American Pastoral

Rereading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is like revisiting a part of the past that I’ve got no reason to adopt as mine, yet will probably never shake. I didn't like this book after read one, but now it's on the top shelf. The Swede is the Swede in all his glory, right up to old age and hanging out at a ballgame with his son, when he encounters Zuckerman who will, ten years on, lay out the Swede’s downfall, a harrowing account of sadness, missed opportunities, and stone failures brushed over with thick applications of bullshit, politics, money, and vanity.

Let’s start by compiling the wrong Swede does; joins the Marines, gets engaged in the South, eventually marries Miss New Jersey (a Catholic!), moves to the country, lets his wife baptize Meredith (their daughter). These would be what Lou Levov, Swede’s old man, would categorize as his son's faults. Sure, Lou was there to bring him to a local college so that he could learn the glove business, sure it was Lou who broke up the engagement when Swede was at Parris Island, it was Lou who interrogated Dawn, the shiksa beauty queen, and it was Lou who thought to mention to Swede, when he was successfully in charge of the family business and moving to the country, that the country was for Klansmen and a nice place for pogroms. Fathers; it’s telling that Lou gets stabbed with a fork by a drunk WASP at the book’s close.

So we have a familiar Roth theme here, the father-son. We also have the brother-brother Roth, the husband-wife Roth, the Jew-goy Roth, and the married couples-cunt married couples Roth. The new Roth here is the father-daughter Roth. Young Merry Levov blows up a post office and kills a doctor in the idyllic NJ town; it’s 1968, she’s 16, and she can’t win.

Roth devastates with descriptions of Merry’s stutter, her shyness, and her relations with mother, grandparents, and Swede himself. Swede’s fall is incredible, and he’s never able to do more than witness. He’s berated by his outcast brother regarding Merry, and the guilt laid down by his wife and parents is subtle, but not enough to ebb accumulation.