American Pastoral (1997). Content and Description

The prolific Roth became known throughout the 1980s and early 1990s for producing irreverent postmodern works such as The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, books that play with the readers’ expectations while still delivering inimitable first- person prose. In 1997, however, Roth yet again defied expectations by producing a dense, detailed, and realistic novel.

American Pastoral, the first book in what would come to be known as the author’s American trilogy, was a striking departure for Roth in a number of ways. Whereas readers had come to expect Roth’s novels to feature an in-depth portrait of a tortured and verbose male protagonist (often, critics argued, at the expense of gaining insight into other characters), American Pastoral was painted on a wider social canvas and featured penetrating analyses of a number of central characters.

Taking aim at the vast shifts in society caused by the Vietnam War, the excesses of 1960s radicalism, and the cultural and racial enmity to which, according to Roth, they gave rise, American Pastoral is preoccupied with history on both the personal and national levels. As does John Updike, the fellow postwar American author to whom he is often compared, Roth attempts to combine a psychological account of his main characters with a broader social commentary on the aspirations of America during its continued industrialization after World War II. This marked a return to the realist roots that Roth had abandoned after lukewarm critical response to his early novels Letting Go and When She Was Good.

American Pastoral is primarily the story of Seymour “Swede” Levov, a hometown hero who finds his world turned upside down when his college-aged daughter, Merry, becomes a bomb-toting member of the 1960s counterculture. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s literary alter ego in many novels, returns in American Pastoral, but this time to tell another’s story, rather than his own. When a now-aging Nathan Zuckerman returns to his high school for a 45th reunion celebration, he meets Swede Levov’s younger brother, Jerry, and is told the story of his older classmate’s heroic rise and fall. Fascinated by Jerry’s tale, Zuckerman takes it upon himself to re-create the details of his deceased classmate’s life and the events that led to his premature demise.

Part of Zuckerman’s fascination with Swede Levov arises from the fact that this former Jewish classmate was widely regarded as truly “American” in a way that his other school friends could never hope to be. From his success as an athlete to his blond hair and blue eyes, Swede is viewed as the student most likely to succeed. Zuckerman provides the reader with an in-depth analysis of the events of postwar America—from the Vietnam War to Watergate, the Newark race riots, and the obsolescence of family-run businesses—to explain why Swede does not live up to the expectations that surround him in his youth.

Many critics see American Pastoral as perhaps Roth’s strongest and most lasting contribution to American letters; the novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and made Time magazine’s prestigious 2005 list of the “All-Time 100 Greatest Novels.”

For Discussion or Writing:
1. American Pastoral—often labeled the first in a trilogy that extends from the author’s treatment of Swede Levov’s postwar America to the McCarthy era of I Married a Communist and the culture wars of The Human Stain— marked a turning point in Roth’s literary career. Is American Pastoral appropriately viewed as the first of a trilogy? Why would these works be grouped together? What themes recur in these works by Roth?

2. Roth’s most recent works have all manifested an increasing interest in American history. How does Roth’s portrayal of the United States in American Pastoral compare to his portrayal of the Jewish romance with America in The Plot against America, his 2004 dystopian novel about Nazism come home to roost on U.S. shores?

3. Look up a definition for the literary convention pastoral. How does the concept of “the pastoral” function as a defining principle of the narrative? Is Roth’s novel a uniquely American pastoral? How do the title and the ideology of the pastoral relate to the frequent Genesis imagery in American Pastoral?

4. Although critics often distinguish American Pastoral from Roth’s earlier works, the novel also marks the return of Nathan Zuckerman, the alter ego who saw Roth through so many novels. Why this return? What role does Zuckerman play in American Pastoral? How does Roth use his position and his cobbled-together narrative as a commentary on the role of the writer and on the possibility of establishing the truth about another’s life?

5. In American Pastoral Roth begins explicitly to address the theme of race and postwar race relations, a topic that had remained mostly subtextual in his earlier works. What can we make of Roth’s depiction of the Newark race riots in American Pastoral? Do they manifest a particularly cynical response to the rise of black nationalism and the political radicalism of the 1960s? How does Roth’s representation of the waning of Jewish racial difference in American Pastoral play a part in this depiction? How does American Pastoral compare to The Human Stain, Roth’s 2000 novel about race in America?

6. Like John Updike, Roth is preoccupied with regional American decline. In American Pastoral he attempts to re-create the world of Swede Levov and his antecedents in the glove manufacturing business with painstaking detail. He also focuses much of his text on the destruction of Newark and the area surrounding it. How can Roth’s representation of regional decline in New Jersey (often read through the decline of the glove trade) be compared to Updike’s depiction of Pennsylvania in his Rabbit tetralogy?