Book Review: American Pastoral
Book Review:
American Pastoral
By: Philip Roth
Review By: Grant Catton
Brief Synopsis
American Pastoral is a bit over 400 pages and is basically the life story of a young Jewish man, named Seymour “Swede” Levov, who came of age in the post-World War II era and, in fact, just missed serving in the war itself by a few weeks. The story begins in the form of a narrative told by Skip Zuckerman, a man who grew up in Newark, N.J. and who was a few years younger than the much-admired and athletically gifted Swede. Zuckerman was a great admirer of the Swede’s as a young boy and an adolescent, as it seems was their entire highschool and their entire milieu in their youth. Zuckerman’s admiration for the Swede is even apparent when the two, as aging men, run into each other at a Mets game.
Not long after, Zuckerman recieves a letter from the Swede asking him to write the Swede’s life story, and inviting him to lunch at an Italian restaurant in New York City to initiate the process. At the lunch, Zuckerman is dismayed, almost to the point of amusement, to find that the Swede only wishes to talk about how wonderful his life is and how everything has turned out perfectly for him. Zuckerman leaves in veiled disgust, only to find out weeks later that the Swede has passed away from prostate cancer.
Through a process that is unclear, at least to this reader, Zuckerman realizes upon reflection, that the Swede’s life was anything but perfect and simple, and so begins the Swede’s long tale of woe, fraught with the tensions of Jewish versus gentile lifestyles, new world versus old world lifestyles, and the ongoing generational battle between parents and children. These battles seem to intersect tragically in the Swede’s life.
In a narrative hand-off that is ill-explained, once again, perhaps only to this reader, the book picks up an omniscient third person narrative of the life of the Swede. In brief, the Swede is a full blooded Jew who attempts, partly accidentally and partly on purpose, to live the ideal gentile existence. He is an all star at three sports in high school, he joins the army after high school and, while missing the war by several weeks, becomes a drill instructor in the Marine Corps. After that, he attends a small college in New York and woos a Miss New Jersey pageant candidate, Dawn Dwyer, who will win the title but will not win the Miss U.S.A. pageant. As a young man, the Swede will gradually take the reins of his father’s glove manufacturing business, while fathering a girl child who develops a stuttering problem which will torment her for her entire youth. The child, Merry, grows up in the Vietnam era and all of the anger and frustration of that generation seems funneled directly into her as she becomes more and more resentful of her family’s wealth and of her country’s actions. Her resentment culminates in her bombing of the local post office. The act, meant as a protest of the war, kills a local doctor who was dropping off some mail in the early morning. Merry is forced into hiding and, other than a brief torment by one of her contemporaries seemingly sent by her, her father hears nothing about her for five years. During that time he is left to torture himself with questions and self flagellation, as his relationship with Dawn becomes strained, and she herself begins to breakdown. The two are forced to assemble whatever life they can, as they live their days in their small town mansion in New Jersey, and are forever tormented by a neighboring couple, more dysfunctional than the Levovs, in fact, who are absolutely American and seem to have sprouted from the American soil generations ago. The Swede eventually encounters his daughter, who is living in squalor in a slum in Newark and who has become a member of the Jain religious sect. He quite unceremoniously vomits in her face, apparently disgusted by her smell, but leaves her there. The story ends at a dinner party thrown by the Levovs, at which the Swede parents and the all-American neighbors clash so thoroughly that the drunken all-American wife stabs the Swedes father in a fit of frustration, while the Swede nearly has a heart attack at the thought that his daughter has come back to frighten the old man to death.
Review
Like much of Roth’s fiction, at least like Portnoy’s Complaint, this book seems to be partly autobiographical. Zuckerman, a recluse writer who lives in New England, is, quite obviously based upon Roth himself. One would have to look deeper into Roth’s past to discern on whom Swede Levov is based, but, since it is ostensibly fiction, we are left to assume it is a conglomeration of real life people.
The book was difficult to get into and difficult to finish. There were times when it is engaging, and, in general, I found myself at some points desperately wondering what would become of the family, but this desperation came only after a healthy half of the book in which little else happens but that Zuckerman relates his awe of the Swede, his confusion about him as a person, and then makes the slight-of-hand switch into the narrative of the Swede’s life. In other words, it did not get interesting until more than half way through and I would doubt that many readers stayed with it for that long.
