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| Crowd control on the streets of Newark, 1967 |
“The Swede.” So begins Philip Roth’s Pulitzer-winning American Pastoral (1997), a novel of truly epic proportions about a very ordinary man. And its hero, a tragic hero on the scale of the Greeks, is Seymor “The Swede” Levov. “The Swede.” A declaration. He doesn’t need a verb to be a complete sentence. He simply asserts himself. Not even “Call me Ishmael.” Not “Call me the Swede,” or “We called him the Swede,” just: “The Swede.”
The Swede has a perfect life, for a Jew from Newark: star high school athlete, marine, marries Miss New Jersey, takes over his father’s glove business. Everything is going for the Swede, until the bomb.
His daughter Merry, at a measley sixteen years old, becomes radicalized by the war in Vietnam. She begins to fight with her parents. She argues with the other kids at school. She argues with everyone. And then she bombs the post office, killing an innocent passerby, to “bring the war home.” In an instant the Swede’s idyllic life, his “American pastoral,” is completely overturned.
The story is an obvious allegory. Like the decline of the Sutpens and of the Reivers and of the Compsons for Faulkner symbolizes the decline of the Old South after the Civil War, the decline of the Levovs for Roth symbolizes the overturning of the heroic postwar Newark, and America as a whole, by the twin crises of the Vietnam war and the 1967 Newark race riots, converging in the Swede’s ungrateful little brat who blows up a post office and goes into hiding.
The Swede had known little adversity in his life, certainly not unexpected adversity like that which his own teenage daughter had brought down upon him. All of a sudden nothing made any sense to him anymore, and for the first time he asked himself, “Why me?”
Roth’s soaring prose, worthy of Hawthorne, often comes through as long, sprawling sentences framed as questions. Roth is not a shower, he’s a teller. And tell he does. Again and again the Swede asks himself, “How could this possibly have happened?” “I gave my daughter everything. How could she do this?” “Why must tragedy strike?” All of the Swede’s questions can be reduced to the most fundamental of all: “Why?” Within that simple “why” is the mystery of life, the mystery of existence. Something the Swede never had to think about so long as he was a star athlete and married to Miss New Jersey and running Newark Maid Gloves.
When the Swede’s terroristic daughter disappears, what does he do? He has an affair with her speech therapist (Merry has a stutter, one Roth does not shy away from depicting in the most stigmatizing manner). Perfect Swede, who had been faithful to his wife Dawn for twenty years, has an affair. Once the facade is pulled back, all bets are off. Nothing means anything anymore. The Swede, whose entire life had hitherto been dedicated to observing traditional family decorum to the letter, no longer has any reason to do anything, or not to do anything. Because he can’t find reason behind his daughter’s actions which killed a man.
And several years later, when the Swede finally tracks down Merry, he calls his brother Jerry to tell him that his daughter is a Jain now and lives in a dilapidated Newark squat, that her existence is more depraved than he could have imagined, and that she has since her disappearance set off several more bombs and killed three more people. “One plus three is four.”
And instead of comforting Seymour, his brother Jerry, vicious Jerry, launches into a tirade, blaming the Swede for anything and everything. What Jerry reveals to Seymour is that his rosy-eyed view of America had been a fantasy all along. It’s not that America had fallen; it’s that America had always-already been fallen, and it took the bomb for the Swede to wake up and realize it.
“You wanted Miss America? Well, you've got her, with a vengeance–she's your daughter! You wanted to be a real American jock, a real American marine, a real American hotshot with a beautiful Gentile babe on your arm? You longed to belong like everybody else to the United States of America? Well, you do now, big boy, thanks to your daughter. The reality of this place is right up in your kisser now. With the help of your daughter you're as deep in the shit as a man can get, the real American crazy shit. America amok! America amuck!” (p. 277)
Casting a shadow over the entire story is the Second World War. WWII was heroic, it was epic, ultimately triumphant, so very American, just like the Swede’s regular athletic feats at Weequahic High School throughout the duration of the war. But WWII also means the Holocaust. The Holocaust figures into everything here, but is rarely mentioned explicitly in the novel. Merry compares what the U.S. is doing to Vietnam to the Holocaust, a comparison which her grandfather Lou, who also opposes the war, cannot agree with. The only other mention I can remember is when the grandfather so sanctimoniously compares Deep Throat to the Holocaust during a tense dinner party conversation. “I think Miss Lovelace is having the time of her life.” “Adolf Hitler had the time of his life, Professor, shoveling Jews into the furnace.” (p. 361)
“What happened to the Swede?” becomes “What happened to America?” No easy answer is given, but everything suggests that what had been America was, at least in part, an illusion, a fantasy. A brief respite between the bookends of World War II and the Vietnam War, a respite that, for a minority of Americans, felt like heaven: timeless, and so without history. And then History returns with the bomb.
“What on earth is less reprenehsnible than the life of the Levovs?” The novel ends with an unanswerable question, or a question that in its very asking refuses an answer.