American Pastoral by Philip Roth sucks you into a whorl of extremist Vietnam War propaganda, which comes inexplicably from the calmest part of the United States: a maple-and-oak backyard in Rimrock, New Jersey. There lives our blond-haired, blue-eyed businessman, Seymour “Swede” Levov, his beautiful wife Dawn, and their daughter Merry. Their whole suburban life is successful and pastoral until Merry begins to spiral off trajectory, engaging in extreme antiwar protests until one day the life of the Levovs is blown apart as if by a deliberately planted bomb.
Philip Roth wrote this novel in 1997 and went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for it. The novel was meant to echo the failure of the American Dream, specifically the immigrants’ dream of a respectable suburban life with a job, wife, trees and backyard barbecues, since Swede Levov is a third-generation immigrant himself. It was also meant to record the chaotic reality of the sixties and seventies in the United States—the Vietnam War and antiwar protests, Watergate Scandal, political assassinations and civil rights movements—onto which some people stubbornly projected this fantasy.
In the beginning of American Pastoral, Roth chronicles the high school career of the superhero Swede: noble, stoic, athletic, humble, and seemingly blessed with everything good in life in New Jersey. Then, as his life unravels with Merry and all the crises brought in her wake, he struggles to hang on by a thread. Roth tells of the agony of a man who has worked hard his whole life to achieve success, come by it all honestly, yet at the age of forty-five finds himself in the grotesque, horrifying position of being Merry’s father—a bomber‘s father. A teenage bomber, now gone missing.
Non-ideal things happen to ideal people. Deviancy prevails, as the novel states near the end (which I won’t spoil). “You can’t stop it. Improbably, what was not supposed to happen had happened and what was supposed to happen had not happened.”
The extremes of sexual, political, and religious ideology encountered in American Pastoral are so bizarre that it’s often uncomfortable to read, but it’s a representation of American reality that I see myself coming back to in the coming years. Swede Levov, after all, was based on a real person that Philip Roth went to high school with in Newark. Though I usually end book reviews on a harmonious note, this novel insists there’s nothing harmonious about American life, so I’ll just invite you to read and experience American Pastoral for yourself. Be warned that there’s nothing pastoral about it, either.
