Elijah Bacal
American Pastoral, by Philip Roth. Vintage Books, 1998, 423pp., $9.99.
In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man. In the wake of America’s victory in the Cold War — and the seemingly inevitable expansion of its commercial, military, and cultural power around the world — “history,” with its ebbs and flows, its triumphs and tragedies, was over. Now was to be the age of stable hegemony, wherein our problems would be boredom and stagnation, not life-or-death civilizational struggle. Fukuyama’s prophecy was blown apart — literally — on 9/11, when it became clear that this century would remain stuck in the same fatal cycle of retribution that defined the last. Perhaps Philip Roth is a prophet, then: in his 1997 novel American Pastoral, published five years after the end of history, four years before the end of the end of history, the characters’ troubles also begin with an explosion. The novel follows the Levovs, an American Jewish family at midcentury. There’s patriarch Seymour “The Swede” Levov, nicknamed thus in high school for an athleticism atypical of his nebbishy peers, and his wife Dawn, a former beauty queen. Then there’s their daughter Merry, who, after an adolescence marred by a stutter and a weight problem, embraces antiwar radicalism and accidentally kills a man while blowing up a post office in her reviled hometown of Old Rimrock, New Jersey. The Swede laments that Merry, supposed to become the wealthy, educated, assimilated apotheosis of the many generations of hardworking ever-more-American Levovs, instead threw this all away in a single, fateful blast. This screeching halt and rapid reversal of the Levovs’ smooth ride into the American elite haunts him, ultimately coming to dominate his inner life and irreparably ruin his marriage.
In another world, Nathan Zuckerman is also struggling to fit himself into history. American Pastoral’s first quarter follows Zuckerman, an aging, itinerant novelist and recurring Roth character whose latest furious draft, as it happens, is about the Swede. As a child in the Jewish Newark suburbs, Zuckerman idolized the Swede for his athletic prowess and is awestruck when, after all these years, he receives a letter from the Swede asking him to dinner. Soon after, the Swede dies suddenly, and in doing so renews Zuckerman’s childhood obsession. Who was the Swede? Was he really the perfect all-American man Zuckerman idolized as a boy, or was there darkness behind the façade.
After questioning the Swede’s brother, Zuckerman hears about Merry and digs up an old newspaper clipping about the bombing. This is all we get of the “real” lives of the Levovs. The novel’s remaining three quarters, then, are what we are to assume is Zuckerman’s novel about the Swede. The details of the characters’ lives — Merry’s stutter and the family’s meandering attempts to ameliorate it, the marital troubles of the Swede and his wife after Merry disappears following the bombing — are inventions of Zuckerman’s mind.
Zuckerman’s final sequence in the novel, only about 90 pages in, occurs at his 45-year high school reunion. Instead of a wistful reflection on a long life, the reunion is, for Zuckerman, a frightful confrontation with decay: of the friends he loved, of the beauty of the women he once coveted, of his own health as he reels from a cancer diagnosis which has rendered him impotent, and of the early 20th-century lifeworld he feels is irretrievably buried in the past.
Perhaps, then, although he disappears after 90 pages, Zuckerman is the real hero of American Pastoral, which is less concerned with the historical processes it narrates than with the act of narration itself. The novel deals in stereotype: the Swede’s life is too cookie-cutter, too all-American, and its disruption (a bombing by his overweight daughter trying to stick it to “Honky America”) too on-the-nose for either to be taken as straightforward realism. Were this heavy-handed mix of archetypes presented simply as Roth’s creation, one could accuse him of being a cranky old white man bemoaning tired boogeymen. Roth, however, displaces the work of imagination onto Zuckerman — a Jewish-American writer facing his own impotence, irrelevance, and death.
This device raises some questions. Should we credit Roth for writing a savvy novel about the malleability of history, and the way in which base grievances and projections inevitably creep into the narration of history? Or is the use of Zuckerman as a framing device a thinly veiled attempt to pass off vulgar stereotyping as astute metacommentary by a real novelist, Roth, quickly becoming just as much of an anachronism as his fictional avatar?
Either way, amidst the end of history, both Roth and Zuckerman are far more ambivalent about the 20th century than Fukuyama is. Unlike him, they aren’t quite ready to declare victory and keep moving. American Pastoral mourns the lost middle-class Jewish Newark of the early 20th century, the milieu in which Roth was raised and a frequent fixation of his fiction. In the novel, he surveys the damage: deindustrialization, crumbling apartment buildings, hollowed-out factories, race riots, and white flight. Roth and Zuckerman are fixated on a narrative of the 20th century as essentially constituted by decay, more concerned with the pathos to be unearthed therefrom than with creating a balanced capital-H History.
