For more reviews and bookish posts visit: https://www.ManOfLaBook.com

American Pastoral by Philip Roth is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tackling the American Dream. Mr. Roth is one of the most famous contemporary American writers, earning and reciving multiple national and international awards.

Seymour Irving “Swede” Levov is the son of a successful Jewish businessman lining in 1930s Newark, NJ. Swede has won the genetic lottery in brains, looks, and athleticism. After joining the Marines during World War II, Swede marries Dawn Dwyer, former Miss New Jersey from Elizabeth, NJ.

Swede creates the perfect American life until his daughter, Merry, bombs a post office and kills a man to protest the Vietnam War. Slowly the masks come off and Swede realizes that there is darkness hidden under everyone’s veneer of respectability they project.

This is a slow, thought-provoking book that is worth the effort but difficult to start. Frankly, if I was intimately familiar with the New Jersey scenery I might have had to put it down and read another book before continuing.

After having about a week to think about it, I agree that American Pastoral by Philip Roth is a great American novel. the author has a keen insight into the American Dream, what it masks, and how it so quickly falls apart.

A slow read, but full of discussion about dreams, success, and the layers of truth we hide. The novel is also about America, and the idyllic image presented versus the struggles of everyday life. Mr. Roth peels the layers of a seemingly idyllic American family until the truth comes out and the protagonist realizes they are just as bad, or worse, than everyone else.

One of the reasons the book seems slow is because Philip Roth doesn’t spare the reader the difficult moments, or spoon-feed us what he wants us to get out of this book. We witness the uncomfortable moments, anguish, screaming, and neurotics of the characters.

The big question at the end, for me, was whether or not Swede, the protagonist evolved. Did he become a better human being, or just better at repressing all that has happened, and burying his findings?

The author looks at different aspects of society, and the people living in it, ruminates on them, and then reexamines his findings to shed a new light on them. A different, and cynical, take on America and its promises. ( )

The whole time I was reading American Pastoral I kept thinking that if the name on the cover wasn't Philip Roth, this novel would not have won a Pulitzer Prize nor have gained much recognition. It is an uneven novel written in what I would describe as modified stream-of-consciousness, as though its narrator, Roth's fictional doppelgänger Nathan Zuckerman, suffers from ADHD. He habitually and annoyingly interrupts significant events to have a character dwell on trivialities, such as when a drunken neighbor stabs his father and, just after the initial, unexplained screams, spends two pages writing about fauna and flora before finally returning to the stabbing. Particularly odd is the disappearance of Zuckerman right in the middle of his 45th high school reunion while dancing with the insubstantial Joy Helpern. Zuckerman evanesces before our eyes; his first-person ruminations on his childhood hero, Seymour Levov, morph into third-person, single character point-of-view imaginings of the life of Levov, forever known as the Swede, an almost mythical legend of high school sports and a highly successful businessman.

American Pastoral is separated into three parts, "Paradise Remembered," "The Fall" and "Paradise Lost." One can't ignore the obvious allusions to the Bible and Milton's epic poem nor avoid interpreting the Swede and his wife, Dawn, as Adam and Eve. Their daughter, Merry, is Satan, an angel cast out of heaven for bombing the village store in protest of the Vietnam War. Through this act, Merry ends up killing an innocent man and becomes a specter haunting Levov as he tries to figure out what he did to set his daughter on her anarchist path. The remainder of the novel is devoted to stripping away the veneer of the Swede's charmed life and questioning the wisdom of his level-headed approach to life's problems.

Roth is reported to have expended a great effort researching his novel; what this adds in detail is overshadowed by the often unrealistic and at times bizarre thoughts of his protagonist (what devoted father describes his prepubescent daughter's genitalia as a c**t?). Most unsatisfying is that, after spending Parts II and III focused on the noble Swede's search for daughter, Roth leaves her fate unresolved, electing instead to end the novel with a repulsive minor character mockingly laughing at the ideal couple's comeuppance. ( )

This one goes on the worthy but dull shelf for me. Like high-fibre cereal, or push-ups.

Lots of important themes and serious purpose, but Roth's writing lacks the word-magic to go with his scope or vision, the pace is slow in a plodding rather sensuous or elegant way, and I'm mystified by the abrupt transition from Zuckerman's perspective to the main story with no reference to Zuckerman thereafter (artistic license? laziness? significant postmodern literary device?).

The last chapters are a blaze of dramatic revelation, without illumination - as if Roth woke up suddenly and thought he'd better wake up the reader with some loud fireworks before nodding off at his keyboard again.

As gloves go, it's made of cowhide not peccary. ( )

Roth hasn't changed all that much since the 60's when he "bursted onto the scene" in Portnoy's Complain. Ossified within his conventions, the same critique of this "American Trilogy" rings true: "The real achievement here is the sleek embodiment of the modern reactionary (and curiously Freudian) notion that all so-called 'do gooders' are motivated, at least in part, by psychosis." Here the Freudian is a "Pivotal" kiss between a father and his young, stuttering girl-child. From this, perhaps, we can account for her later "psychosis", although the precise etiology of her so-called "hysterical craziness" is always a bit out of grasp.

