American Pastoral by Philip Roth

Philip Roth is one of my favorite authors. I’ve read quite a few of his novels. This is one of his best.

American Pastoral, from 1997, is the first of three novels that Roth called his American Trilogy. I’ve read the third, The Human Stain, from 2000, which is excellent. I have not read the second, I Married a Communist from 1998. Maybe I will soon.

American Pastoral features Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s fictional stand-in who appears in nine of Roth’s novels. I recently read Exit Ghost, from 2007, the last Zuckerman novel. In that novel, Zuckerman suffers from incontinence and impotence as the result of prostate surgery. In this novel, Zuckerman has just recently had the surgery. In Exit Ghost there’s a scene at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan called Pierluigi’s. There’s a scene at a Manhattan Italian restaurant in American Pastoral, too, but it’s called Vincent’s. Zuckerman, here, lives in western Massachusetts, just as he does in Exit Ghost.

In Exit Ghost, though, Zuckerman is a central part of the story. In American Pastoral, he’s the storyteller. The story Zuckerman tells is about Seymour “Swede” Levov, the older brother of a schoolmate of Zuckerman’s back when they were growing up in Newark, New Jersey. Swede, though Jewish, is fair-haired, tall, handsome, and an all-around athlete. The novel begins with Zuckerman’s recollections of Swede in high school during the second World War. The neighborhood idolizes him for his embodiment of the American assimilation and perfection that the Jewish immigrants strive for.

Because I like the way one novel connects to another in my reading, I was pleased, after having recently read The Natural, that this novel begins with baseball stories. The Swede, a gifted athlete, is a Roy Hobbs type. Nathan Zuckerman and his friends obsess over a series of baseball novels by John R. Tunis starting with one called The Kid from Tomkinsville published in 1940. The lead character in that novel, named Roy Tucker, and his tragic story seems like it might have been an inspiration for Bernard Malamud a decade later. Zuckerman’s high school memories are followed by a scene 40 years later in the mid-80s when Zuckerman happens to run into the Swede and his young son at a Mets game.

But the connection from The Natural to American Pastoral was only accidental; I didn’t choose to read this deliberately. My church hosts a drop-in program every Tuesday for homeless folks. We provide two hot meals, a shower truck, donated clothes, a comfortable place to sit, an electrical connection to charge cell phones, and a rack of used books free for the taking. As I arrived to work I glanced through the rack and found American Pastoral, a paperback edition marked on the back “Reader’s Edition Not For Sale”, which I assume means it was printed pre-publication for reviewers. I’d not seen that before. The novel was well-reviewed when it came out and ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. I read another Pulitzer winner recently, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, which won the prize in 1921.

The novel begins with a prologue that explains how Nathan Zuckerman gets interested in telling the Swede’s story. Ten years after running into the Swede at the Mets game, Zuckerman receives a letter from the Swede wanting to meet Zuckerman and asking Zuckerman, the writer, to help the Swede write an appropriate tribute to the Swede’s father, who recently died. The letter includes a cryptic reference to “how much he suffered because of the shocks that befell his loved ones” (p. 18). Zuckerman and the Swede meet at that Italian restaurant in mid-town Manhattan where Zuckerman learns that the Swede is married, for a second time, with three boys (the oldest was the youngster that Zuckerman saw him with at the Mets game) and that the Swede had recently been treated for prostate surgery, just like Zuckerman, although without the negative consequences of the surgery. The Swede never mentions his father, or his first marriage, or the family “shocks” he alluded to in his letter, so Zuckerman’s curiosity is aroused.

Next, there’s a scene a few months later at Zuckerman’s 45th high school reunion where Zuckerman finds Jerry, Zuckerman’s classmate and the Swede’s younger brother. From Jerry, Zuckerman learns that the Swede died earlier that week, the prostate cancer had metastasized, and, Jerry discloses the “shocks” in the family that the Swede had referred to. The Swede and his first wife, a Miss New Jersey pageant winner, had a daughter, Meredith, called “Merry” who at age sixteen in 1968 had set off a bomb as a protest against the Vietnam War at the country store with a postal station in the little rural town of Old Rimrock, New Jersey, where the family lived. The bomb destroyed the store and killed a local doctor who had been picking up his mail. After that, the daughter went into hiding. The American dream of the star athlete marrying the beauty queen is blown up just as completely as the country store and by the same bomb. Five years later the Swede had gotten into contact with his daughter again and they remained in touch until just a year or two earlier when Jerry learned from the Swede that Merry had died.

