Miss America turns bomber.
Do you still blame the parents?

Tim Adams reviews American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Jonathan Cape, £15.99, pp432

Having spent a good part of two decades scrutinising his imagination, examining its origins and doubting, obsessively, its integrity, Philip Roth, now in his mid sixties, seems determined simply to employ his gift in all its extraordinary vigour. Hard at the heels of Sabbath's Theater, and its remarkable whoring hero, the great pretender has, with American Pastoral, produced his second masterpiece within two years.

We open in familiar Roth territory: Newark, New Jersey; and a half-lit age of post-war hopefulness, a time when New York was still a city of old-world craftsmen and new-world chancres, and 'atomic energy was all our own'. The focus of all that optimism, all that energy, at least in Newark's Weequahic High School, rests in the frame of Seymour 'Swede' Levov: a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jew, effortless star of every sport he plays.

Unlike many of Roth's characters, raging for their slice of the American pie, the Swede, with his Waspish looks and his corporeal brilliance, is at liberty to gain access to the nation's dreams by conventional means: through prowess on the ball park. Thus he inherits and expands his father's glove-making business, marries the shiksa Dawn Dwyer Miss New Jersey 1949, buys a smallholding upstate and prepares for the simple successes to which he appears born. But this being a Roth novel 'Simple is never that simple'. And this being a Roth novel at least some of the complexity comes from the rigmarole of unreliable narration.

The story of Seymour Levov is told in the voice of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's long time alter ego. Zuckerman cherishes schoolboy memories of the inscrutable Levov; when he runs into him in post-prostate life there seem to be no cracks in the myth. It is only later, when he meets the Swede's brother at a high-school reunion, and he is informed how the Swede died in despair, that he begins to imagine below the surface. Thus what we get is archetypal blandness (Levov) viewed by exaggerated consciousness (Zuckerman); a fantasy of threatened innocence as viewed by all-knowing experience. And it would not be Philip Roth (or Nathan Zuckerman) if he did not concoct mental traumas that were at least the equal of his hero's physical magnificence.

The author has long been preoccupied with the tyrannies our bodies hold over us: for Portnoy it was the dictatorship of an over-eager right hand; Zuckerman of The Anatomy Lesson was, like Roth himself, a hostage to worn vertebrae; this time, however, it is the very physical perfection of the Levovs that apparently sets in motion the events that leads to the destruction of all that they love.

For a while though it is the American pastoral dream, the dream that is encapsulated in the Swede, a real-life Johnny Appleseed, who needs nothing more in his life than to 'stride' his own 100 acres, hand-in-hand with his own daughter, Merry, to their own village store. At first the single tiny flaw in this world is that the daughter suffers from a speech impediment, which, according to her therapist, is an expression of her inadequacy beside her all-too-idyllic parents. The personality disorder that creates the stammer, however, becomes something far more alarming, and that pastoral dream is comprehensively dismantled, cliché by cliché, when, at the age of 16, Merry reduces the village store to rubble with high explosives as part of an obscure protest against the Vietnam war.

After the bomb, which kills a family friend, all hell breaks loose for the Swede. His daughter disappears and, in his mind, becomes responsible for all of the Weathermen-inspired mayhem of the late Sixties.

Roth has long been a master of the rip-tide dynamics of mania; but here, for the most part, he details the studied avoidance of conflict: the strategies by which Levov continues to make sense of the world. This, as a result, is a book that, wonderfully, tells you more than you will ever want to know about glove-making. Indeed there is an Updike-like preoccupation with surface and process. But this is also Rabbit Angstrom as conceived by Philip Roth, and eventually his comfort zone of kid leather and calfskin is stripped away to reveal places of unimagined filth (this reaches its apotheosis when, overcome by the stench of the unwashed daughter he has come to rescue, Levov vomits in her face). As the Swede's brother later yells, in a vintage two-page Rothian rant: 'You wanted Miss America? Well, you've got her, with a vengeance she's your daughter! The reality of this place is right in your kisser now! America Amok! America Amuck!' Despite its insistence on the more extreme degradations of modern America, however, American Pastoral is no simple satire on the bucolic delusions of the suburban middle class; far more of its anger is in fact directed against the freedoms of the permissive society.

And on this occasion, Roth's narrative tricksiness serves to hold our sympathies for these attitudes in perfect uneasy balance. Few writers are capable of raising themselves to the technical heights achieved in the climactic scene here, a 100-page account of a dinner party; hardly any are able with such authority to measure what America has become against what it once seemed capable of. Only this writer, however, would dare to do these things in the voice of a sentimental old Jew, smooching with a high-school sweetheart and reminiscing about his Boy's-Own hero. As a result this momentous novel ends impossibly unresolved, ends in fact with the question 400 pages have been spent exploring: 'And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?' So wonders Philip Roth, all American. (For a day).

 

This review was first published in the British daily The Observer.