Philip Roth
American Pastoral
Houghton Mifflin Co., 423 pp., $ 26
At 64, Philip Roth has decided there may be more to life than masturbation. Until now, he has spent most of his literary career reflecting on himself, dissecting himself, portraying himself, disguising himself, and, at times, artistically and otherwise playing with himself. In the process, he has pitted his id against nearly every imaginable Jewish, middle-class, American, and literary taboo. His characters have, in no particular order, found sexual release in a handful of liver; turned into a 155pound, watermelon-shaped female breast; drowned a naked President Nixon in a bag full of water; and bedded the beatific Anne Frank. In Sabbath’s Theater, the eponymous protagonist sums up the Rothian credo in four words: “F — the laudable ideologies.”
This style of truth-telling has a vapid ideology all its own. Irving Howe ruefully observed that Roth’s writings “betray a swelling nausea before the ordinariness of human existence.” So what is extraordinary about Roth’s latest novel, American Pastoral, is its ordinariness. It is not about Roth’s usual compulsion, which is to say, sex. Nor is it about his usual obsession, which is to say, Philip Roth. In American Pastoral, he has produced his most radical work since he began his literary rebellion 40 years ago by producing a conventional book, a testimony and elegy to the bourgeoisie.
Spanning from World War II to Watergate, American Pastoral sets out in familiar territory: the Jewish section of Newark, amid the hum of leather factories and smoke shops, the smell of Syd’s hotdogs and Tabachnik’s pickle barrels. Only this time there is no Portnoy complaining about stifling Jewish mothers or millennial guilt. Instead, there is Seymour Levov, the hero of Weequahic High School.
Tall with striking blond hair and blue eyes, “Swede” Levov is the mythical Other: an Aryan Jew, a football star, a Marine. Where Roth’s most notorious character, Portnoy, fantasized about and had tortuous relationships with goyim, the Swede settles down happily with one: Miss New Jersey of 1949. Together, the Levovs are Newark’s Kennedys. He dutifully runs the family glove business, Newark Maid, while she breeds cattle at their farm. “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. . . . Where was the Jew in him? You couldn’t find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief.” No Roth.
Actually, Roth is present in American Pastoral, or rather his longtime alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, is. But Zuckerman is not the novel’s protagonist; Roth is not interested in playing his usual cat-and-mouse game, making us guess what part of Zuckerman’s life is simply borrowed from the author’s and what part is invented. Zuckerman is here to observe.
At the book’s start, the Swede is in his late 60s. He seeks out Zuckerman, the worshipful childhood friend of his brother Jerry, ostensibly because Levov wants the famous novelist to write a tribute to his recently deceased father. Zuckerman’s encounter with the Swede over dinner at a New York restaurant confirms what he has always suspected: Levov is empty, a kind of Matroshka doll with nothing inside. “There’s nothing here but what you’re looking at,” Zuckerman concludes at the end of their meal. “This guy is the embodiment of nothing.”
Or so it seems. It is only soon after, at his 45th high-school reunion, that Zuckerman realizes he has committed the novelist’s worst sin: He has misread a character. Zuckerman learns that the Swede, who has just died of cancer, had concealed more than his illness during their encounter. At the height of the Vietnam War, Levov’s daughter blew up a local post office in protest and disappeared. “His life was blown up by that bomb,” says Jerry, the Swede’s brother. “The real victim of that bombing was him.”
And so begins Zuckerman’s effort to reconstruct the Swede’s rise and fall, a rise and fall that self-consciously parallels the American century. In Merry, Levov’s daughter, Roth finds the ultimate vessel for civilization and its discontents, the Oswald of ideologies, a woman who could bestill even Sabbath’s heart. She has killed not just one person, but four. She is a Weatherman, a mad bomber, “chaos itself.” But just as we seem to be heading back to the couch of Portnoy’s shrink, Roth subverts his ordinary subversions. Rather than lampoon the Swede, Roth gives his life a lyrical quality and lacerates Merry for destroying Swede Levov’s American pastoral. It is as if, after all these years, Roth himself has joined the ranks of the Patimkins, the middleclass Jews he satirized so ruthlessly in Goodbye, Columbus. Zuckerman confesses for Roth: “Writing turns you into somebody who’s always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on.”
It is a stunning confession; Roth has revolted against his own revolt, and has embraced the Swede’s pastoral as the antidote to Sabbath’s theater. The Swede signifies order, faith, law, reason. He is home; he is Newark; he is flesh and blood. And with one nonsensical act, Merry — the Communist idiot, the viper, the stuttering imp — destroys her father and all he embodies. Her vision has “nothing whatsoever to do with ‘ideals’ but with dishonesty, criminality, megalomania, and insanity,” writes Zuckerman. “Blind antagonism and infantile desire to menace — those were her ideals.”
But something is lost in Roth’s conversion to middle-class ideals; his characterization of Merry, the one type he has always gotten right, is off. She is all catalyst and no character. While the mythical Swede contains an unmistakable inner life, Merry has only a stutter and a bomb. Even her name is pat: Merry is unmerry. When Lyndon Johnson appears on TV, she screams: ” You heartless mi-mi-mimiserable m-monster.” Years later, when she has converted from communism to cultism, she screams: “I am bound to harm no living being, neither man, nor animal. . . . I destroy plant life. I am insuffciently compassionate as yet to refuse to do that.” Indeed, by the end of the book, she has spouted so many ideologies, she has none. And that is perhaps the point, and why ultimately she doesn’t destroy the novel along with her father. Unlike the Swede, who embodies America at her best, she truly is the embodiment of nothing.
And, oddly, her nothingness is what makes American Pastoral so powerful. Merry is the logical outgrowth of Roth’s relentless revolt against convention. The literary uprising, which began with the sardonic Neil Klugman of Goodbye, Columbus, inevitably led to the petulant Portnoy, which inevitably led to the soulless Sabbath, which finally produced J the murderous Merry. Once all ideologies are found wanting, there is only chaos itself. Thirty years ago, Portnoy’s Complaint literally ended with a punchline; American Pastoral closes with despair. “The combatant had borne all the disappointment he could,” Zuckerman writes of the Swede. ” Nothing blunt remained within him for bludgeoning deviancy to death. What should be did not exist. Deviancy prevailed. . . . The old system that made order doesn’t work anymore. All that was left was his fear and astonishment, but now concealed by nothing.”
Roth, too, has left himself bare, especially to those who will charge he has renounced everything he himself has wrought. Unlike his other books, American Pastoral is very much a political book, and, stranger yet, a conservative one. It is a paean to old Newark, its family-run factories and crowded neighborhoods, to all the ordinary people whom Merry and her modern disciples have destroyed. It seems that somewhere along the way from Portnoy to the Swede, Philip Roth decided that even literary rebellions have consequences.
David Grann is managing editor of the New Republic.
