American Pastoral

The Golden Boy

Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov is the son of a Newark glove manufacturer — Jewish immigrant success made manifest in a single generation. He is tall, blond, athletic, modest; at Weequahic High he was the kind of student who makes the whole school proud. He marries Dawn, a former Miss New Jersey. He takes over his father’s factory. He buys a stone farmhouse in Old Rimrock. He has a daughter, Merry.

Nathan Zuckerman, who worshipped the Swede from afar in high school, encounters the Swede’s brother at a class reunion forty years later and is told what happened. The novel is Zuckerman’s attempt to imagine it from the inside.

What happened is this: Merry, sixteen, becomes a political radical. She protests the Vietnam War with increasing intensity. In February 1968 she bombs the Old Rimrock post office and kills a man. She goes underground. The Swede spends the rest of his life trying to find her and understand.

The Pastoral Destroyed

American Pastoral is the first of Roth’s American Trilogy, and its central argument is that the pastoral — the American fantasy of clean, prosperous, uncomplicated life, of history defeated by individual effort and good character — is always a construction over an abyss. The Swede did everything right. His daughter did not.

Roth is not blaming the Swede, and he is not exactly blaming Merry. He is examining the gap between one generation’s dream and the next generation’s inheritance, and the violence that gap can produce. The violence is literal here, but the novel insists it is also the normal condition of American families.

Reading Guides

• The Human Stain by Philip Roth — Full Review
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen — Full Review

Zuckerman’s Method

The formal structure of American Pastoral is worth dwelling on, because it is essential to the novel’s argument. Nathan Zuckerman does not know the Swede intimately — he worshipped him from a distance in high school, encountered him briefly decades later, and then reconstructed his inner life from second-hand account and imagination. The novel Roth writes is explicitly Zuckerman’s imagining of what it must have been like to be the Swede from the inside, and the explicit framing of this as imagination is not a weakness but the point.

Zuckerman cannot know the Swede’s interior life. Neither can the reader. What both have is the outward facts — the marriage, the daughter, the bombing — and the task of making sense of them. The American pastoral, Roth is arguing, is always a construction, always an imagining of a life from outside, always a projection of what we believe American success looks like from the people who achieve it. The Swede is what the American dream looks like from a distance; Zuckerman’s imagining of his interior is the attempt to get close enough to see the dream’s actual texture.

Newark’s Decline

The industrial Newark that produced the Swede — the Newark glove factory, the immigrant-founded business, the Jewish community that built itself into prosperity over two generations — is a constant presence in the novel, not as backdrop but as historical ground. Newark’s decline from prosperous industrial city to urban crisis is the collective fate that mirrors the Swede’s personal one. The 1967 Newark riots, which Roth renders with documentary precision, are the external equivalent of what Merry does to her family: the eruption of a violence that had been accumulating beneath the pastoral surface, finally undeniable.

Roth had left Newark for New York in 1959 and did not live there as an adult, but the city remained central to his imaginative world. The Newark of American Pastoral is both a real place — specific streets, specific buildings, specific social geography — and a figure for the possibility that the American promise creates and then withdraws. The Levovs built something in Newark; Newark was destroyed around them. The pastoral is always at risk from the history it was constructed to evade.

Merry Levov

One of the novel’s most demanding accomplishments is the portrait of Merry Levov — the daughter who becomes a bomber, who goes underground, who the Swede finds years later as a Jain monk, who has deliberately degraded herself in ways he cannot comprehend. Merry is not rendered sympathetically in any conventional sense, but Roth is careful not to make her merely incomprehensible. Her radicalization follows a logic — the logic of a child who took her parents’ America seriously enough to be outraged when it murdered Vietnamese civilians — and her subsequent choices, however incomprehensible to her father, have their own integrity.

The novel does not answer the question of who failed whom. The Swede did everything right and his daughter rejected everything he was. This is not a judgment on the Swede; it is the pastoral’s fundamental condition. The dream does not protect its dreamers from the people their children become, because the children inherit the dream and the reality it was built on top of, simultaneously.

The American Trilogy

American Pastoral was published in 1997 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. It is the first of Roth’s American Trilogy, followed by I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). The trilogy examines three consecutive decades of American political life — the 1960s, the 1950s, the 1990s — through three individual lives destroyed by their encounter with the decade’s specific violence. Together they constitute Roth’s most sustained attempt to write American history through individual fate: to show how the large forces of the century — the counterculture, McCarthyism, political correctness — arrive not as abstraction but as catastrophe in ordinary lives.

Philip Roth (1933–2018) was born in Newark, the son of an insurance company employee, and Newark’s Weequahic neighbourhood provided the specific geography for much of his fiction. The Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral was the major American fiction prize’s acknowledgment that this particular Newark Jew had written one of the century’s essential accounts of what American optimism looked like in the moment of its undoing.

Our rating: 4.6/5 — Roth’s greatest novel: the American pastoral taken seriously and then destroyed, with a protagonist who fully deserved the dream he had and a daughter who refused it for reasons she could not entirely articulate and he could not entirely understand.