American Pastoral
author: Philip Roth
name: Paul
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1997
rating: 3
read at: 2011/09/25
date added: 2011/09/26
shelves: novel
review:
A brief aside since it’s been a while since I listened to any audiobooks: I listened to the version narrated by Ron Silver on my iPod and I remembered in doing so why I both love and loathe audiobooks. Pro: they are possibly the best thing (when I’m into them) imaginable for dull commutes, especially for someone like me that finds driving terminally boring. Con: Even with an iPod, audiobooks just aren’t as convenient as regular books for almost every other application. Mr. Silver does a great job narrating on this one, though he doesn’t do that much to differentiate individual voices. My overall impression of the audio here was favorable but at one point about midway through I seriously considered just picking up the actual novel and finishing it that way. Okay, on with the book review.
American Pastoral is my first encounter with Philip Roth. Let me get a couple of complaints and pet peeves out of the way, first. For one, I have this thing about writers who write about writers. They do it all the time. I know the axiom, “Write what you know” is out there, but it just seems so incredibly self-referential, so dull and easy to me that I first ask the question: Is it utterly essential that this character be a writer? If the answer is “yes,” then okay. But usually, nearly all the time, the answer is “no” and I get annoyed. The self-insertion, first-person narrator in American Pastoral, Nathan Zuckerman, not only doesn’t have to be a writer, he doesn’t even have to exist. The first part of the book, with its ping-ponging adoration of the protagonist-to-be, Seymour “Swede” Levov and the fabricated historical contextualizing of him from an external viewpoint serves, as best as I can tell, to allow Roth to write about the act of writing. He pontificates at times, rather passionately and eloquently I should add, about what it means to observe as a writer and then what it means to try to orchestrate those observations into something meaningful, something that reflects reality.
Secondly, as hard as Roth tries, he is never really able to give Levov enough roundness to feel genuine. Roth tries valiantly to make him human in spite of being extraordinary, to create someone believable who, by need of the story must be near perfection until he can be shattered by the weight of his shame and guilt over one act outside his control, he doesn’t quite get there. It feels like Swede Levov is a puppet, an article designed to demonstrate something; he’s above humanity until his great sorrow finally creates a human from the superhero, and I don’t think that’s precisely what Roth was hoping for.
What surprises me is that neither of these things, possibly deal-breakers in other books, really bother me all that much about American Pastoral. Roth’s Pulitzer-winner is a very meticulously crafted novel, with a lot of the strings showing almost like Edgar Bergen’s ventriloquism. It’s not perfect, and certainly the illusion is poorly hidden, but it’s good where it matters—in the content. And the content in this book is, for the most part, wonderful.
Roth—via Zuckerman—details the life of Swede Levov, high school athlete superstar, successful businessman, husband of a former Miss New Jersey, father of an adored daughter. He’s the guy who has it all, and unlike some characters that might get put into this idyllic life in the hands of other authors, The Swede loves it. There is a herculean act—wrought in part by the Nathan Zuckerman beginning—put forth to make sure that there is no dissatisfaction, no malcontent or malaise in the mind of Seymour Levov until the act which undoes everything and punctures the meticulous world of the Levovs. He adores his life, he loves that he has it all and there is a professed self-awareness about how The Swede operates, acknowledging and respecting his blessed station, trying for a humility in the shadow of this great cascade of fortune. Of course a book about a guy with no problems would be miserably boring so Roth makes The Swede’s daughter, Merry, a stuttering and angry child who fixates on the Vietnam war to an unhealthy degree. Eventually she turns to an act of terrorism on the small New Jersey hometown that The Swede loves so ferociously. In this act of—rage? defiance? desperation? accident?—Merry Levov, The Swede’s daughter, blows up both the town’s general store and also, symbolically, Seymour’s life.
