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PARTISAN REVIEW
The Book ofJob
AMERICAN PASTORAL.
By
Philip
Roth.
Houghton Mifflin. $26.00
It
may be too early to say that Philip Roth has exhausted his interest in
Nathan Zuckerman, the ubiquitous writer-hero of many
of
his previous fic–
tions. Zuckerman is the narrator of
American Pastoral,
but early in the novel
he virtually disappears into the consciousness of its main character Seymour
"Swede" Levov. For readers of Roth, Swede as hero may be a surprise: a
handsome, athletic, successful business man, with a solid, respectable, and
generous character. Roth has accustomed us to characters of extreme dispo–
sition, sexual virtuosos, irreverent jokers, deconstructors of comforting
pieties. A provocateur par excellence throughout his brilliant career, Roth
unsettles us again by reversing field and giving us what we would least expect
from him: a deeply sympathetic treatment of a man with all the middle class
virtues. The reversal is all the more extraordinary, coming after, as it does,
his most "nihilistic" novel,
Sabbath's Theater.
A famous high school athlete, son of a successful glove manufacturer, and
married to Miss New Jersey of 1949, Swede has it made. Though Swede is
a maker and a doer, the way has been prepared for him by his father, the
founder of Newark Maid Gloves. "Rough-hewn" and "undereducated,"
"limited.. .with unlimited energy," Lou Levov dominates every scene in
which he appears with his strong opinions and biases. He bequeaths his con–
fidence and energy, but the rougher edges of the father have been smoothed
to a comfortable blandness in the son. Nothing stands in Swede's way of liv–
ing the American dream until the explosion. His daughter, ironically named
Merry, sets off a bomb that destroys a store and kills its owner. She is respon–
sible for three more deaths as well. The time is the sixties, the time of
Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen,
the Newark riots. The novel is an impassioned and baffled meditation on
what used to be called the problem of evil: how could the benign Swede and
his beautiful wife, Dawn, have produced the monstrous Merry?
The question is of course rhetorical. The novel doesn't answer the ques–
tion. There is a psychoanalytic explanation in the novel that can't be taken
seriously (I'm sure Roth doesn't take it seriously). Merry is a stutterer, who
finds release in the bombing, after which she becomes completely fluent in
her speech. (More convincing is the speculation about the cause of the stut–
tering. "Maybe that was what lay behind the stutter, all those words she
uncannily knew before other kids could pronounce their names, the emo–
tional overload of a vocabulary that included even 'I'm lonesome.') There is
