WARNING: American Pastoral Spoiler

Finished Philip Roth’s American Pastoral two weeks ago and I have wanted to write about this thing almost from the moment I began reading it. I had shit to say about this book every damned day. I didn't know what I was talking about but I had something to say.

Roth tells the story, his story, the American story through his alter-ego – the writer Nathan Zuckerman.

I was reminded often of our friend Grant Miller’s critique of the last Sopranos (a different sort of love letter to New Jersey and America in general). Grant said that there are surprises left to be had from great writing. Grant cited Roth in particular and Grant was right. Roth can use dramatic turns in his work and the real surprise is what follows the shock. The surprise or the shocker is never the thrust of what Roth is doing…unlike the M KNight Shamamamammamamammlammmmamamamamamamamama guy.

The shock in this novel rivals anything I’ve come across in books (that includes serious books from Xenophon and that sort of junk) and the pain felt by American Pastoral’s “subject” Swede Levov is searing. There was nothing to buffer or buoy the Swede when he lost it all. Roth’s Zuckerman tells us that the Swede lacked vital components that aide a man in the process of experiencing great pain or after suffering great loss. Even as a young sports hero for Weequahic, the Swede did not require the tools, tools like me turn to when they feel defeated. The Swede was never really defeated and did not need such stuff. Consider:

“But wit or irony is like a hitch in his swing for a kid like the Swede, irony being human consolation and besides the point if you’re getting your way as a god.”

What happens to the Swede later in life is tragedy for any man, but worse for this one who traded in godhood on the sports field for quiet, dedicated respectability. This gift of his to his family and the world was not enough and Roth says…

“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again.”

These aren’t things I necessarily believe, but like the too-sensible-for-God subject of Everyman, these are the things I find challenging in Philip Roth’s books.

I know too many fucking people who read only what they believe. They only argue with those who have the same starting point as they do. They consider producers of different thoughts as the Enemy or foreign or whatever. When a potent artist and mind like Roth seems to be very different from mine – I am exhilarated.

I’m going to end with three long passages from American Pastoral that I will always remember.

Ghost Writer is probably next. Maybe I’ll do all the Zuckerman novels (minus My life as a Man) and end with his latest book Exit Ghost.



“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 — initiating 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.”


“It’s astonishing that everything so immediately visible in our lives as classmates we still remember so precisely. The intensity of feeling that we have seeing one another today is also astonishing. But most astonishing is that we are nearing the age that our grandparents were when we first went off to be freshmen at the annex on February 1, 1946. What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened. That the results are in for the class of January 1950 – the unanswerable questions answered, the future revealed – is that not astonishing? To have lived – and in this country, and in our time, and as who we were. Astonishing.”


“And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, that was on the neutral, de-religionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff – no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey feeds all. A moratorium on funny foods and funny ways and religious exclusivity, a moratorium on the three-thousand year old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion for Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year. A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.”