American Pastoral

In American Pastoral, Roth, via Zuckerman, delineates the character of Seymour “The Swede” Levov, an American Jew who could not be more different from Mickey Sabbath. Handsome, thoroughly assimilated, he is presented as a simple, kind conformist who has ridden the “immigrant rocket” to the American Dream - a high-school sports star, Marine Corps veteran, husband to Miss New Jersey 1949, owner of an eighteenth-century stone house in an idyllic Newark suburb, millionaire businessman and father to a precocious daughter who belongs to the 4-H Club, studies ballet and easily gets top grades in school. But this ideal only child turns out to be, in the Swede's brother's words, a monster, who turns intensely radical during the Vietnam War, kills a man when she plants a bomb at the local post office in 1968 and goes on the run for five years, during which time she is raped and dehumanised, while remaining completely out of contact with her family. This tragedy splits the Swede in two, so that his conformist exterior is underlain by a savage, disorderly grief.



And of course the personal tragedy mirrors the historical: just as the Swede is torn apart, late-sixties America is rent as violently as the Temple of Solomon, Newark itself destroyed by riots and killings that erupt, as they did in cities all over the country in those years, as if in retribution for America's complacency, hypocrisy and the violence of its past. The book climaxes in a gut-wrenching extended scene of utter emotional devastation, a dinner party for his parents held in the Swede's house on a late summer evening in 1973, at the height of the Watergate hearings. The dinner concludes a day during which the Swede has discovered that his terrorist daughter Merry, after her half-decade on the run, is living as a starving Jainist in a hovel in Newark, an hour away from his home; that she had murdered three more people after the first bomb; that she has been raped repeatedly; that five years ago she had been harboured for three days after her initial crime by her speech therapist, a family friend who never told the Swede what she had done, even during a four-month affair with him (she and her husband are at the dinner party); that his wife is also having an affair with their architect, a competitive, “civic-minded” WASP - he too is at the party with his alcoholic wife - whose apparent one-dimensionality is spectacularly stripped away when the Swede glimpses him before dinner dry-humping Dawn Levov at the kitchen sink. Quite a day, even for a Philip Roth novel.

This magnificent scene, spread across the last 140 pages of the book, is peppered with references to Oedipus Rex, references that have been earned. The novel is tragic on no less a level. Having endeavoured to secure for himself a life beyond the reach of history, the Swede suffers the worst fall. A private, ahistorical, compliant man, he is crushed, as Roth puts it, ...