The New Criterion

Philip Roth is a writer of great comic gifts, but in American Pastoral, his twenty-second book, these gifts are unfortunately not much in evidence. Nostalgia and indignation alternate in setting the tone of this new novel. In the present case, Roth’s aim is to create an idyllic American life for Seymour Irving Levov, to embody in him the pastoral dream of the American Jew (to become a fully assimilated American), and then to strip him of his illusions and attainments by the most cruel and irrational of means.

Roth’s Levov is “the household Apollo” of the Newark Jews, a boy so blond and handsome that he is called “the Swede.” Since Jewish boys are “not athletic,” the Swede is, of course, a star athlete (in several high-school sports) and therefore the idol of every Jewish kid at Weequahic High. Like Bernard Malamud’s Roy Hobbs, the Swede is a “natural” at sports. But as a responsible Jewish boy, he skips a pro baseball career with the Giants in order to enter his father’s business. Almost effortlessly, it seems to others, the Swede becomes a big manufacturer of ladies’ gloves in Newark. Naturally, he must marry, so Roth gives him not merely a shiksa but Dawn Dwyer, the beautiful, talented Miss New Jersey of 1949--almost Miss America herself. Naturally, he must be successful, so Roth makes him a millionaire. And what would a Jewish millionaire do but move his family from Newark out to Old Rimrock. There, in a stone house on a farm in rural New Jersey, a place redolent with the history of the American Revolution, the Levovs try to create—like Seymour Levin in Malamud’s A New Life—an American pastoral existence. “Why shouldn’t I be where I want to be?” Seymour Levov asks. “Why shouldn’t I be with who I want to be with? Isn’t that what this country’s all about?”

So it seems. As the 1950s pass into the 1960s, the Swede enjoys a sort of “utopia of rational existence.” He is the complacent embodiment of liberal bourgeois commercial and domestic happiness. Dawn herself finds contentment in breeding cattle on the farm. (This seems to be how Roth conceives the pastoral theme.) The children are also a source of parental satisfaction, especially the daughter, Meredith, the apple of her father’s eye.

Yet as Merry enters adolescence, signs of trouble begin to surface. Somewhere she picks up pro-Communist, antiwar rhetoric. By the mid-1960s, she has turned on her loving father as a capitalist pig who exploits his black factory workers. While other white businessmen bail out during the rising tensions, the Swede tries to keep his Newark factory open, for the sake of his black employees. But when roving gangs trash the city and Newark goes up in flames, in the riots of 1967, Levov reluctantly takes his factories offshore, to Puerto Rico or the Philippines.

But to daughter Merry he is still an entrepreneurial bloodsucker—now exploiting the colored peoples of the Third World. Merry comes to hate her mother, hate America, hate their upscale life. The last vestige of the Swede’s idyll is shattered in 1968, during the Vietnam War, when the teenage daughter blows up the Old Rimrock post office, killing a local doctor, and disappears into the antiwar underground. Merry is thus the agent who “transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral—into the indigenous American berserk.”

I am not sure what to make of “the indigenous American berserk,” but it seems to be crazier than, say, the Israeli, the French, or the German varieties. Roth evidently believes that there is some “deep American shit” into which families like the Levovs plunged neck-deep.

Seymour Levov, the bland Swede, I find a colorless figure. Much more interesting is the narrator of his tale, Nathan Zuckerman, a familiar alter ego for Roth and the protagonist himself of the trilogy The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and The Anatomy Lesson (1983)—not to speak of stray productions like The Counterlife (1986). The Swede’s mask has a meaning that beguiles Zuckerman. To understand his idol, Zuckerman composes this “realistic chronicle”: “I began gazing into his life— not his life as a god or a demigod in whose triumphs one could exult as a boy but his life as another assailable man.” American Pastoral explores the destructive impulses that wrecked not merely families like the Levovs but whole cities like Newark. It presents Zuckerman’s conclusions about the familial and social conditions that produced the Sixties radical youth who nearly destroyed America.

For Zuckerman, the Swede is to be understood as the culmination of the American Jew’s desire to abandon his ethnic parochialism and “to go the limit in America with your rights, forming yourself as an ideal person who gets rid of the traditional Jewish habits and attitudes, who frees himself of the pre-America insecurities and the old, constraining obsessions so as to live unapologetically as an equal among equals.” This is the process by which the immigrant Solomon or Saul would beget a son Stephen, who would in turn beget “an authentic American” Shawn.

But the Swede is an enigma to Zuckerman precisely because his ethnic identity has been Americanized out of him:

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. All that he had eliminated to achieve his perfection. No striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness—just the style, the natural physical refinement of a star.

We may very well doubt that this is an adequate résumé of Jewish qualities, but it appears to be Zuckerman’s and—at least some of the time—to be Roth’s. (A great many of Zuckerman’s viewpoints are echoed in Roth’s The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988). But inasmuch as the “real facts” about Roth’s life and his attitudes are seized upon by the fictional creation Zuckerman, who invades the postmodernist Roth’s autobiography, we must be cautious: Zuckerman complains of how author Roth is slyly concealing himself from us with a false show of objectivity.) In any case, Zuckerman feels “a twinge of shame and self-rejection” in the Swede’s leaving behind Jewish Newark for the pastoral idyll in the WASP Republican stronghold of Old Rimrock.

