American Pastoral

American Pastoral is a 1997 Philip Roth novel concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, an all-around good guy whose life is ruined by the "indigenous American berzerk".

The framing device employed in American Pastoral is a 45th high school reunion attended by frequent Roth alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman. There he meets former-classmate Jerry Levov ("Swede" Levov's younger brother) who describes to him the tragic course of Seymour's adult life. The rest of the story consists of Zuckerman's posthumous recreation of Seymour Levov's story, based upon Jerry's testimony, a few newspaper clippings, and Zuckerman's own impressions after two brief run-ins with "the Swede" towards the end of his life. Note that in the first of these run-ins (at a 1985 baseball game), Seymour is with his young adolescent son, strongly implying he divorced his first wife and started a new family.

Plot

Levov is born and raised in Newark, New Jersey the son of a successful glove manufacturer. Called "the Swede" because of his blond hair, blue eyes, and Nordic good looks, he is a star athlete and the hero of the book's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman. "The Swede" eventually takes over his father's glove factory -"Newark Maid"- and marries Dawn Dwyer, an Irish-American Miss New Jersey winner.

Levov establishes a perfect life for himself, with a perfect wife, a perfect home in the country, and a perfect career. Yet as the Vietnam War and racial unrest wrack the country and destroy inner-city Newark, Seymour's teenage daughter is slowly radicalized until the good fortune of his "pastoral" life is exploded with an act of terroristic violence.

Connections

Though Roth has re-used ideas and characterizations from his own body of work before, American Pastoral contains perhaps his most blatant act of "self-plagirization". In it he has Seymour Levov's father, Lou, complain bitterly about his friends' anti-Black animosity (steming from their rage at the destruction of their businesses and neighborhoods during Newark's race riots):

"I'm by the pool and my wonderful friends look up from the papers and they tell me they ought to take the schvartzes and line 'em up and shoot 'em. And I'm the one who has to remind them that's what Hitler did to the Jews. And you know what they tell me, as an answer? 'How can you compare schvartzes to Jews?'"

(p 164)

Compare it to this passage from The Professor of Desire (also spoken by the protagonist's father):

"And, tell me, what could make a difference with those ignorant bigots? At least let them hear what someone else thinks of them! Jewish people so full of hatred that they go out and vote for a George Wallace- it's beyond me. Why? People who have lived and seen a whole life-time as a minority, and the suggestion that they make in all seriousness is that they ought to line up the colored in front of machine guns and let them have it. Take actual people and mow them down... I tell them, look at Mr. Barbatnik- ask him if that isn't the same thing that Hitler did with the Jews. And you know what their answer is, grown men who have raised families and run successful businesses and live in retirement now in condominiums like supposed civilized people? They say, 'How can you compare niggers with Jews?'

(p. 235)

Quotes

• "But wit or irony is like a hitch in his swing for a kid like the Swede, irony being a human consolation and beside the point if you're getting your way as a god." (p. 5)
• "I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface." (p. 23)
• "And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people... ? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again." (p. 35)

American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and the film rights to it were later optioned by Paramount Pictures.

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