American Pastoral
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| Author | Philip Roth |
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| Cover Artist | Robert Overholtzer |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | Family life (fiction) U.S. History (fiction) |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Vintage |
| Released | 1997 |
| Media Type | |
| Pages | 423 |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-395-86021-0 |
| Followed by | I Married a Communist |
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, an all-around good guy whose life is ruined by the "indigenous American berzerk". The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and was included in All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels. The film rights to it were later optioned by Paramount Pictures.
The framing device employed in American Pastoral is a 45th high school reunion attended by frequent Roth alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman. There he meets former-classmate Jerry Levov ("Swede" Levov's younger brother) who describes to him the tragic course of Seymour's adult life. The rest of the story consists of Zuckerman's posthumous recreation of Seymour Levov's story, based upon Jerry's testimony, a few newspaper clippings and Zuckerman's own impressions after two brief run-ins with "the Swede" towards the end of Levov's life. In these two run-ins we learn that Seymour has remarried, has three young children - while the daughter Merry, from his first marriage, - the one who ruined his previous life - is not mentioned. In Zuckerman's reimagining of Seymour's life this second marriage has no part; it ends in 1974 with Watergate unrolling on TV while the previous lives of all protagonists completely fall apart.
[edit] Plot introduction
Levov is born and raised in Newark, New Jersey the son of a successful Jewish-American glove manufacturer. Called "the Swede" because of his anomalous blond hair, blue eyes and Nordic good looks, he is a star athlete in three sports and narrator Nathan Zuckerman's idol and hero. "The Swede" eventually takes over his father's glove factory -"Newark Maid"- and marries Dawn Dwyer, an Irish-American Miss New Jersey 1949 winner (the actual winner this year was Kathleen Crowley).
Levov establishes what he believes to be a perfect American life with a beloved family, a satisfying business life, and a beautiful old home in rural, Republican New Jersey. Yet as the Vietnam War and racial unrest wrack the country and destroy inner-city Newark, Seymour's teenage daughter, whose only flaw has been a stutter, becomes angry and fat and increasingly radicalized joining the far left radical organisation 'The Weathermen'. Levov's "pastoral" life implodes in a devastating act of violence that changes everything.
[edit] Major themes
Though Roth has re-used ideas and characterizations from his own body of work before, American Pastoral contains perhaps his most blatant act of "self-plagiarisation". In it he has Seymour Levov's father, Lou, complain bitterly about his friends' anti-Black animosity (steming from the destruction of their businesses and neighborhoods during Newark's race riots):
- "I'm by the pool and my wonderful friends look up from the papers and they tell me they ought to take the schvartzes and line 'em up and shoot 'em. And I'm the one who has to remind them that's what Hitler did to the Jews. And you know what they tell me, as an answer? 'How can you compare schvartzes to Jews?'"
- (p 164)
Compare it to this passage from The Professor of Desire (also spoken by the protagonist's father):
- "And, tell me, what could make a difference with those ignorant bigots? At least let them hear what someone else thinks of them! Jewish people so full of hatred that they go out and vote for a George Wallace- it's beyond me. Why? People who have lived and seen a whole life-time as a minority, and the suggestion that they make in all seriousness is that they ought to line up the colored in front of machine guns and let them have it. Take actual people and mow them down... I tell them, look at Mr. Barbatnik- ask him if that isn't the same thing that Hitler did with the Jews. And you know what their answer is, grown men who have raised families and run successful businesses and live in retirement now in condominiums like supposed civilized people? They say, 'How can you compare niggers with Jews?'
- (p. 235)
[edit] Quotes
- "But wit or irony is like a hitch in his swing for a kid like the Swede, irony being a human consolation and beside the point if you're getting your way as a god" (p. 5).
- "I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface" (p. 23).
- "And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people... ? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again" (p. 35).
- "And then the loss of the daughter, the fourth American generation, a daughter on the run who was to have been the perfected image of himself as he had been the perfected image of his father's father ... the angry, rebarbative spitting-out daughter with no interest whatever in being the next successful Levov, flushing him out of hiding as if he were a fugitive—initating the Swede into the displacement of another America entirely, the daughter and the decade blasting to smithereens his particular form of Utopian thinking, the plague America infiltrating the Swede's castle and there infecting everyone. The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral—into the indigenous American berserk" (p. 86).
- "The authority of beauty is a very irrational thing" (p. 385).
- "The old system that made order doesn't work anymore. All that was left was his fear and astonishment, but now concealed by nothing" (p. 422).
| Preceded by: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser |
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1998 |
Succeeded by: The Hours by Michael Cunningham |