One moment on the framing device, perhaps the most enjoyable part of this novel (because it doesn't promise anything) - but functions more like rain on a used car lot - buffing out scratches we would otherwise notice, since after all, this is an Unreliable Narrator. Remember, the Author is a little more clever than you think he is. When you compare the imagined Swede to the author Zimmerman - even this device is Roth's construction. Probably the preamble is also necessary to add to "mystique" to the Swede character, who otherwise is an "everyman" of no particular import.

The detail on glovemaking is good. Roth has done his research, though perhaps hasn't balanced it quite right. Would have preferred him to go even further, the clumsy metaphor notwithstanding. (And see it's a metaphor for something covering something else and also a yonic image, and see the outsourced industry a metaphor for 'loss-of-american-innocence' and see women don't wear gloves anymore because no one knows how to be a proper lady as we would have it and so on.) He also gets about half-way there regarding the details of beauty competitions and the psychology of beauty contestants, so that you think he knows something about it. But he doesn't go nearly far enough on this subject, as if at some point he ran out of time or source material or was put off by it.

I don't know if teens really speak like this to their parents. If they don't then Roth's conversations between Swede and his daughter are just his way of "owning the libs" in a bit of a contrived fashion (I wouldn't put it past him tbh). If they do, then why bother mentioning it and using it as the most concrete evidence that she is "hysterical" and "crazy". As played-out as this narrative is, Roth seems to want to portray Swede as a "weak, tolerant lib" (my paraphrase) who won't "lay down the law" in his own house because he's a "nice guy" (as opposed to his brother who "Takes-What-He-Wants-When-He-Wants-It", see it's two sides of the American coin do you get it). Even so, the puerile conversations between Swede and the Militant Left appear to take the phonemes of so-called "Left Thought" and leave them as un-reflected "Egoistic Pathology" and "Inane thought" (his words). There is no discussion to be had, and in the 400 pages none occurs. Swede never gets beyond his initial (reactionary) reaction of, "How dare you insult me. I haven't done anything. This is crazy. You are crazy," (my paraphrase).

"You are an exploiter capitalist,"
[...]
"You have no idea about work you have never worked in your life,"
[...]
"The unreality of being in the hands of this child! This loathsome kid with a head full of fantasies about "the working class"! This utterly insignificant pebble! What was the whole sick enterprise other than angry, infantile egoism thinly disguised as identification with the oppressed? Her weighty responsibility to the workers of the world! Egoistic pathology bristled out of her like the hair that nuttily proclaimed, "I go wherever I want, as far as I want—all that matters is what I want!" Yes, the nonsensical hair constituted half of their revolutionary ideology, about as sound a justification for her actions as the other half—the exaggerated jargon about changing the world. "
[...]
"No one begins like this, the Swede thought. This can't be what she is. This bullying infant, this obnoxious, stubborn, angry bullying infant cannot be my daughter's protector. She is her jailer. Merry with all her intelligence under the spell of this childlike cruelty and meanness. There's more human sense in one page of the stuttering diary than in all the sadistic idealism in this reckless child's head. [...] How does a child get to be like this? Can anyone be utterly without thoughtfulness? The answer is yes."

All this the more disappointing because it steps around an interesting discussion at the crux of the novel's "fateful explosion" which Roth never addresses. Really, what is a Modern American's responsibility at home and abroad. Are these demands congruent with Americans' self-conception (this alone would be the downfall of the so-called "American Pastoral"). Are all American actions abroad permissible or are some not, and what strategy/tactics are permissible to oppose these impermissible actions and so on. Swede himself, during his military service, was explicitly eager to fire a heavy gun on an atoll in the Pacific, so one imagines Roth intended there to be a contrast between Swede's own (patriotic) teenage militarism and his daughter's, yet no discussion is to be had. Instead, the "dialectic" that occurs is between Swede's denial of his daughter's responsibility (see above, "my daughter's protector [...] her jailer") and his acceptance that she is responsible for these actions, which is only significant because it reflects her guilt upon him despite a lack of "Guilt-action" on his part. In searching for a "Guilt without Action" dynamic Roth was unfortunate to have written this before the era of Modern American school shootings. Swede as the parent of a school shooter would be more appropriate and would be doubly serviceable because Roth would not be conspicuously avoiding the discussion above.

