Having His Bomb and Exploding it Too: Roth's American Pastoral

*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 45^th 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.