American Pastoral by Philip Roth

In a sense, 2009 was the year of the Pulitzer Prize for me. I read seven novels that won the award: William Kennedy's Ironweed (review here), Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (review here), Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons (review here), Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (review here), Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove (review here), Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries (review here) and, finally, Philip Roth's American Pastoral. There were no truly bad novels in the bunch, with Smiley's book just on the border, but only Eugenides and McMurtry really impressed me.

Roth is capable of doing so; The Plot Against America was one of my favorite reads of 2006, and I was mostly impressed by The Human Stain when I read it earlier this year. Like the latter, the narration in American Pastoralis provided by Roth's oft-used fictional alter-ego, famous novelist Nathan Zuckerman. The occasion of the 45th reunion of his high school Class of 1950 finds Zuckerman reminiscing, in particular about a student/athlete who had been the king of the town during Zuckerman's New Jersey youth:

The elevation of Swede Levov into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews can best be explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and the fears that it fostered. With the Swede indomitable on the playing field, the meaningless surface of life provided a bizarre, delusionary kind of sustenance, the happy release into a Swedian innocence, for those who lived in dread of never seeing their sons or their brothers or their husbands again.

But for Zuckerman, the Swede was not just a mythical legend; he was the older brother of one of his friends and thus the first god to deign to acknowledge young Zuckerman's existence:

And then one day I shared in that glory. I was ten, never before touched by greatness, and would have been as beneath the Swede's attention as anyone else along the sidelines had it not been for Jerry Levov. Jerry had recently taken me on board as a friend; though I was hard put to believe it, the Swede must have noticed me around their house. And so late on a fall afternoon in 1943, when he got slammed to the ground by the whole of the JV team after catching a short Leventhal bullet and the coach abruptly blew the whistle signaling that was it for the day, the Swede, tentatively flexing an elbow while half running and half limping off the field, spotted me among the other kids and called over, "Basketball was never like this, Skip."

The reminiscence about Zuckerman's youth and the Swede's place in it is really a long introduction to two later encounters that Zuckerman had with the Swede. In a brief 1985 encounter, they run into each other at a Mets game, and Zuckerman is introduced to the Swede's son. More enigmatically, Zuckerman receives a letter from the Swede ten years later, asking to meet with Zuckerman to discuss the possibility of writing a memoir of the Swede's father. Though this is ordinarily the sort of request Zuckerman turns down cold, he can't possible refuse the Swede, and so they meet for dinner. In a very strange meal, the Swede talks about his health, his brother, his wife and sons, but never really gets around to the subject that had seemed to inspire the letter. Zuckerman leaves the meal concluding that the Swede, pleasant and sociable as he was, was nothing more, a man wholly lacking in drama or complexity. Later that year, at his reunion, he runs into Jerry Levov and finds out that the Swede has just died, and that it turns out Zuckerman had known very little about the Swede's life:

"The incessant questioning of a conscious adulthood was never something that obstructed my brother. He got the meaning for his life some other way. I don't mean he was simple. Some people thought he was simple because all his life he was so kind. But Seymour was never that simple. Simple is never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming too late. His life was blown up by that bomb, The real victim of that bombing was him."

"What bomb?"

It turns out that the Swede's daughter, Merry, his daughter from his first marriage, had blown up the local post office in a 1968 protest against... well, against the world, against Vietnam, against her father. A man was killed in the blast, but the repercussions certainly did not stop there. This revelation, shocking to Zuckerman who cannot quite figure out how he had remained ignorant about such an event, inspires him to reconstruct the Swede's life in the years leading up to and following the explosion that had torn his world apart. Thus the majority of American Pastoral is a novel within a novel, an imagining by Nathan Zuckerman of what life was like for Swede Levov as he married Miss New Jersey, took over his father's successful glove-manufacturing company, and raised a daughter who would eventually rebel against everything he stood for in the most violent way possible.

The early part of the book, in which Zuckerman discusses his childhood and own experiences with the Swede, is the novel's strongest section. Too much of what Zuckerman imagines about the Swede's struggles with his daughter, and his struggles with his daughter's crime, struck me as trite and cliched, from Merry's juvenile rantings about Vietnam to the machinations of Rita Cohen, the woman who shows up at the Swede's office demanding Merry's prized possessions on behalf of the fugitive girl before trying to seduce the Swede in a hotel room. Even worse, the book's frame story structure obfuscates responsibility for the banality: is this Roth who can't resist the urge to present the culture wars through platitudes, or it Zuckerman who is stuck believing in this hackneyed dichotomy.

The novel has its strengths: Roth's prose is always compelling. if nothing else, and American Pastoral does evoke many of the hotly debated issues of the late 1960s and early 1970s with verve and vigor. The novel is probably best enjoyed, and its social commentary most coherent, if read in conjunction with Roth's subsequent (and superior) two novels, I Married a Communist (set during the McCarthy era) and The Human Stain (set amidst the impeachment of President Clinton), which loosely form Roth's so-called "American Trilogy," each using its narrative to tackle the cultural divides that plagued a particular decade of post-WWII American public life.