Roth's refusal to have a discussion regarding the questions at center of this novel leads to a series of choices (or perhaps the other way around). Roth relies on the visceral reaction against the bombing to carry over to another series of things which have a more tenuous connection to that violence. Of all forms of self-mortification, asceticism may be the most neutral, yet we are supposed to be horrified and disgusted to find Swede's daughter has converted to Jainism. If that doesn't get the emotions flowing, he adds that she is covered in filth and feces, "smells like shit", and in a moment of nearly pure Bathos has Swede literally vomit into her face. And this is somehow thought to be related to her political terrorism (which itself is, of course, directly related to her personal psychosis)

"The five "vows" she'd taken were typewritten on index cards and taped to the wall above a narrow pallet of dirty foam rubber on the unswept floor. That was where she slept, and given that there was nothing but the pallet in one corner of the room and a rag pile—her clothing—in the other, that must be where she sat to eat whatever it was she survived on. From the look of her she [was] near starvation not as a devout purified by her ascetic practices but as the despised of the lowest caste, miserably moving about on an untouchable's emaciated limbs."
[...]
"Fantasy and magic. Always pretending to be somebody else. What began benignly enough when she was playing at Audrey Hepburn had evolved in only a decade into this outlandish myth of selflessness. First the selfless nonsense of the People, now the selfless nonsense of the Perfected Soul. [...] Always a grandiose unreality, the remotest abstraction around—never self-seeking, not in a million years. The lying, inhuman horror of all this selflessness."

Abstract painting too.

"It never occurred to the Swede, reading the flier, that enough could not be claimed for the paintings just because they were so hollow, that you had to say they were pictures of everything because they were pictures of nothing—that all those words were merely another way of saying Orcutt was talentless and, however earnestly he might try, could never hammer out for himself an artistic prerogative or, for that matter, any but the prerogative whose rigid definitions had swaddled him at birth. It did not occur to the Swede that he was right, that this guy who seemed so at one with himself might be inadvertently divulging that to be out of tune was. Sad."

I can only touch briefly on Roth's antipathy toward women, particularly "women intellectuals" (this would require a thesis to unpack, and another one on the racism) which appears mostly unchanged since his work in the 60's. Here Swede despises the "posturing" Professor wife of his friend the Columbia Law Professor, who looks "dumpy" and is "insufferable". Swede is supposedly very even-handed when he describes her as a "difficult person" and "unpleasant", far more pleasant than other descriptions of her. In a comment to Swede by Mr. Orcutt by Zimmerman by Roth:

"Leave it to our visiting intellectual to get everything wrong. The complacent rudeness with which she plays the old French game of beating up on the bourgeoisie...." Orcutt was confiding to the Swede his amusement with Marcia's posturing. "It's to her credit, I suppose, that she doesn't defer to the regulation dinnerparty discipline of not saying anything about anything. But still it's amazing, constantly amazes me, how emptiness always goes with cleverness. She hasn't the faintest idea, really, of what she's talking about. Know what my father used to say? 'All brains and no intelligence. The smarter the stupider.' Applies."

Everything in this third part is contingent. Roth appears to just be adding infidelities between main characters into the Third Act because he *really* wants to get his Point across (I find the idea that both partners in Swede's marriage are having sex with other people very dubious, particularly for the Swede character). The dinner party where everyone is cheating on each other and the daughter's collaborator is there and the father of Swede and the father's wife who doesn't exist, it all seems to be a way of quickly wrapping up a novel that is already too long. And we never meet anyone in Dawn's family, what's up with that? Roth gets progressively more direct as the novel progresses and comes to stating and re-stating the Theme in paragraph after paragraph, eventually reaching this trite summary summation:

"She was nothing like the one he had imagined. And that was not because she had been passing herself off with him as something else or somebody else but because he had understood her no better than he was able to understand anyone. How to penetrate to the interior of people was some skill or capacity he did not possess. He just did not have the combination to that lock. Everybody who flashed the signs of goodness he took to be good. Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself. What was he, stripped of all the signs he flashed? People were standing up everywhere, shouting "This is me! This is me!" Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea of who or what they were than he had. They believed their flashing signs too. They ought to be standing up and shouting, "This isn't me! This isn't me!" They would if they had any decency. "This isn't me!" Then you might know how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world."
[...]
"And then this large, unimpeded social critic in a caftan could not help herself. Marcia sank into Jessie's empty chair, in front of the brimming glass of milk, and with her face in her hands, she began to laugh at their obtuseness to the flimsiness of the whole contraption, to laugh and laugh and laugh at them all, pillars of a society that, much to her delight, was going rapidly under—to laugh and to relish, as some people, historically, always seem to do, how far the rampant disorder had spread, enjoying enormously the assailability, the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things."

( )

On the opposite end of the spectrum from In Cahoots is this Pulitzer Prize-winning book. While I did not finish reading this title (yet), I found that I liked the smooth and subtle prose and the rich character landscape created by the author. I understand why it won. Why didn't I finish it then and why didn't I give it more stars? Because it got pushed aside for some different reading I needed to do during NaNoWriMo and it became due at the library. Because I didn't finish it, I can't say that I recommend it yet, either. I may come back and try it again, mainly because I want to work my way through several Pulitzer books to see what make them tick. ( )