American Pastoral Wrong and Wrong and Wrong Again Page Number

April 20, 1997

The Trouble With Swede Levov

By MICHAEL Wood

---

Philip Roth's new hero gets everything he dreamed of

---

More than on Philip Roth from The New York Times Archives

---

American Pastoral By Philip Roth. 423 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Visitor. $26.

ho would take idea Nathan Zuckerman would autumn in honey with normality, with the all-American life? With the old idea of the melting pot equally order and progress, a pacified history in which resentment and misunderstanding fade abroad across the generations? With Thanksgiving every bit a grade of ethnic truce, where the Jews and the Irish hang out together as if no one had e'er crucified anyone? This is, afterwards all, the garrulous, manic hero of five Philip Roth novels, and the subtle fictional critic of Mr. Roth'due south autobiography, ''The Facts.'' His alter id, as you lot might say, the human being whose business is to get out of control and give criminal offense. ''I am your permission,'' Zuckerman tells Mr. Roth in that book, reproving him for lapsing into the tame decencies of the uninvented life, ''your indiscretion, the key to disclosure.'' ''The distortion called fidelity is non your metier,'' Zuckerman insists. And Mr. Roth himself says he is pleased to accept escaped the constrictions of the Jamesian tact and elegance he once admired, liberating his talent for what he calls ''extremist fiction.''

Yet here is Zuckerman attending a class reunion of veterans from Weequahic High in Newark, checking out the prostates and remarriages and loftier-powered jobs and the dead fathers; having dinner in New York with a former star athlete from the same school, a nice guy chosen Seymour Levov, alias the Swede, and wondering at the fellow's sheer likable ordinariness. ''Swede Levov's life, for all I knew, had been virtually simple and about ordinary and therefore just not bad, right in the American grain.'' The little clause (''for all I knew'') gives the game away. Of course Zuckerman is wrong about this -- at that place wouldn't exist a novel here if he weren't, allow alone a Philip Roth novel. ''I was wrong,'' Zuckerman says handsomely. ''Never more than mistaken nearly anyone in my life.'' But what'southward interesting about the book is that Zuckerman could accept thought, even for an instant, that he was right; and that we can't, in the stop, know how correct or wrong he is, since he is making everything upwardly, dreaming ''a realistic chronicle,'' as he says, quoting the onetime Johnny Mercer song (''Dream when the day is through''), and taking off into history equally he imagines information technology. It'due south truthful that the imagining is grounded in the well-nigh meticulous reconstructions of sometime times and places -- the Levov family glove factory, the spreading acres of w New Jersey, a Miss America competition in Atlantic City, the mussed-up neighborhoods of what used to be the city of Newark -- and information technology gets easier and easier to forget that Zuckerman's manufacture and imagination are providing all this. He gives us plenty of clues, though, before he vanishes for good on page 89, off into fiction, in the heart of a dance with an erstwhile schoolmate named Joy Helpern. ''You get them incorrect earlier you run into them,'' Zuckerman says of ''people'' in general, ''while you're anticipating coming together them; yous get them wrong while you're with them; and so yous go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again.'' How could the writer of fiction exist exempt from this contagion? Zuckerman/Roth would respond that in that location is no exemption; only the need, whether yous're a novelist or not, to continue imagining other people, and the hope that guesses may give life to the dead and the fallen and the lost.

Zuckerman attributes his attachment to the romance of ordinariness to a cancer scare of his own, but he offers a subtler diagnosis in ''The Facts.'' ''The whole point about your fiction (and in America, non merely yours),'' he tells Mr. Roth, ''is that the imagination is ever in transit between the good male child and the bad boy -- that's the tension that leads to revelation.'' Swede Levov is the skillful boy for whom life is but great -- except that he's not. He is the good boy whose life turns to disaster -- equally if that'due south what good boys were for, and only the bad boys go free. Or he is the good boy whom Zuckerman can imagine and mourn for just in this manner.

Swede is alive when the story opens, dead shortly later on. Zuckerman picks up a few details of his life at the reunion, notably from Swede's ferocious brother, a bullying cardiac surgeon in Miami. The rest is his dreamed chronicle. In and out of Zuckerman'southward mind the story hinges on Swede'due south sixteen-year-one-time daughter, Merry, an just, pampered child, who has fallen in with a department of the Weathermen and blown upwardly a rural mail office, killing a doctor who happened to be mailing his bills. The time is 1968. Merry goes into hiding, is raped and becomes destitute, gets involved in farther bombings in Oregon, winds upwards dorsum in Newark, stick-thin, filthy, a veil over her face, having become a Jain, dedicated to such extremes of nonviolence that she can scarcely bring herself to consume considering of the murder of plant life involved. The novel stages an run into between Swede and his derelict-looking daughter, and the scene manages to exist both shocking and unimposing.