However, the character of the Swede is complex and ultimately likeable and I think that is what carries and ultimately saves this story. The Swede is, at once, as Jewish as could be, but the embodiment of all of the stereotypical gentile ideals; he is blond, he is good at sports, he loves his country. At the same time, he must navigate an upbringing that is intensely Jewish. His father, an industrious and creative man, shepherds him through his mastery of the glove making trade and it is taken for granted that the Swede will take over the business one day. No matter how gentile the Swede tries to be, and at times he is even more gentile than the gentiles, it somehow does not work for him. He remains a hard-working, level headed and reasonable man, in the face of the craziness that surrounds him from all quarters. Or possibly he is the one who is crazy for believing that he can successfully navigate the two worlds, raise a child in both worlds, and not expect to encounter such craziness.
Either way, for his innocence, for his grace or for his dutiful responsibility and loyalty to his family, we come to love the Swede, though in terms of personality, there is less to grab on to than with other characters. He is just a good man, and it is hard not to pity him in some ways, and yet his character does not draw pity. He seems to somehow deserve it all.
Read this if you are either obsessed by Roth’s fiction and cannot avoid it, or have nothing to read and this book finds its way into your hands.
The Elements
This book is typical Roth in many ways. It has many of the elements that can be had in his other fiction.
First and foremost, this book is about Jews and their assimilation into a gentile country. Like many of Roth’s other main characters, the Swede is a second or third generation American Jew, two or three times removed from the Old Country, as it were. And yet, his assimilation is far from complete. In fact, the Swede is so much the ideal gentile, the ideal American, that this somehow causes damage to those around him. He loses himself in his own perfect life, his own quest for all things gentile and American, or what he perceives as those things. The Swede has it all, but, in the end, his life is just as crazy as everyone else’s.
The second major theme in this book is the theme of generational conflict. Though there is not a great deal of conflict between the Swede and his father (very little, in fact), there is a great deal of conflict between Merry and her parents, Dawn and the Swede.
Throughout the book we get the sense that this conflict stems from several causes. First, that the Swede is Jewish and his wife is Irish Catholic creates a fundamental rift in the child’s head that only tears her further and further apart over time and confuses her. Second, that Dawn’s flawless beauty and efforts to bring out the beauty in her daughter put such pressure on Merry from such a young age, that she was forced into the habit of stuttering. The stuttering could be seen as a cause of Merry’s anger in and of itself, as the stuttering made her frustrated and angry and she apparently took out this anger on her parents and on society.
Ultimately, we are left with the sense that under riding tensions between what the Swede represents and what Dawn represent cause the child to be so mixed up as to rebel wildly against them, and against society. As Merry comes from a generation that was notoriously rebelious, and gave birth to the Hippie movement, this would not be surprising. However, Roth pushes Merry’s rebelliousness to such an extent that it becomes almost a caricature of itself, and does not seem real or even possible. In the world of the story, we must accept it as true, however, and see the stark contrast she creates between her upbringing and her adult life. She is a twisted and angry soul, formed under intense and yet almost imperceptible pressure.
Merry as a metaphor for a generation, and possibly the U.S. itself
Merry must be seen as a metaphor for something larger. My belief is that she first symbolizes her entire generation. She exists at the flashpoint between the old and the new worlds, in a century coming of age, the old generation ceding control to the new, etc., etc., and the gross result could be a metaphor for the boom generation in itself. By most accounts, the Hippie movement fizzled out and had little lasting effect on American government or business. In fact, it would seem as though the Hippie’s, in a later incarnation, became the very thing they detested. Not exactly so with Merry, but her journey from innocence to rebellion and ultimately into a moral extreme, could be seen as a metaphor for the whole generation.
Merry could be viewed also as a metaphor for the U.S. Just like the nation, she has an identity crisis because she comes from diverse backgrounds. She is the old world and the new, Jewish and gentile, blessed yet doomed, energetic and yet misguided, sent astray by a force she cannot understand, control or make sense of, she hurtles into disgrace and will let no one stop her. Finally, she is content there.
This book was written in 1997, long before the grossly confusing and irreverent Bush 43 administration, however, it is not inconceivable to think that Roth was on to something.
