I feel very conflicted about American Pastoral. On the one hand, I found it to be more thought-provoking than the average novel in its heart-breaking exploration of American decline. On the other, I found it often boring and too long. This isn’t that unusual when reading the books with the literati’s seal of approval, but it was different from the other Roth novels I’ve read. I don’t recall being annoyed by the writing style in Portnoy’s Complaint or The Plot Against America. Maybe I’ve just grown more impatient as a reader over the past few years. Perhaps this is a reflection of a new form of American demise Roth did not live long enough to comment on: the loss of attention span symptomatic of TikTok brain rot. I am hesitant to be negative about a book that received such critical acclaim, but at the same time I have read a lot of “classics” that didn’t make me this bored.
American Pastoral has a very strange structure. It begins in the familiar Roth setting: post-war Jewish America. The narrator is Nathan Zuckerman, the semi-fictionialized version of Roth who narrates many of Roth’s novels. Zuckerman is an accomplished writer from Newark with a man crush on Seymour “the Swede” Levov, who was a tall, athletic, beautiful stud that once graced the halls (and fields) of Weequahic High School. Everyone in the community shares this man crush. The Swede is exceptional not in his intellect but in his effortless coolness and physical perfection. Now an old man, Zuckerman gets a letter from the Swede seeking his counsel on a essay the Swede was writing about his late father. In the letter, the Swede alludes to suffering, which intrigues Zuckerman. The two meet for dinner, avoid discussing the letter and anything with depth, and Zuckerman goes home ruminating over how shallow the Swede seems to be.
Later, at Zuckerman’s 45th high school reunion, Zuckerman talks with the Swede’s younger brother Jerry. Jerry tells him the Swede just died from pancreatic cancer. Oh, also the Swede’s 16-year-old daughter was a murdering terrorist Weatherman who completely ruined his life. The rest of the novel is Zuckerman’s artistic rendering of the Swede’s demise based on the very limited facts he has at hand.
This framing strikes me as fairly weird. Why doesn’t Roth simply write his fan fiction of the Swede without letting us know it is mere speculation? There’s a long lead-up to this novel within a novel. Its unclear to me what rhetorical purpose the framing serves. It reminds me of a Socratic dialogue (e.g. Phaedo) where readers like to nerd out over why Plato uses so much misdirection to make his point (e.g. this guy heard it from another guy who was with Socrates). I’ve never been able to buy that this is so important. Yet, it does appear to be a deliberate choice by the author. It’s particularly surprising because over the rest of the novel, Roth is somewhat ham-fisted about his deeper meaning. American Pastoral is full of passages that highlight the deeper meaning Roth is trying to convey. If only he had included such a passage for the framing of the novel… That is what a simpleton like myself requires.
The Writing
Is there such a thing as too much beautiful prose? The answer is obviously yes, and this problem has traditionally been solved with the editor’s red pen. American Pastoral goes back and forth between the central drama and tangential aspects of the plot. There’s a thematic consistency between the plot’s offshoots in that they all comment on decline and disappointment. I didn’t mind the digressions themselves, but most of them were too long. Long asides about glove making in Newark, about a weird kiss the Swede shares with his daughter, 100 pages or so about Dawn’s roundabout path to a face lift and marital infidelity, more on glove making… It gets exhausting! There’s even a scene where the Swede’s father monopolizes a dinner party by launching a rant about the decline in American morality. Everyone at the party is cringing or bored. The readers are also subjected to this old man raving verbatim. Indeed, multiple parts of this novel reminded me of being trapped in conversation with a windbag. The tone throughout these digressions is taxing and replete with long, frenetic, rambling passages that give the reader anxiety. This aspect, at least, is by design: Roth is revealing the Swede’s inner life. Beneath the calm surface is a desperate, grasping man hopelessly searching for answers that do not exist. But while this artistic device is initially effective, it bores you after awhile.
Decline
His face was vacant of everything except the struggle not to weep. He appeared helpless to prevent even that. He could not prevent anything. He never could, though only now did he look prepared to believe that manufacturing a superb ladies’ dress glove in quarter sizes did not guarantee the making of a life that would fit to perfection everyone he loved. Far from it. You think you can protect a family and you cannot protect even yourself.
As mentioned previously, I found the themes interesting and thought provoking. I am a sucker for a story about American decline! Roth does a good job of weaving the Levov family’s decline with American decline writ large. He touches on the myth of linear progress: we expect that because things got better in the past, they will continue to do so. The Swede’s dad worked his way out of nasty factory work to starting his own business. He never graduates high school but his two sons graduate college, with one becoming a doctor and the other taking over the family business. But things aren’t so simple: the doctor is a serial divorcer (he marries the new nurses and discards the old ones) and the Swede is a shell of a man with a broken marriage and a murdering daughter. So it goes with Newark, once a rising star and then a ghetto. The bustling factories become old brick walls with broken windows. American families and cities are constantly rising and falling. Something, something, Anna Karenina.