Perhaps the best example of the novel’s slippery realism is the character of Merry. Merry’s quaint, parochial childhood – raising cattle with her mother, dutifully writing in her “stuttering diary” – soon gives way to adolescent angst. After her disappearance following the bombing, she resurfaces, now rail-thin, as a devout Jain, committed to – get this – killing no organism, however small. Is this a realistic portrayal of the life of a young woman in 1960s America befitting a Great American Novel? No. But Roth is not so much interested in the facts of history as he is in people’s experience of it: how time progressed, how it made them feel, and how they narrativized it.
The problem is that narratives turn people into characters, and characters into caricatures. Merry is not permitted her own narration: at the mercy of the Swede’s discipline and Zuckerman’s gaze, she never can tell the story of her life and America on her own terms — the warmongering, the racism, and her parents’ rote and antiquated expectations.
At the same time, careful reading might suggest Roth is criticizing faulty narration of history, not engaging in it himself. For example, the Swede and Dawn’s frustration in understanding and addressing Merry’s stutter mirrors their frustration in attempting to understand history. They see a psychiatrist, who tells them that the young girl’s stutter is a reaction to their success: the daughter of the high school stud and Miss New Jersey has to distinguish herself somehow. This diagnosis infuriates the Swede, who claims the short and unattractive psychiatrist is channeling his own ressentiment. Merry’s stuttering diary, which chronicles every single interaction she has in her young life and rates the severity of the stuttering therein on a numerical scale, is an impossible attempt — just like Zuckerman’s — to comprehensively make sense of a period of time in writing. Just like history, Merry’s stutter suffuses everything at every moment, exhausting the characters with its sheer presence; and yet when they try to understand it, to catalog it faithfully, they cannot. It, like the character’s many aborted attempts to explain themselves and understand each other, contributes to the novel’s atmosphere of frustration. As history swerves, their identities swerve with it.
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Another way to see American Pastoral is as a farce. For all the talk of Roth as a Great American Novelist – declared The Guardian upon Roth’s death, “The great American novelist may be no more, but he has left behind some great American novels” – that term, with its didactic connotation, doesn’t seem to fit American Pastoral. A Great American Novelist is ideological; he wants you to see the world as he sees it. Roth is having more fun than that. Rather than using fiction to get his word in at the end of history, he mines the 20th century’s narratives and archetypes for entertainment value, creating characters who are entertaining marionettes rather than somber embodiments of ideas.
Most of American Pastoral depicts American life at midcentury, yet one could argue it is a characteristically 90s postmodern novel – a parade of indifferently deployed signs detached from any genuine meaning, now-weightless archetypes easily batted around after the last century squeezed all the meaning out of them. High school football stars, beauty pageant contestants, untrustworthy psychoanalysts, firebrand student radicals: can’t one write a fun novel about the 20th century's greatest hits without being accused of prejudice? Could it be possible to depict these familiar types without subscribing to the ideology that produced them?
These questions come to a head as the novel traverses the American scene, covering the Vietnam War protests, inequality, gender, and finally, race. Roth’s portrayal of the Newark riots of 1967 is particularly callous and one-sided: the Swede narrates the riots as a particularly severe upsurge of elemental violence and chaos endemic to Black America. Nothing else, nothing more. He fixates on his Black shop foreman, Vicky, who stayed in the factory with him during the riots. He childishly wonders why the rioters couldn’t be more like Vicky, while simultaneously wondering why she isn’t more grateful for the scholarships and lavish graduation parties he provided for her two sons. And there it is, his personal innocence: he kept his factory in Newark after the riots when many other businesses fled elsewhere, often overseas.
The cause of the riots was the beating of a Black man by Newark police, after which the mayor refused to suspend the officers involved. American Pastoral effaces this. “To some,” write Rick Rojas and Khorri Atkinson in a piece for the New York Times commemorating the 50th anniversary of the riots, “the flames and violence were riots, wrecking neighborhoods and driving away white and middle-class residents … Or it was a rebellion, the uprising of a long-oppressed community that had finally had enough, and from that, a new sense of empowerment was born.” Commenting on the 1968 report of the Kerner Commission, which asserted that decades of racial hierarchy and segregation drove the previous year’s nationwide riots, James Baldwin accused white America of asking a question it already knew, deep down, the answer to: “What does the Negro want?”
“This question,” Baldwin said, “masks a terrible knowledge. I want exactly what you want … I want to be left alone … I simply want to be able to raise my children in peace.” To write a Great American Novel, Roth would need to understand and portray the fact that those student activists, those rioters, might see their lives as a microcosm of the American story just as much as his characters do. They might even harbor identical hopes and fears – the desire for opportunity and upward mobility, frustration at its elusiveness, confusion at the swift social and economic changes sweeping the country. To portray these qualities in other characters would befit a Great American Novel. But American Pastoral is not the Great American Novel. Rather, it is a cautionary tale, a reminder to humble ourselves before the infinite, variable past in our desire to contain it in a single narrative. Pressing Roth’s façade teaches this lesson well – Roth, perhaps, could stand to learn it as much as anyone else.