*Warning: Spoilers
lie ahead like the stars on an American flag’s field of blue*
American
Pastoral is a simple tale of Seymour “Swede” Levov. Levov was naturally gifted in sports and
became a local hero in his New Jersey hometown and high school. Out of high school, in 1945, he joined the
marines, but he was made a drill sergeant on Parris Island and never saw any
combat. He married a beautiful woman who
had won the title of Miss New Jersey but failed to win Miss America. He took over his father’s thriving
glove-making business. He had a
daughter, Meredith, known as Merry, and moved to the country with his
family. In her teen years, Merry became
and opponent of the Vietnam War and gained the name Ho Chi Levov among her
classmates for her outspoken political opinions. In 1968, she set a bomb off at the postal
area of the local general store, killing a family doctor in the process. The bomb blew up Levov’s American Dream along
with the Hamlin Store. Levov doesn’t see
his daughter again until 1973. It is a
meeting that lasts for only a few hours at most but that leaves him as
distraught as ever. The last quarter of
the novel takes place at a dinner party hosted by Levov and his wife the very
evening after he has seen Merry as we watch the family, and presumably America
by extension, fall apart.
While
Seymour Levov’s story would in itself be a gripping one, Philip Roth wants the
story to be every bit as much about America as it is about Levov, and that’s
where his weird narrative tricks start muddying up the waters of his simple
tale. Roth’s tale of America’s lost
innocence is essentially a conservative tale about how the beauty and promise
of postwar America was destroyed in the late 1960s by race riots, activist
women, and opposition to the Vietnam war.
Roth, it seems to me, is too smart and world-weary to not know that his
representation of America’s Paradise Lost is too simplistic and easy, so he
casts layers and layers of doubt on top of the narrative which simultaneously
lets him draw the simple conclusions he draws and suggest that he knows that
the conclusions are too simple. He gets
his simplicity and wants to keep his intellectual rigorousness at the same
time--a move that, to me, falls flat.
The first
and most prominent narrative complication in American Pastoral is the
presence of a frame. The story of
Seymour Levov doesn’t begin until page 83 in my edition. Before that, we learn bits about Seymour, but
more importantly we learn about our narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, and his
relationship with Levov, his idolization of Levov. The only other Roth novel that I have read is
Portnoy’s Complaint, so I was unaware at the time that I read American
Pastoral that Zuckerman is a recurring character in Roth’s books, a
narrator who closely resembles Roth himself.
Zuckerman was friends with Levov’s younger brother, Jerry, and had a
huge man-crush on Seymour, making a childhood hero of him. The novel, published in 1997, begins in 1995,
and the first chapter involves a long scene of Zuckerman and Levov meeting for
dinner in May of that year. Throughout
the scene Zuckerman attempts to reach below the surface, to figure out who
Levov is, to suss out his motives, his thoughts, his traumas. Each time he tries to get a read on Levov,
Zuckerman tells us “I was wrong.” So
Roth sets us up with an unreliable narrator, a man who both idolizes Levov and
who seems incapable to knowing what is going on beneath the surface. To complicate matters further, Zuckerman
writes his version of events after he learns about Levov’s death and Merry’s
bombing of the Hamlin store from Jerry, whom he meets at his 45th
class reunion, in the fall of 1995. Once
he finishes his story, he tells us this:
I had the amateur’s impulse to send Jerry a copy of the manuscript to ask what he thought. It was an impulse I quashed: I hadn’t been writing and publishing for nearly forty years not to know by now to quash it. ‘That’s not my brother,’ he’d tell me, ‘not in any way. You’ve misrepresented him. My brother couldn’t think like that, didn’t talk like that,’ etc.
Through the
layers that Roth creates, we have an imaginary narrator creating the imaginary
past of another imaginary character with a different unknowable imaginary past. As a result, nothing here is presented to us
in a way that we can comfortably draw conclusions about Roth. He has shielded himself fiercely from the
story that bears his name.
Within this
muddy framework, there are still more questions raised that are never
answered. I am thinking particularly
here of Merry and her agency. Levov is
convinced that his daughter has been manipulated, brainwashed into creating the
bomb and setting it off. In opposition
to that idea is Rita Cohen, the petite woman who presents herself to Levov as a
disciple of Merry, a woman who is awed and intimidated by Merry’s overwhelming
personality. When Levov last speaks with
Rita, however, Rita accuses him of telling Merry that Rita and Levov never
slept together. The subject of Rita and
Levov’s encounter at the hotel is mentioned only in passing in Merry and Levov’s
conversation, so Rita is clearly not as connected with Merry as she has led
Levov to believe. Who Rita is is never
answered in the novel, nor is her connection to Merry ever revealed. Rita’s presence allows for some excellent
drama and allows for Roth to create an over-the-top sex scene, but her presence
in the novel itself does little to effect the overarching plot. Remove Rita from the novel, and the only real
thing that you lose is the counterpoint to Merry’s agency. Without Rita, there is no one to suggest that
Merry is not simply a pawn in someone
else’s game. Levov’s inability to know—and
ours as well--whether Merry was manipulated or manipulator is central to Levov’s
crisis and pain. The only other thing
that Rita contributes to the story is that she is another corrupted woman in a
landscape of corrupted women.
It is important
to the novel that Merry is a daughter and not a son. If Levov had a headstrong son who committed
this act of terrorism, one who then met with his father at twenty-one with a
sense of calm and purpose, the issue of his agency would not have been called
into question, with or without a Rita Cohen.