From that information from Jerry, Zuckerman goes home and writes the Swede’s story, which is the rest of the novel. “That was as far as we got,” Zuckerman says of the story he heard from Jerry at the high school reunion, “as much of an earful as I was to hear from Jerry–anything more I wanted to know I’d have to make up” (p. 74).

The novel is in nine chapters, further divided into three sets of three, titled: “Paradise Remembered”, “The Fall”, and “Paradise Lost”. “Paradise Remembered” is the prologue stuff but concludes with Zuckerman’s imagined telling of the Swede’s life, including a wonderful but excruciating series of numbered summarized “conversations” between the Swede and his rebellious, obnoxious daughter, sunk into anti-capitalist, anti-war ideology she doesn’t understand, and running off to New York to soak up more of it from friends she makes who had dropped out of Columbia. Merry’s adolescent extremism attached to entirely counter-productive political strategies, set in the 1960s and written about in the 90s, resonated strongly for me with the 2020’s BLM “Defund the Police” and the 2024’s anti-Israel “Queers for Palestine” movements, among others. It’s a perennial human foible.

In “The Fall” we meet a new character named Rita Cohen. It’s four months after the bombing and Merry’s disappearance. Rita claims to be in touch with Merry and shows up at the Swede’s factory (he took over his father’s glove business) asking for some items that Merry wants. Desperate to find his daughter, the Swede gives in to RIta’s demands, which border on blackmail, eventually giving Rita $10,000 at a meeting in a hotel in New York. But he doesn’t learn anything of Merry in return. Meanwhile, we learn about the glove business. And we learn about the Swede’s first wife, Dawn Dwyer, a Catholic girl, Miss New Jersey. Dawn, rather oddly, raises cattle on the grounds of their Old Rimrock property; it’s more a vanity project than a business, though. She suffers greatly from Merry’s actions and disappearance. We learn, post bomb, she spends some time in a mental institution, and then recovers from her depression by flying to Geneva for a face lift as a way to start over.

In the final chapter of the middle section, five years have passed and the Swede reconnects with Merry. The Rita Cohen character sends him a letter telling him where to find her. She’s only a few miles away in a derelict section of Newark. She’s become a Jain. She’s thin, and filthy. Her religious beliefs prevent her from bathing. She lives in squalor. She tells the Swede where she’s been for five years, harbored by the radical underground, first in Chicago and then in Oregon. She set off two more bombs and killed three more people. She was raped at least twice. It’s miserable. I was desperate at this point for the Swede to call the FBI, have his daughter arrested but also ensure she got the care and supervision she needs. But he doesn’t.

The final section is a long telling of a dinner party at the Swede’s home with his wife in Old Rimrock. The Swede’s mother and father are there. Merry’s old speech therapist, Sheila is there with her husband, a doctor. There’s a man from one of the old families in the county, Bill Orcutt, and his wife, Jessie. Bill is an architect designing a new house for the Swede but really for Dawn, part of her starting over self-therapy. And another couple, the Umanoffs, Marcia and Barry. The Swede sits with his secret knowledge that he’s recently re-connected with Merry, and he knows now, from Merry, that it was Sheila who hid her in the first days after the bombing. We learn that the Swede had a brief affair with Sheila, and that she never told him what she had done for Merry. At the party, the Swede spies Bill Orcutt pushing himself physically on Dawn and realizes the two are having an affair, and that the home Orcutt is building with Dawn is really for the two of them, not for Dawn and the Swede. All of this against the backdrop of the Watergate hearings, which are on the television, and the release of Deep Throat, the movie, which the characters discuss. All of America is coming apart, along with the Swede’s marriage and family.

The novel ends suddenly as the dinner party comes to an end. We never get to the Swede’s second marriage or the three boys he has with his second wife.

The story is not told chronologically. Despite the three part structure, episodes from throughout the Swede’s life between high school at the end of World War II, and the dinner party at the end of the Vietnam War, get told in jumbled order. Zuckerman, the storyteller, is interested in analyzing how the conservative, kind, peace-making, all American character of the Swede, falls apart under the blows of the other side of America: the chaotic, privileged, over-confidant, self-righteous, but also ludicrous part of our national soul. In the midst, we get long contemplations of American themes: race, labor issues, immigration, religious identity. It’s an incredibly ambitious and well-executed work. But in the final section, as the analysis of the Swede and America continued and as new characters and stories are introduced at the interminable dinner party, I began to grow impatient. The hook of the novel, the drama of Merry’s violent action and her situation in hiding demanded an equal dramatic conclusion, but we’re not given one. Of course we know, from the beginning of the novel, that Merry will live another twenty years and the Swede will continue to be in touch with her; we know that the Swede’s marriage to Dawn will end, and seems about to end shortly after that last evening, but the novel itself simply fades away.