But the upshot is not some simple moral like it takes effort to keep improving. These swings of fortune are occasionally the result of deliberate actions, the kinds of things you can point to and say “see?” or “told you so.” But many times they are no ones fault, they are simply life’s byproducts that must be reckoned with… eventually. Roth shows that sometimes its just “shit happens.” Much of the tragedy of the Swede is that he mostly did everything right. He is unsatisfied when he searches his memory for some simple explanation for his daughter’s terrorist origins. He wants there to be something he can take responsibility for. He wants to find a cause and effect, some reassurance that there is a logic to the universe. Roth is pretty deliberate on this point:
He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one’s history.
What is the Swede guilty of?
Something was on top of him that had called a halt to him. Something had turned him into a human platitude. Something had warned him: You must not run counter to anything.
The reader, much like the Swede, wants to know what he did to deserve such misfortune. No one can truly internalize that life is mixed with the random and the causal. The Swede is not denying responsibility throughout the book; rather, he seems to be earnestly searching for something to be guilty over. Acting in the age-old tradition of the younger brother, Jerry Levov gives us a hint at what is so wrong. Where the Swede is a peace-maker effortlessly holding things together and never daring to offend anyone, Jerry is an outspoken asshole who “tells it like it is” and thinks that is always a virtue (it’s not). Jerry seems to hate the Swede. Part of this is a childlike resentment of the popular older brother. But he does have a substantive gripe regarding the Swede’s inauthenticity. He has no personality. He is an amorphous blob that changes shape depending on what propriety requires. His governing principle is “you must not run counter to anything.” He is like this as a son, mostly appeasing his overbearing father and doing what is expected by taking over the family business, going to college instead of pursuing a baseball career, etc. He is like this as a husband and even as a cuckold. He is like this as a father, where he opposes Merry politely and with no condescension. He can’t be firm and completely assertive. There is something subhuman about the one who tries to keep everything together. It is the ultimate sacrifice because you have no identity: you are defined by your environment and whatever that calls for.
This comes to a head when the Swede meets Merry in Newark five years after the Old Rimrock post office bombing. He is horrified by her filth and the squalor she lives in. He calls Jerry for advice. Jerry yells at him. He says he needs to go there and grab her and take her out of there. He roasts his brother for his inaction. He emasculates him by offering to fly up there and do it himself. He accuses him of deserving Merry’s disdain. After all, who could do anything but hate something as inhuman as the Swede. I did not find this a compelling explanation for why Merry hates the Swede. In fact, I think its important to the novel that there is no explanation! However, it does explain why Jerry hates the Swede. Assimilation comes with resentment on both sides. There is the losing party, in this case the American Jewry, who Jerry represents. They’re mad because they feel betrayed. Then there is the gaining party, in this case the William Orcutt’s of Old Rimrock. They’re mad because they feel threatened by new people penetrating their social class. The Swede thinks he can seamlessly assimilate into the “American pastoral” without any repercussions and he is sadly mistaken.
The Swede shows glimpses of escaping the bonds of propriety towards the end of the book. At a disastrous dinner party, he violently confronts Merry’s speech pathologist, who he learns harbored Merry after the bombing. He breaks things, knocks a painting down (but later re-hangs it), shoves his former mistress and seems for once to be ugly. Is this what Jerry wants? After five years of anguish, he finally explodes. This is the only scene where his reaction to conflict is to air his grievances rather than placate those around him.
What are we all guilty of?
What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for. It was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn’t wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup. It was as though being in tune with life was an accident that might sometimes befall the fortunate young but was otherwise something for which human beings lacked any real affinity. How odd. And how odd it made him seem to himself to think that he who had always felt blessed to be numbered among the countless unembattled normal ones might, in fact, be the abnormality, a stranger from real life because of his being so sturdily rooted.
Towards the end of the book, the Swede is realizing that he can never see all there is to see in others. When he gives a factory tour to Rita Cohen, he can’t see that she is a terrorist fencing his lifestyle. He can’t see that William Orcutt is sleeping with his wife, or that his wife is cheating on him. He can’t see that Merry’s speech therapist harbored her as a fugitive in the immediate aftermath of the bombing.
Everyone in the Swede’s life is deceiving him with decency. He sees in the end that people have a tendency to revert and “run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were.” But it’s more than willful deception on the part of his friends. The Swede’s worldview is incompatible with this kind of reversion, which explains his befuddlement in the above passage. Only when he too is broken can he see that the logic of the universe is not progress, peace and seamless assimilation, but instead entropy, conflict and disorder. The Levov’s ascent, the post-war boom, the promising beginning of Merry’s childhood… these are the exceptions rather than the rule. The Swede’s pleasant life was a mere happy accident, a fluke of fortune bestowed by genes and circumstances. But sometimes we are given more than we can handle and we crumble.
Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy–that is every man’s tragedy.
Miscellaneous Quotes
And if there’s anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it’s self-questioning coming too late. His life was blown up by that bomb. The real victim of that bombing was him.
Her animus, her superior airs, the sense she gave of being unclean, everything intolerable to the Swede in a friend, let alone in a mate—well, those were the very characteristics that seemed to enliven Barry’s appreciation of his wife. It was a puzzle, it truly was, how one perfectly reasonable man could adore what a second perfectly reasonable man couldn’t abide for half an hour.