American Pastoral
By: Philip Roth
Review By: Grant Catton
Brief Synopsis
American Pastoral is a bit over 400 pages and is basically the life story of a young Jewish man, named Seymour “Swede” Levov, who came of age in the post-World War II era and, in fact, just missed serving in the war itself by a few weeks. The story begins in the form of a narrative told by Skip Zuckerman, a man who grew up in Newark, N.J. and who was a few years younger than the much-admired and athletically gifted Swede. Zuckerman was a great admirer of the Swede’s as a young boy and an adolescent, as it seems was their entire highschool and their entire milieu in their youth. Zuckerman’s admiration for the Swede is even apparent when the two, as aging men, run into each other at a Mets game.
Not long after, Zuckerman recieves a letter from the Swede asking him to write the Swede’s life story, and inviting him to lunch at an Italian restaurant in New York City to initiate the process. At the lunch, Zuckerman is dismayed, almost to the point of amusement, to find that the Swede only wishes to talk about how wonderful his life is and how everything has turned out perfectly for him. Zuckerman leaves in veiled disgust, only to find out weeks later that the Swede has passed away from prostate cancer.
Through a process that is unclear, at least to this reader, Zuckerman realizes upon reflection, that the Swede’s life was anything but perfect and simple, and so begins the Swede’s long tale of woe, fraught with the tensions of Jewish versus gentile lifestyles, new world versus old world lifestyles, and the ongoing generational battle between parents and children. These battles seem to intersect tragically in the Swede’s life.
In a narrative hand-off that is ill-explained, once again, perhaps only to this reader, the book picks up an omniscient third person narrative of the life of the Swede. In brief, the Swede is a full blooded Jew who attempts, partly accidentally and partly on purpose, to live the ideal gentile existence. He is an all star at three sports in high school, he joins the army after high school and, while missing the war by several weeks, becomes a drill instructor in the Marine Corps. After that, he attends a small college in New York and woos a Miss New Jersey pageant candidate, Dawn Dwyer, who will win the title but will not win the Miss U.S.A. pageant. As a young man, the Swede will gradually take the reins of his father’s glove manufacturing business, while fathering a girl child who develops a stuttering problem which will torment her for her entire youth. The child, Merry, grows up in the Vietnam era and all of the anger and frustration of that generation seems funneled directly into her as she becomes more and more resentful of her family’s wealth and of her country’s actions. Her resentment culminates in her bombing of the local post office. The act, meant as a protest of the war, kills a local doctor who was dropping off some mail in the early morning. Merry is forced into hiding and, other than a brief torment by one of her contemporaries seemingly sent by her, her father hears nothing about her for five years. During that time he is left to torture himself with questions and self flagellation, as his relationship with Dawn becomes strained, and she herself begins to breakdown. The two are forced to assemble whatever life they can, as they live their days in their small town mansion in New Jersey, and are forever tormented by a neighboring couple, more dysfunctional than the Levovs, in fact, who are absolutely American and seem to have sprouted from the American soil generations ago. The Swede eventually encounters his daughter, who is living in squalor in a slum in Newark and who has become a member of the Jain religious sect. He quite unceremoniously vomits in her face, apparently disgusted by her smell, but leaves her there. The story ends at a dinner party thrown by the Levovs, at which the Swede parents and the all-American neighbors clash so thoroughly that the drunken all-American wife stabs the Swedes father in a fit of frustration, while the Swede nearly has a heart attack at the thought that his daughter has come back to frighten the old man to death.
Review
Like much of Roth’s fiction, at least like Portnoy’s Complaint, this book seems to be partly autobiographical. Zuckerman, a recluse writer who lives in New England, is, quite obviously based upon Roth himself. One would have to look deeper into Roth’s past to discern on whom Swede Levov is based, but, since it is ostensibly fiction, we are left to assume it is a conglomeration of real life people.
The book was difficult to get into and difficult to finish. There were times when it is engaging, and, in general, I found myself at some points desperately wondering what would become of the family, but this desperation came only after a healthy half of the book in which little else happens but that Zuckerman relates his awe of the Swede, his confusion about him as a person, and then makes the slight-of-hand switch into the narrative of the Swede’s life. In other words, it did not get interesting until more than half way through and I would doubt that many readers stayed with it for that long.
