy. Here, and in more conventionally expository authorial passages, meditativeness and discursiveness predominate over drama. Nevertheless, passion seethes through the novel's pages. This is some of the best pure writing Roth has done. A writer who is unafraid to linger in the minds of furious men, he leads us fearlessly through this man's grief, bewilderment and rage, and perhaps through the history of that era. show less

Difficult read. Not because of Roth's loquacious turn of phrase, nor even his desire to see one traumatic event from every possible perspective. Just when you sense the approach of a momentous twist in American Pastoral's minimalist plot, Roth obtrudes a dampening stream of consciousness from one character or another. This tests any reader's patience, until you reach the last page and realise there's nothing more. This story isn't about what happens, it's about what people think:

"And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings show more and invisible aims?"

A searing mental pain pervades the novel, expressed eloquently from multiple angles:

"The goal was to have goals, the aim to have aims. This edict came entangled often in hysteria, the embattled hysteria of those whom experience had taught how little antagonism it takes to wreck a life beyond repair."

While I didn't love this novel, I recognise it does what it says on the tin. American Pastoral is a truly American novel. The themes are immigration, more specifically Jewish immigration; industrial development in New Jersey; attitudes to the Vietnam war; terrorism and its psychological impact; generational differences; familial concerns such as illness, death and affairs. The last of the three sections attempts to bring all these aspects together to a point: it is impossible to construct a true impression of your family, friends and associates from their outward displays. show less