It is Merry’s femininity that calls her agency into question. She is always Levov’s little girl underneath the
monster she has become, and I mean monster quite literally. When she became a teenage, Roth/Zuckerman
describes her transformation this way:
the grasshopper child who used to scramble delightedly up and down the furniture and across every available lap in her black leotard all at once shot up, broke out, grew stout—she thickened across the back and the neck, stopped brushing her teeth and combing her hair; she ate almost nothing she was served at home but at school and out alone ate virtually all the time, cheeseburgers with French fries, pizza, BLTs, fried onion rings, vanilla milk shakes, root beer floats, ice cream with fudge sauce, and cake of any kind, so that almost overnight she became large, a large, loping, slovenly sixteen-year-old, nearly six feet tall.
Merry becomes monstrously unfeminine, and the
disgust at her appearance and hygiene is anything but lovingly described in
that passage. Both Merry and Rita are
women whose femininity is twisted and threatening to Levov and the America he
represents.
Poor Levov,
high school sports icon, all-American kid, dutiful son, and loving father finds
himself saddled with this beast of a child who seems to hate everything about
the country he loves. She’s
argumentative and vitriolic in spite of Levov’s loving understanding. No one can blame Levov for his handling of
Merry’s desire to go to New York to hang out with her politically radical
friends. Roth/Zuckerman is at pains to
show what a devoted and thoughtful father he is. But then, Levov is surrounded by faulty
women. His love for Dawn, his wife, was
triggered by her beauty, and her beauty is the thing that he returns to about
her again and again. Even at the moment
that he most admires her, the moment in which she wins over his father, he
attributes her ability to do that to her beauty. In opposition to Dawn’s femininity are Sheila
Salzman’s cold intelligence that leaves us wondering how we are supposed to
believe that Levov ever had an affair with her,
Marcia Umanoff’s snooty academic posturing and delight in needling poor
Lou Levov’s sense of morality, and Jessie Orcutt’s unexplained drunken behavior
whose violence against Lou brings the novel to a close. The women of this novel are uncouth and
violent and a never-ending source of aggravation for Seymour Levov. In spite of all of Levov’s violent fantasies
in the last portion of the novel, he is not a man of violence. In contrast, the two overt acts of violence
are committed by women, first Merry’s bombing and then Jessie’s stabbing of Lou
Levov with a dessert fork. And after
Jessie’s stabbing, it is Marcia who finds the whole thing amusing, and her
laughter is the final crushing note that Levov has to endure:
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.
Marcia is one
of the laughing jackals, delighting in the world falling apart, in America’s
falling apart. In fact, she and the
women like here are one of the causes of that destruction
Marcia’s
laughing leads Levov to ask the final question in the novel: “And what is wrong
with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible
than the life of the Levovs?” And here
is where Roth gets to enjoy his sentimentality and his snark at the same
time. Lou’s patronizing treatment of
Jessie is painful to watch, even if you believe his heart is in the right
place. Seymour would have had the
perfect life if the women in his world would have only given up their own
agency and followed his plans. Merry
would have been the adoring daughter.
Dawn would have been the happy wife.
He would have been Johnny Appleseed, conquering and nurturing the wilds
of America. They all would have lived in
the house he chose and lived the life he dreamed and they all would have been
happy. The ending question of the novel
cannot be answered unproblematically.
One cannot say that there is nothing wrong with the life of the Levovs. But the question depends on your desire to
say that there is something beautiful about the life of the Levovs to feel the
question’s pinch. You need to agree that
there was something ideal about the world before the Fall whose absence we
mourn. Levov is a simple hero, an
American hero, and Zuckerman finds no
fitter comparison for Levov historically than John F. Kennedy:
His great looks, his larger-than-lifeness, his glory, our sense of his having been exempted from all self-doubt by his heroic role—that all these manly properties had precipitated a political murder made me think of the compelling story . . . of Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, only a decade the Swede’s senior and another privileged son of fortune, another man of glamour exuding American meaning, assassinated while still in his mid-forties just five years before the Swede’s daughter violently protested the Kennedy-Johnson war and blew up her father’s life. I thought, but of course. He is our Kennedy.
Merry, in this analogy, is Lee Harvey Oswald
and her primary victim is not the doctor who died in the blast, but her father,
whose understanding of America died in the blast. Zuckerman’s tale depends on a lionizing of
Levov and the America he represented, and in turn Roth’s novel depends on the
same, but Roth knows that life is too complicated for that lionizing, so he
distances himself while at the same time having the emotional thrust of his
novel depend on it.
The novel is,
not surprisingly, well written. Roth
creates great encounters between characters and scenes that are pulsing with
meaning and movement. My problems with
the novel are all at the level of content, but the writing is not so amazing
that it is with few parallels. In short,
I believe that had this list of 100 fiction novels in the English language been
created by two women or two black scholars instead of two white men American
Pastoral would not have made the cut.
I haven’t
even touched on the racial politics that hover at the fringes of the history
Roth tells and the importance of Vickie, his office manager, and the praise
Zuckerman wants to give Levov for employing black men and women in Newark until
the economic environment led her to move his glove factory out of the
country. I haven’t touched upon the
weird Freudian scene in which Merry at twelve years of age asks Levov to “kiss
me the way you k-k-kiss umumumother.” I
haven’t touched upon the role of religion in Roth’s story, the relationship
between Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism. If you have insight into these elements in the
story, I’d love to hear about it.
