BOOKS
307
really no explanation for Merry, though lots of reasons she gives for her
hatred of the middle class lives of her parents. As Merry and her cohort see
it, Vietnam, racism, and exploi tation of the poor have their source in the hyp–
ocritical virtues of her parents. The actual motive for terror remains obscure.
There were of course Merry Levovs in the sixties; they represented the
extreme of the peace movement. Their physical violence manifested itself at
times in the rhetoric of its more peaceable mainstream participants. They
were its oxymoron, so to speak, throwing bombs for peace. Merry undergoes
a conversion at the end. She becomes an ascetic in revulsion from killing. She
is reduced to
fil
th, avoiding cleanliness from fear of harming the microscop–
ic creatures that inhabit water. From one extreme to another, Merry is a one
dimensional character, little more than an occasion to display the conscious–
ness of Swede Levov, where the real "action" of the novel is. Roth withholds
his imagination of Merry's counterlife. Like her parents, we are always guess–
ing what she is about. We are never inside her head. Since Roth is a master
at presenting counterlives, that is, giving us his world from conflicting per–
spectives, we may wonder why he doesn't get inside Merry's head. The effect
of doing so would be to displace the focus from her father's bewilderment
where the novelist wants it to be.
Roth may have reversed fields, but he has not changed direction. The
publicity that accompanies
American Pastoral
says that having explored the
human need "to demolish, to challenge, to oppose, to pull apart... [Roth]
now focuses on the counterforce: the longing for an ordinary life." This is
not quite right. Certainly Swede, who has had an ordinary life, longs in vain
for its return. But the writer, whether Zuckerman or Roth, has something
else in mind.
[Swede] invoked in me, when I was a boy-as he did in hundreds of
other boys-the strongest fantasy of being someone else. But to wish
oneself into another's glory, as boy or as man, is an impossibility...on aes–
thetic grounds
if
you are a writer. To embrace your hero in his
destruction, however-to let your hero's life occur within you when
everything is trying to diminish
him,
to imagine yourself not in his
mindless ascendancy, when he is the fixed point of your adulation, but
in the bewilderment of his tragic fall-well, that's worth thinking about.
Zuckerman is telling us that the writer to whom very little happens in his life
(he resides alone in Connecticut and sees hardly anyone) lives in the imagina–
tion of error, loss, defeat, and disintegration of the characters of his creation.
Swede Levov is a type, already anticipated in
Sabbath's Theater
in the char–
acter of Norman Cowan, "a nice guy with some depth." Attractive,
intelligent, and considerate, Norman is an irresistible target to the perverse
