American Pastoral

Why I read this book

I’ve started and stopped American Pastoral a few times. Philip Roth is one of those Important American Authors™, and the first book of his American Trilogy is lauded as one of those Important American Books™, and I’ve read The Plot Against America and Portnoy’s Complaint and enjoyed both of them thoroughly, so why not.

One key takeaway

N/A for fiction books.

Summary

American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel published in 1997 concerning Seymour “Swede” Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov’s happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the “indigenous American berserk”.

The framing device in American Pastoral is a 45th high school reunion attended by frequent Roth alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, who is the narrator. At the reunion, in 1995, Zuckerman meets former classmate Jerry Levov who describes to him the tragic derailment of the life of his recently deceased older brother, Seymour “Swede” Levov. After Seymour’s teenage daughter Merry, in 1968, set off a bomb in protest against American involvement in the Vietnam War, killing a bystander, and subsequently went into hiding, Seymour remained traumatized for the rest of his life. The rest of the novel consists of Zuckerman’s posthumous recreation of Seymour’s life, based on Jerry’s revelation, a few newspaper clippings, and Zuckerman’s own impressions after two brief run-ins with “the Swede”. In these encounters, which take place early in the novel, Zuckerman learns that Seymour has remarried and has three young sons, but Seymour’s daughter Merry is never mentioned. In Zuckerman’s reimagining of Seymour’s life, this second marriage has no part; it ends in 1973 with Watergate unraveling on TV while the previous lives of the protagonists completely disintegrate.

How was the book

A meditation on “bullshit-nostalgia” and myth-making, a deep inquiry into the surface and the depth of American heroes both as humans and as metonymies for America. The book employs a framing structure, with frequent Roth alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman attending his 45th high school reunion after reconnecting with his childhood idol, Seymour “The Swede” Levov. Zuckerman “dream[s] a realistic chronicle” of “the Swedes” inner life, inhabiting him like a glove, the metaphor serving double duty as both a physical covering and as the central proving ground for masculinity in the family Levov’s world in the glove factory.

The glove factory, like everything in the Swede’s imagined life, is held onto dearly beyond the point of sensibility. The Swede weathers the 1967 Newark riots, endures the mass exodus of the glove industry to the Philippines, continuing in spite of his father’s protestations to take the glove empire overseas. Everything in the Levov family tragedy is clung to, as if foolishly embracing what you love will stop it from leaving you. But who is grasping at what was lost? The Swede, or Nathan Zuckerman cum the Swede? This Triple Self Portrait narrative structure in fact forms the dramatic thrust of the novel. The artifice is the art, the medium is the message. This isn’t just a family novel of disintegration, there is the loss of masculinity of Nathan Zuckerman, rendered incontinent by prostate cancer, and of the historically fashioned American man, brought down equal by the tides of equality, and of a generation, silent in name but booming in presence. It is no longer just a novel about the dissolution of the American pastoral “into everything its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral– into the indigenous American berserk”, but the betrayal of a generation’s promise to their children that things really were as simple and defined as they were when they were growing up, the Swede and Nathan Zuckerman and their entire generation modern refugees to the rising tides of postmodernism.

The 60s launched a broadside to American patriarchy, and so it is doubly effective that not only Seymour’s daughter but his wife have embraced a more operative form of the nihilism of the time; his daughter cum domestic terrorist finding solace with the Weather Underground, his wife running to the arms of the “Wasp blandness” of “Mr. America”, William Orthcutt III. The collapse of Nathan “Skip” Zuckerman and Seymour “The Swede” Levov a fall from Arcady and Eden, a compelling statement that we are all surface to everyone else, that “being unknowable is the goal” and all there is to be done is to cherish what has been lost.

Favorite quotes

And then the loss of the daughter, the fourth American generation, a daughter on the run who was to have been the perfected image of himself as he had been the perfected image of his father, and his father the perfected image of his father’s father … the angry, rebarbative spitting-out daughter with no interest whatever in being the next successful Levov, flushing him out of hiding as if he were a fugitive–initiating the Swede into the displacement of another America entirely, the daughter and the decade blasting to smithereens his particular form of Utopian thinking, the plague America infiltrating the Swede’s castle and there infecting everyone. The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for 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. (86)

Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive (248)

Was everyone’s brain as unreliable as his? Was he the only one unable to see what people were up to? Did everyone slip around the way he did, in and out, in and out, a hundred different times a day go from being smart to being smart enough, to being as dumb as the next guy, to being the dumbest bastard who ever lived? Was it stupidity deforming him, the simpleton son of a simpleton father, or was life just one big deception that everyone was on to except him? (356)

After I’d already written about his brother–which is what I would do in the months to come: think about the Swede for six, eight, sometimes ten hours at a stretch, exchange my solitude for his, inhabit this person least like myself, disappear into him, day and night try to take the measure of a person of apparent blankness and innocence and simplicity, chart his collapse, make of him, as time wore on, the most important figure of my life […] (74)

Any other reading

I Married a Communist (Book 2 of American Trilogy), by Philip Roth, 1998.
The Human Stain (Book 3 of American Trilogy), by Philip Roth, 2000.