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PARTISAN REVIEW
Sabbath, who not only tries to seduce his friend's susceptible wife, but insists
on telling
him.
"But how do you plan to kill her? When you find out she is
fucking your best friend." In a sense, Merry's bomb is intended to have the
same effect on her father that Sabbath's obscene aggressiveness has on his
friend. Norman's reasonable response is: "What the hell has become of your
mind? ...This is awful." Since we are mosdy in Sabbath's mind in the course
of the novel, the friend's sweet reason does not prevail.
It
is much less inter–
esting than the awful extremity of Sabbath's mind. In
American Pastoral,
Merry is like Sabbath only in her effect on her father's Norman-like rea–
sonableness. Merry is litde more than an ideological stereotype, whereas
Sabbath is an antinomian genius. We are told that Merry is very intelligent,
but the novel provides litde evidence of it. Instead we hear her mouthing the
radical cliches of the sixties with the conviction of her hatred of her family.
We can't but sympathize with her family, her father in particular, at the same
time that we know that he has been living in the fool's paradise of the
American dream.
The obsessive focus of the novel is the relationship between parent and
child, father and daughter: the estrangement (an extreme case of it) that a
parent often feels as the child emerges into independence or the illusion of
it. Even if it does not become the scandal that Levov experiences (the fierce
unrelenting hatred his daughter feels for him makes him the symbolic target
of the bomb), there is in every well-meaning parent who has suffered such
estrangement the unspeakable pain of incomprehension of how this could
be. The parent may feel he has produced a genetic mutation. Could this be
my child? Roth superbly captures the oscillations between guilt and resent–
ment that consume Swede's life, the utter pain in losing a child in life.
Inevitably, there is a certain tedium about having to endure the concentrat–
ed attention to the mind of a character as limited in his understanding and
self-understanding as Swede--especially in his unrelenting incomprehen–
sion, guilt, and resentment. But the tedium is not simply a function of
Swede's limitations. Grief of the kind experienced by Swede is the endless
repetition of these feelings. It is the rare person who doesn't find his capac–
ity for sympathy taxed by the spectacle of the endless suffering of even a
close friend.
What interests Roth above all is the law of entropy in human life, the
precarious and futile attempts by which we try to maintain its stabilities.
There is, of course, the "breakdown of the body," when Swede finds his
daughter reduced to a lumpen state, emaciated and filthy. "Her foulness had
reached
him.
She is disgusting. His daughter is a human mess stinking of
human waste. Her smell is the smell of everything organic breaking down."
Virtues, the stuff of which character in its honorific sense is made, turn out
to be pastoral illusions. Swede, who seems to be the rare exception to the