Zuckerman, however, can give us no realistic explanation for why Merry Levov, a perfectly ordinary, privileged, upper middle-class American girl, should detonate a bomb in Old Rimrock and then go underground and kill several others in Oregon. “What happened to our smart Jewish kids?” he asks. “They are crazy. Something is driving them crazy. Something has set them against everything. Something is leading them into disaster.” But what that “something” is he cannot tell us.

Still, he itemizes the list: “Mark Rudd and Katherine Boudin and Jane Alpert—all in their twenties, Jewish, middle-class, college-educated, violent in behalf of the antiwar cause, committed to revolutionary change and determined to overturn the United States government.” How could they have turned against the country that had given their parents such freedom and such open opportunities to become successful? How could they have bombed, killed, abandoned their families, and gone underground for the Viet Cong, the Black Panthers, or Che Guevara?

Merry, in any case, reappears in Newark some five years later. She is now living in filth as a Jain cultist in the bombed-out slums. She now believes that the killing of any life is unholy, even that of a gnat, and is slowly starving herself to death in search of selfless spiritual enlightenment. Her various conversions—political and religious—have evidently made her mad as a hatter. “Abnormality cloaked as ideology” is the way that William Orcutt, the Swede’s neighbor, explains away these kids. The novel gives us little reason to think otherwise.

Although he wants to give a “realistic chronicle,” Zuckerman is actually Newark’s Kafka. He lives in a world where things are as meaningless as they are grotesque. Zuckerman concludes that the Swede’s inscrutable mask had been adopted because he

had learned the worst lesson that life can teach—that it makes no sense… . The nice gentle man with his mild way of dealing with conflict and contradiction, the confident ex-athlete sensible and resourceful in any struggle with an adversary who is fair, comes up against the adversary who is not fair—the evil ineradicable from human dealings—and he is finished… . Stoically he suppresses his horror. He learns to live behind a mask. A lifetime experiment in endurance. A performance over a ruin. Swede Levov lives a double life.

But of course it is Zuckerman who lives the double life. Obsessed with “The Angel of Time” that is consuming his few remaining years, Zuckerman at sixty-two has now had a prostate operation and is living alone, abandoned in his doll’s house, without a woman and without sex. He calls himself “purely a writer,” someone “whose aging powers had now but a single and unswerving aim, a man who would be seeking his solace, like it or not, nowhere but in sentences.” This is a remarkable development for any of Roth’s sex-crazed protagonists. But Zuckerman has dealt with it by retiring to a place much like Malamud’s Bennington, “about ten miles from a college town called Athena.” Alluding to the Malamud figure in The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman remarks: “I met a famous writer there when I was just starting out. Nobody mentions him much anymore, his sense of virtue is too narrow for readers now, but he was revered back then. Lived like a hermit. Reclusion looked awfully austere to a kid. He maintained it solved his problems. Now it solves mine.”

Living like a hermit, going back over their boyhood past, trying to make sense of the Swede’s life—all of this is Zuckerman’s way of recovering his “urban pastoral”:

Am I wrong to think that we delighted in living there [in Newark]? No delusions are more familiar than those inspired in the elderly by nostalgia, but am I completely mistaken to think that living as well-born children in Renaissance Florence could not have held a candle to growing up within aromatic range of Tabachnik’s pickle barrels?

Like Proust’s madeleine, Tabachnik’s pickles obliterate time so that the word “death” comes to have no meaning to Zuckerman. The most vivid writing in American Pastoral he devotes to Newark as it used to be—as a commercial center before the racial problems began. How ladies’ gloves were manufactured in the days when there was a glove industry—how the leather was tanned, stretched, dyed, cut, lined, sewn, sized, boxed, and shipped—it is this that inspires Zuckerman’s most lyrical prose. He knows enough to check his own “bullshit-nostalgia,” but he cannot help glorying in the old days, when

there was a factory where somebody was making something in every side street. Now there’s a liquor store in every street—a liquor store, a pizza stand, and a seedy storefront church. Everything else in ruins or boarded up. But when my father bought the factory, a stone’s throw away Kiler made watercoolers, Fortgang made fire alarms, Lasky made corsets, Robbins made pillows, Honig made pen points… . The major industry now is car theft… . It’s something horrible. [Black kids] ram cop cars in broad daylight. Front- end collisions. To explode the air bags… . Wheeling the car in circles at tremendous speeds. Killing pedestrians means nothing to them. Killing motorists means nothing to them. Killing themselves means nothing to them.

The Swede, who employed a great many blacks, tried to keep his factory open through the riots, but, as liberal as he is, he explodes at the black racists and craven politicians who destroyed the old Newark:

A whole business is going down the drain because of that son of a bitch LeRoi Jones, that Peek-A-Boo-Boopy-Do, whatever the hell he calls himself in that goddamn hat. I built this with my hands! With my blood! They think somebody gave it to me? Who? Who gave it to me? Who gave me anything, ever? Nobody! What I have I built! With work--w-o-r-k! But they took that city and now they are going to take that business and everything that I built up a day at a time, an inch at a time, and they are going to leave it all in ruins! And that’ll do ’em a world of good! They burn down their own houses—that’ll show whitey!

The burden of American Pastoral is thus Zuckerman-Roth’s belief that it is foolish for any Jew to think that he can ever fully assimilate into gentile America or shape a marriage, a home, or a business according to rational principles that make for continuing stability in life. If the goyim don’t get you, your dream will be destroyed from within by the kids. Although he seems a perfect atheist, Zuckerman’s world is governed by the God of Job, who is not above driving the children crazy to punish their fathers for thinking that a secure Jewish existence is a given thing—even in America.