But the novel revolves non and then much around this scene as around what Merry has done, the deaths she has caused, and the absurd, irresistible question of how this respectable Jewish athlete and his Irish, former-Miss-New-Jersey wife could have given birth to this once angry, now dislocated, obviously reasoning, weirdly unthinking girl. The question can't be answered, of class, just causalities keep shaping themselves in the mind. Is it because the parents are so respectable, so decent and so liberal, as much confronting the war in Vietnam equally their girl, that the girl has to turn out this fashion? Is there an American allegory here, immigrant generations rising to prosperity simply to autumn into violence and despair? Or accept the parents washed everything they can and should take, and is it Merry the changeling who reminds us that the inexplicable exists? ''And what is wrong with their life?'' the novel ends. ''What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?''

This is an respond to Zuckerman's own merciless portrait of the (female person) intellectual who laughs with please at the sight of historical disorder, ''enjoying enormously the assailability, the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things.'' But the answer itself notwithstanding seeks to moralize the wreck of a world, as if Zuckerman had never heard of Job, equally if the Levovs' virtue ought really, after all, to have been a protection for them, rather than an invitation to damage.

''American Pastoral'' is a little boring -- as befits its crumbling subject, but unmistakably tiresome all the same -- and I must say I miss Zuckerman'south manic energies. Simply the mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable, and you have only to interruption over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated, to run into that Mr. Roth didn't entirely carelessness Henry James subsequently all. A judgement starting time ''But after strudel and coffee,'' for example, lasts almost a total folio and evokes a whole shaky generation, without once losing its rhythm or its comic and melancholy logic, until it arrives, with a flick of the conjuror's hand, at a revelation none of us tin can have been waiting for.

Because both novels are hefty and cocky-consciously American, trying to rethink national history, because both deal in painstaking and slightly mind-numbing realism, because both brainstorm in New Jersey and terminate in hell, ''American Pastoral'' invites comparing with John Updike's ''In the Beauty of the Lilies.'' The chief difference is that Mr. Updike's novel ends in a secular apocalypse, the final act in the story of the decease of a Christian God, while Mr. Roth's ends in the imagination of ruin, the death of a Jew's dream of ordinariness. The difference is not extreme, although both stories are.

---

Michael Wood is the author of ''The Magician'due south Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction.'' He teaches at Princeton University.

---

More than on Philip Roth
From the Athenaeum of The New York Times

Review of "Farewell, Columbus" (1959)

Review of "Letting Go" (1962)

Review of "Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

Review of "Portnoy'due south Complaint" by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Philip Roth Shakes Weequahic Loftier (February 29, 1969)

Review of "The Ghost Writer (1979)

Review of "Zuckerman Unbound" (1981)

"The Book That I'm Writing" (1983), Philip Roth on "The Anatomy Lesson"

Review of "The Anatomy Lesson" (1983)

"Roth's Real Father Likes His Books" (1983), by Maureen Dowd

"Conversations with Philip" (1984), past David Plante

Review of "Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue" (1985), by Harold Flower

Review of "The Counterlife (1987), by William Gass

Review of "The Facts: A Novelist'southward Autobiography" (1988), by Justin Kaplan

"What Facts? A Talk with Roth" (1988)

Review of "Charade (1990), past Fay Weldon

Review of "Patrimony" (1991), by Robert Pinsky

"To Newark, With Love. Philip Roth." (1991)

"Dear Muddied Dublin: My Joycean Expedition with Philip Roth" (1991) by William Styron

"Roth Returning to Newark to Become History Honor" (1992)

Review of "Operation Shylock" (1993), by D. M. Thomas

Review of "Sabbath's Theater" (1995)

"Claire Bloom Looks Back in Anger at Philip Roth" (1996)

Review of Claire Bloom's memoir, "Leaving a Doll's House" (1996)

---

Return to the Books Dwelling Page

lombardibothe1936.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/20/reviews/970420.20woodlt.html

Share this post