American Pastoral
There are a big big pile of books sitting by my bedside and, in this respect, I’m like anyone else. Of course I also have my Kindle by my bedside and there are certain people that are understandably amused by the fact that they bought me the Kindle at my behest and I read one book on it (The Glorious Cause) and then downloaded a biography about Alexander Hamilton and then haven’t picked it up again. But I will, I promise.
Anyway, I’ve read some Roth before. Portnoy’s Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus. And the images in Goodbye, Columbus present themselves to me on occasion. I read it right around the time I read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and both of those books are about summer and about coming of age and, you know, I’m Jewish, so I identify will all that exisential Jewish angst. But all that being said, and even though I knew it was supposed to be good, I was still blown away by this book.
The book concerns the life and times of Seymour Levov and there are many many different things running through it and, you know, this ain’t the New York Times, so I’m always unsure of how much summary I should provide. But briefly, the book is really told through the eyes of Nathan Zuckerman, a frequent Roth alter-ego, and it starts with a series of vignettes as Zuckerman goes back to his 45th high school reunion.
The book is about a number of different things and I think one of them is about the impossibility of human understanding. The great chasm we all face when we seek to communicate with each other and know each other and how there is no reality and there is no truth because it’s all wrapped up in our various perceptions and there really, at the core, there really is only our various sides of the story. And I don’t mean this to say that I don’t believe in the practicality and necessity of policy or of action. It is what it is. And we must act. And we musn’t stand in one place all our lives, contemplating our navels and tearing out our hair because we can’t trust what our eyes tell us. But there it is. We can’t trust what our eyes tell us.
Now, my friend Mike, wrote me and he said (via Pat) that “Roth is not as solipsistic as [I] suspect” and I guess there are a number of different thoughts about that statement and one of them is that it’s probably true and another is “how much do I suspect?” and another is “let us separate Roth and this work since they are two distinct things”. But, no matter.
Here is something beautiful. Zuckerman introduces us to the Seymour “The Swede” Levov from the eyes of Zuckerman initially. And The Swede was this big beautiful blonde Jew from Newark that was a great high school athlete and a soldier in the war and the subsequent owner of the Newark Maid glove factory. And Zuckerman was younger and friends with the Swede’s brother, Jerry, and always looked up to and idolized The Swede. So that in a way, the Swede was not a person but an idea. And the idea was the idea of the American pastoral and the beauty and possibility of the American dream and of all the things we learn about and read about in school. About what we might all become. And about how doubt and indecision and the noise in all of our minds may be quelled, one day, as we see it in some people, as we see it in the Swede.
The Swede was the captain of the football team. You know the guy. I know a few people from my high school who jump to mind although, of course, not Jewish. The Jewish is part is important (and we Jews get it) because it underscores the broader point. The Swede was not just a hero, but a hero accepted into this American tapestry although born as an outsider. If he could make it, anyone can! Right?
So you have this idea of The Swede. And then Zuckerman learns a few things about the Swede. Important things. Things like The Swede’s daughter, Merry, blew up a post office in the 60s and became part of the counter-culture and went underground and bombed a bunch of post offices and stores and things like that as a statement against American imperialism, etc. Merry was a murderer.
And this piece of information ruptures Zuckerman’s understanding of the Swede and Zuckerman realizes that The Swede may have appeared to be something to a bunch of people but that he was very much a different thing and Zuckerman wil never know what that other thing truly is or was because we may not know those other things. Remember that time you and I hung out and had so much fun? A few years ago? Well, that moment that you remember is totally different than the one I remember. That funny thing I remember you saying? You probably don’t even remember saying it.
We are all strangers to each other. And it’s more than sadness or tragic or anything. It just is.
So Zuckerman says that he doesn’t know the Swede and can’t ever and then decides to imagine what his life was, given what he did know about him, and then the novel begins: a history of the Swede and an inspection of the events leading up to and befalling the Swede after his daughter blows up the post office.
The novel is also a somewhat conservative statement, attack even, on the counter-culture movement of the 60s and, I think at least in my opinion, an attack on many of the ideas espoused on the far American left. Others may of course read it a different way but that’s the way I read it. And while there was a lot there that resonated with me. And maybe that’s what Roth would say the book really is/was about. This notion of the American berserk. The parasites and the destroyers that want to tear everything down and hide behind strange slogans and bumper stickers and nothingness and nihilism and rags and dirt and, ultimately, lies. And I have thoughts about those things. About the lies that pervade all of our ethos and philosophies and what any of it means.
But, that’s a more incendiary conversation and perhaps unnecessarily antagnostic.
The book, for me, is really about human nature and, again, about solipsism and about misunderstanding and about perception and how we are all beholden to it.
Here’s a scene for you. The Swede has just come from seeing his daughter for the first time in five years. She is living in a tenement, in a slum, in a bad bad part of Newark. She has adopted some strange religion that requires that she harm no other living thing, an extreme veganism in a sense. She is disgustingly dirty. She is dressed only in rags. She has lice and critters. She has spent years on the lam. She has been abused and assaulted and this is this man’s beloved daughter. He is distraught. He is so terribly upset.
And so he calls his brother Jerry and he doesn’t know what to do and what he needs is comfort and tenderness. That’s what The Swede needs. And maybe he needs to figure out if he should go back to that tenement and return his daughter to the beautiful American pastoral but, first and foremost, he is upset and wrecked with grief and loss. And his brother, an obstinate egocentric surgeon with all kinds of his own issues, launches into a tirade against The Swede. Uses this moment, uses The Swede’s anguish, to deliver a lecture on the reality of the human condition, the leniency and indulgence that The Swede displayed in raising Merry, the faults in his parenting skills, the gaps in his understanding of the mankind and children and the self.
Jerry doesn’t care about the reality of what The Swede needs. He only cares that he now has an opportunity to deliver a powerful and nasty “I told you so” to a man on his knees. And it’s all wrong and tone deaf and that’s how it is sometimes. That’s how we are.