American Pastoral leaps around in time, skipping from Swede’s musings on Merry’s motivations, her childhood, her rebellion, the act itself, the aftermath, the affect it has on his wife Dawn, dancing its way from the 50s through the tumultuous 60s and 70s and partially the 80s, all drifting back from the retrospective lens of the 90s where the whole thing is encapsulated by a know-the-ending-first framework from Zuckerman’s initial meeting with the elderly Swede. Roth dissects the slice of life from an all-American Jewish family perspective, weaving notable historical events throughout and contextualizing them within that screwed-up family that, by all accounts, started off normal and should have just kept on being normal. There is a palpable sense through the whole novel that Roth is trying to cut to the truths and lies and misperceptions and insightfulness that all lie behind the simple phrase uttered by the aged: “Back in my day…”
Roth writes with a surgeon’s patience, remorselessly but steadily sawing through disillusionment and agony, capturing at his finest moments the poignant torture of parenthood; the fearful, ineffectual dread of the elderly at seeing the world leave them behind; the natural state of paranoia in a populace that fears even necessary change. He understands that when people look back with nostalgia at the past, they often overlook things that were wrong then, they almost never see what’s right about the present. At times American Pastoral seems to argue that the worst thing we could ever hope for would be for everything to be exactly how we think it should be.
And yet, for all of the triumph of writing in this book, it has a glaring flaw which is the final scene. This last, laborious moment starts fairly late in the novel and describes a dinner party, held some five years after Merry’s terrorist act, by happenstance on the exact same day The Swede first re-connects with his fugitive daughter. I can only think of one other book that had this same sense about it, as I closed in on the end and realized how much physical content the book contained and understood the state of the story at that point and realized, “There’s no way there is enough time left for this to come to a satisfying conclusion.” The previous book was the woefully rushed SF novel by Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash. With that book, which in spite of its incomplete finale I still count as one of my favorites, new and awesome things were still getting introduced practically to the last page. With American Pastoral though, it isn’t that too much new information is added late, it’s that there are so many questions unanswered and resolutions that must be filled in to get from the old-man Swede we encountered with Nathan Zuckerman at the beginning to this mid-life, broken Swede and simply there is not enough time to get there.
And true enough, this final sequence is stunted, baffling and circular, managing all at once to undo some of what was good about American Pastoral up until the dinner party began. The specifics of the disappointment I found in this final scene aren’t necessarily open to discussion in a review, since spoilers would abound. This is book-group discussion material. But I do want to make one broad point about this finishing act that doesn’t give much away in terms of the plot. Up until this point there is a sense that the book is in part about the way in which no matter how much you think you have it all and no matter how hard you work to combat all the variables, to control the environment and influence the outcome, sometimes the agents of chaos and the laws of probability cannot be countered. You could even make an argument that Swede Levov’s un-relatable inhumanity prior to the devastation at the hands of his daughter which injects him with a sudden sense of legitimacy and person-hood is intentional to show that suffering and loss and destruction are essential to making us who we are.
And then, at the very end, Roth seems to suddenly switch tracks and postulates that possibly Merry existed and acted because The Swede was who he was. He unexpectedly seems to re-cast the whole dynamic as if it were some kind of cosmic balance, like an equal and opposite reaction necessary to counter the force that is or was Seymour Levov. But in casting it this way, in making the case that perhaps Merry had to be Merry because The Swede was The Swede, it makes it feel suddenly pat, bookended and complete; karmic, almost. And for a novel that until that point seemed to revel in the entropy of time and the unpredictability that comes when cultures and generations and events collide in this land of (supposed) possibility, that seemed to me to undermine so much of the power the book had held through nine-tenths of its length. I suddenly didn’t know what American Pastoral or Roth himself was really trying to say, it made me wonder if Roth even knew. And in short, it weakened the book for me.
I liked American Pastoral, I liked the way it made me think and I’m sure it will lead me try more of Philip Roth’s work, but I don’t know that I found it to be a masterpiece, largely because of this stifled, abrupt conclusion. I would give the book a mild recommendation, and I think its best platform would be for discussion groups with the luxury of multiple viewpoints to dissect and debate what Roth is saying—intentionally or not—about people and what living in this country does for, and to, them.