However, the character of the Swede is complex and ultimately likeable and I think that is what carries and ultimately saves this story. The Swede is, at once, as Jewish as could be, but the embodiment of all of the stereotypical gentile ideals; he is blond, he is good at sports, he loves his country. At the same time, he must navigate an upbringing that is intensely Jewish. His father, an industrious and creative man, shepherds him through his mastery of the glove making trade and it is taken for granted that the Swede will take over the business one day. No matter how gentile the Swede tries to be, and at times he is even more gentile than the gentiles, it somehow does not work for him. He remains a hard-working, level headed and reasonable man, in the face of the craziness that surrounds him from all quarters. Or possibly he is the one who is crazy for believing that he can successfully navigate the two worlds, raise a child in both worlds, and not expect to encounter such craziness.
Either way, for his innocence, for his grace or for his dutiful responsibility and loyalty to his family, we come to love the Swede, though in terms of personality, there is less to grab on to than with other characters. He is just a good man, and it is hard not to pity him in some ways, and yet his character does not draw pity. He seems to somehow deserve it all.
Read this if you are either obsessed by Roth’s fiction and cannot avoid it, or have nothing to read and this book finds its way into your hands.
The Elements
This book is typical Roth in many ways. It has many of the elements that can be had in his other fiction.
First and foremost, this book is about Jews and their assimilation into a gentile country. Like many of Roth’s other main characters, the Swede is a second or third generation American Jew, two or three times removed from the Old Country, as it were. And yet, his assimilation is far from complete. In fact, the Swede is so much the ideal gentile, the ideal American, that this somehow causes damage to those around him. He loses himself in his own perfect life, his own quest for all things gentile and American, or what he perceives as those things. The Swede has it all, but, in the end, his life is just as crazy as everyone else’s.
The second major theme in this book is the theme of generational conflict. Though there is not a great deal of conflict between the Swede and his father (very little, in fact), there is a great deal of conflict between Merry and her parents, Dawn and the Swede.
Throughout the book we get the sense that this conflict stems from several causes. First, that the Swede is Jewish and his wife is Irish Catholic creates a fundamental rift in the child’s head that only tears her further and further apart over time and confuses her. Second, that Dawn’s flawless beauty and efforts to bring out the beauty in her daughter put such pressure on Merry from such a young age, that she was forced into the habit of stuttering. The stuttering could be seen as a cause of Merry’s anger in and of itself, as the stuttering made her frustrated and angry and she apparently took out this anger on her parents and on society.
Ultimately, we are left with the sense that under riding tensions between what the Swede represents and what Dawn represent cause the child to be so mixed up as to rebel wildly against them, and against society. As Merry comes from a generation that was notoriously rebelious, and gave birth to the Hippie movement, this would not be surprising. However, Roth pushes Merry’s rebelliousness to such an extent that it becomes almost a caricature of itself, and does not seem real or even possible. In the world of the story, we must accept it as true, however, and see the stark contrast she creates between her upbringing and her adult life. She is a twisted and angry soul, formed under intense and yet almost imperceptible pressure.
Merry as a metaphor for a generation, and possibly the U.S. itself
Merry must be seen as a metaphor for something larger. My belief is that she first symbolizes her entire generation. She exists at the flashpoint between the old and the new worlds, in a century coming of age, the old generation ceding control to the new, etc., etc., and the gross result could be a metaphor for the boom generation in itself. By most accounts, the Hippie movement fizzled out and had little lasting effect on American government or business. In fact, it would seem as though the Hippie’s, in a later incarnation, became the very thing they detested. Not exactly so with Merry, but her journey from innocence to rebellion and ultimately into a moral extreme, could be seen as a metaphor for the whole generation.
Merry could be viewed also as a metaphor for the U.S. Just like the nation, she has an identity crisis because she comes from diverse backgrounds. She is the old world and the new, Jewish and gentile, blessed yet doomed, energetic and yet misguided, sent astray by a force she cannot understand, control or make sense of, she hurtles into disgrace and will let no one stop her. Finally, she is content there.
This book was written in 1997, long before the grossly confusing and irreverent Bush 43 administration, however, it is not inconceivable to think that Roth was on to something.
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