Until this book, I had really hated everything I'd read by Philip Roth.  In particular, I thought it was disgraceful that Portnoy's Complaint (read Orrin's review), which is a genuinely vile book, made the Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century.  But I stumbled across a couple of favorable references to American Pastoral by conservative commentators--including David Horowitz who called it the best book of the year.  So I figured I'd give him one more chance.  This book is a vast improvement over his other work and, if editors still did their jobs, it might even have been a great book.

Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's fictional alter ego, introduces the tale of Seymour "Swede" Levov, star athlete and all-around golden boy of Weequahic High School in the 1940's.  After serving in WWII, the hard working, eminently decent Swede marries Miss New Jersey 1949, takes over his Dad's glove factory in Newark and lives a seemingly idyllic upper middle class existence, even moving to a spacious estate in Morris County.  But as we soon find out, something horrible happened to the Levov's which puts the lie to this fairy tale version of the American Dream.  In 1968, Swede's beloved teenage daughter Merry, who had become increasingly politicized and radical in the midst of the Vietnam War years, planted a bomb at the local post office--it's not even a government building, just an adjunct to a country store--and the explosion killed a man.  Afterwards, she went on the lam and Swede only saw her once more, a bedraggled, twice-raped, snaggle-toothed, Jainist parody of his image of his innocent lost daughter. Despite his earnest efforts to lead a good life and be an honorable man, he must confront the fact that he raised a terrorist, whose bomb blew away not merely a building and a neighbor, but Swede's own grasp on the meaning of life.

All of this is okay in so far as it goes.  The relationship between Swede, the decent man of the 50's, and his rebellious daughter, rejecting everything about his life, is a serviceable allegory for the breakdown of American culture in the 1960's.  But there are several problems with the novel.  First, there are structural problems.  Zuckerman introduces the story in a too long set piece revolving around a High School reunion.  Then he seems to be narrating the story as a kind of omniscient voice, or has Roth himself taken over?  It's really hard to tell and, since the Zuckerman character does not actually appear as an actor in the subsequent events, this framing device is really asymmetrical and annoying.

In addition, if the opening section is merely too long, the body of Swede's tale is ponderous and repetitive and the final scene, set at a dinner party, is very nearly interminable.  If star authors still had folks who actually edited their books and told them--"Hey, you need to cut this and rewrite this"--these problems could easily have been obviated.  Ditch the Zuckerman shtick and trim 150 pages and you've got a much tighter story.

But the final problem is spiritual and I'm not sure Roth is capable of dealing with it.  In the final sentence of the novel, he asks us to consider the Levovs and what has befallen them:

    And what is wrong with their life?  What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?

This is a question that, wittingly or not, he has answered within the pages of the book.  For the succeeding generations of the Levovs have depicted a very real progression (or regression) that occurred in Western life over the last century.  Swede's father, opinionated and obstinate as he may be, at least has a set of concrete moral beliefs which he adheres to ferociously.  Swede and Zuckerman grew up in a world that was the product of these beliefs.  Roth's palpable nostalgia for a world where everyone read the same books, saw the same movies, rooted for the same baseball team, etc., suffuses the book with the same air of melancholy and loss that animated Doris Kearns Goodwin's Wait 'til Next Year (see Orrin's review).  But when they grew to adulthood, folks like Swede and Zuckerman and Goodwin somehow lost the courage of their convictions.  At one point in the book, Roth discusses how WWII was about no one dominating anyone anymore and realizing that everyone's' beliefs are equally valid.  Huh?  Here I had always thought that it was about America and Britain imposing liberal democracy--which is after all ultimately just the political and economic manifestation of the Judeo-Christian tradition--on unwilling miscreants.  But Roth has demonstrated by example the weird disconnect that his generation suffered.  These were people who had no compunctions about nuking the Japanese until they accepted our way of life, but went all wobbly legged when it came time to discipline willful sons and daughters.  Somehow, and it seems to have been a function of the mainstreaming of Marxist ideas, they came to believe in materialism as a religion.  It became sufficient to provide material goods and a comfortable life, as Swede does.  Meanwhile, everyone was free to do their own thing, believe whatever they wanted and go their own way.  Is it surprising then that the nuclear family, our shared cultural heritage and Merry's bomb all exploded?  These folks look back adoringly on childhoods of community, shared experience and moral certitude, but the childhoods that they provided their own offspring were relativistic, materialistic and atomistic--no wonder their kids turned out so awful.

But it is unclear to me whether Roth understands these implications of his story.  His narrative voice is so diffused and the story rambles so, that it is hard to determine whether he has merely identified the disease or actually understands its causes.  Certainly the favorable comment by conservatives, and the much more cautious approbation by mainstream leftwing critics, reflects a recognition of the full import of the inchoate ideas that he presents here. I fully recognize how literal minded I am, but I truly did not get a good feel for how much of this Roth comprehends.

The end result then is a book that is terribly disappointing precisely because it comes so close to being great.  I don't know what Roth is working on now, and no author ever does this anymore, but I really wish he would go back and revise this book.  It is a shame to tip toe right up to the edge of greatness and then end up with this half baked product.  There is much here to admire;  the sections on the glove making process and the value of good workmanship are especially good and in their own way they offer one of the most resonant refutations of Marxism in literary history.  But these patches of surpassing brilliance lose some of their luster as they become lost in the messy whole.  I definitely recommend the book, but with serious reservations.  And, while it does not belong on the ML Top 100 either, I would have less trouble with its inclusion than with that of Portnoy; American Pastoral at least tackles some of the most important pathologies our times, even if it does not fully treat them,  and for that reason should be Roth's most enduring work.

(Reviewed:13-Mar-00)

Grade: (B+) Orrin C. Judd

Tweet