Although it was written first, Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral is chronologically the second novel in his American Trilogy about postwar America, beginning with I Married a Communist (1998) and ending with The Human Stain (2000). Covering the period from the end of World War II to the Watergate hearings, the novel focuses on the 1960s, characterizing its turbulence in terms of paradise lost.

Like many previous Roth novels, American Pastoral is concerned with the assimilation of American Jews and the transition from urban Jewish enclaves to dispersed and mainstreamed households in suburbia, as well as with daughters’ and sons’ acceptance or rejection of their fathers. The novel’s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, was the hero of Roth’s earlier Zuckerman Trilogy of novels, collected in 1985 as Zuckerman Bound. Zuckerman has long served as Roth’s alter ego, and in American Pastoral we find him grappling with his own mortality.

The main character of the novel is Seymour Irving Levov, known as “the Swede,” an unusually Nordic-looking and athletically gifted boy from Zuckerman’s neighborhood, who grows up to be a successful businessman and the husband of a former Miss New Jersey. In short, he is the perfectly assimilated subject.

Zuckerman, having withdrawn from the world after a bout with prostate cancer that has left him impotent and incontinent, is horrified to learn that the demigod of his childhood—whom he never stopped idolizing—has actually proven more vulnerable to prostate cancer than he. He also learns that two decades before his death, the Swede’s life was blown apart when his 16-year-old daughter, Merry, in protest against the Vietnam War, bombed the local general store and killed a neighborhood resident.

In this rendition of paradise lost, Merry is Eve, and the novel reflects as much disgust for women’s bodies and disobedience as the original versions of the Fall. Overweight and a stutterer, Merry is a problem child long before her political leanings develop. When the Swede finally finds her five years after the bombing living in a downtown Newark that has been gutted by rioting, she is an emaciated adherent of the Indian religion known as Jainism, and she carries her religious principles to such a morbid extreme that she does not bathe for fear of harming the microorganisms that reside on her skin.

She is so revolting that the Swede vomits when he sees her, and her extreme nonviolence, following the revelation that she has been involved in several bombings that killed four people, reeks of hypocrisy.

The Swede is hardly valorized for his assimilation, however. As others, including his brother Jerry, repeatedly try to tell him, Merry’s extremism is born of his extreme commitment to being perfect and to pleasing everybody around him, especially his father. When he finds Merry in her Jain incarnation, he accedes to her request to leave her in the squalor of her situation in part because he never has been able to bring himself to force her to do anything she does not want to do, and in part because he is hosting a dinner party and he cannot imagine reconciling his daughter in her current state with his parents and his WASP neighbors.

Philip Roth

His love for his daughter is flawed by his love for the American dream, which he naively believed he had achieved. Considering the failures of Merry and the Swede, the novel ends on the lamenting question, “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” (423).

The ambiguity of the novel’s message is compounded by Nathan Zuckerman’s narration of it. In the long first section of the novel, which focuses on the nostalgia he feels for the Swede and for the era of his childhood, after attending his 45th high school reunion, Zuckerman makes it clear that his knowledge of the Swede’s life is limited to Jerry’s brief summary. Although the final two sections of the novel are narrated sometimes omnisciently and sometimes from the Swede’s first-person perspective, we already know that this is Zuckerman’s mind at work—and from previous novels narrated by Zuckerman, we know his mind fairly well.

This raises the possibility that American Pastoral is less about the Swede and the 1960s than it is about Zuckerman and his failing health. Seeking insight into the failures of his own body and shocked to learn that the Swede, too, is mortal, Zuckerman sees the loss of the forties and fifties to the Dionysian excesses of the sixties as paradise lost simply in terms of his own progress toward death.

Sources

Gentry, Marshall Bruce. “Newark Maid Feminism in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” Shofar 19, no. 1 (2000): 74–83.
Milowitz, Steven. Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer. New York: Garland, 2000.
Parrish, Timothy. “The End of Identity: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” Shofar 19, no. 1 (2000): 84–99.
Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis

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