The Indigenous American Berserk

...What the hell happened to our smart Jewish kids...

...Sooner or later the liberal dream must give way to the hot light of nightmare, referred to here as "the indigenous American berserk...

...For all the memory retrieval that goes on here...

...It may be organic, it may be psychological...

...This last sentiment, which nicely describes the method of Portnoy and Sabbath, should not be taken at face value here...

...It's no accident that the best of Roth's recent books (and they are terrifically good), Patrimony and Sabbath's Theater, elbowed the ongoing tribulations of N. Z. aside to make room for more colorful, more dramatic, and ultimately more moving and revealing subjects...

...Roth has always had a great eye to go with his great ear, and an obvious passion for research, and they're on full display here...

...a Jew who in every visible way, from his athletic prowess to his blond hair to his shiksa wife to his rural estate in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, has climbed as close to WASP heights as one can...

...The inscrutable hiddenness of life ("the knowledge," as Sabbath put it, "that everything subterranean beats everything terranean by a mile...

...Roth's social history, for all its heat, is curiously cranky and thin...

...the tricky disjunctions of self...

...He had thought most of it was order and only a little of it was disorder...

...You could almost feel the relief in the prose...

...If age has failed to mellow him...

...And yet, going down these not-yetmean streets once again, fighting to stay alert, it's easy to miss what actually is new here...

...Ridiculously, perhaps, at the onset of old age, I had only to see his signature at the foot of the letter to be swamped by memories of him, both on and off the field, that were some 50 years old and yet still captivating...

...Herman Roth and that putzy poor man's Lear, Mickey Sabbath...

...As is, finally, the innerturmoil of Swede Levov, as imagined by Nathan Zuckerman, as imagined by Philip Roth...

...They have parents they can't hate anymore because their parents are so good to them, so they hate America instead...

...most tellingly in the Roth cosmology, a man who does not shtup every young girl he can...

...He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach: that it makes no sense...

...And look where the f...

...The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy...

...Well, maybe not so captivating...

...The schema is foregrounded throughout...

...the details...

...Jerry Levov, the "bad" (read: multiply divorced) tell-it-like-it-is younger brother, has his own take on Swede's abrupt death...

...the failure to understand anyone's intentions fully, including your own, and yet the endless compulsion, if not responsibility, to try to understand them...

...Roth depicts a world whose energies of order must forever yield to a counterforce of destruction that erupts without warning...

...Swede wonders during the book's long, bravura third section (consisting entirely, like a Chekhov play, of a dull summer dinner party, and recalling the end of Roth's other frankly Chekhovian work, The Professor of Desire...

...Whereas aggression is cleansing or curing...

...Or rather, what's so old and enduring a preoccupation for Roth that by approaching it straight on...

...The tactile pleasures of a woman's glove, the behind-the-scenes insecurities that attach themselves to a beauty pageant, the renovations of an old stone house, the inquisition of a young gentile fianc?©e by her prospective Jewish father-in-law...

...whatever its origins, it's simply there, as furious and intractable and chaotic as adolescence itself...

...He'd had it backwards...

...Among the many vigorous if not obsessional currents in the novel is its revisiting of the arguments ofthat contentious era (and no Roth novel lacks for arguments: He makes more and better use of the exclamation mark than any writer alive...

...Hence, the 1960s...

...Swede's father asks...

...seemingly...

...Will not have the angry quality as his liability, so doesn't get it as an asset either...

...What was he, stripped of all the signs he Hashed...

...The major damage comes later, when, in the novel's devastating event, Merry's Weathermen-like demolition of the local post office kills a man and sends her underground...

...And answering, It is impossible to know...

...as he does throughout this strange, complex and extraordinary novel...

...Surely by now, at century's end, few depths remain unplumbed in this person fashioned in the sort-of-but-notquite-though-provocatively-similar image of the creator Himself...

...Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction, Harvard University I suspect I am not alone among Philip Roth's many readers in finding the prospect of another installment in the Nathan Zuckerman saga about as appealing as a tax audit...

...Exactly what's so indigenously American about hating your parents, or for that matter blowing up buildings, is a question the novel, for all its three decades worth of distance on the era, never answers...

...Though Swede and his wife are carefully depicted as antiwar liberals, determinedly keeping the family glove factory in Newark during the whiteflight years, such "goodness," Roth seems to suggest, was in hindsight a form of denial, a shallow and self-deluding dream...

...they can only imagine, and even then they are doomed to fail...

...A reminder that the true fall, always, is into knowledge...

...Systems will break down, personal or national, psychological or ideological...

...One might also wonder if in portraying the '60s as an aberrational tear in the American fabric, the writer may be hitting the nostalgia button a bit too hard...

...Did children really love their parents so much better in older, whiter, more orderly Newark...

...There has always been a deep strand of Chekhovian melancholy in Roth's literary fabric, and it is powerfully and abundantly present in American Pastoral...

...Always holding things together...

...from the beginning of Roth's career these have provided an undertow of somberness, a countercurrent running below the crashing waves of rage, sex and bravado, asking, What does it mean to be good...

...Even then, as history crashes the stage, the reader is pulled irresistibly back to that stuttering young girl in that perfect old house...

...History arrives in the Swede's life in the form of his teenage daughter...

...It is simply what is the case...

...It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again...

...Roth portrays this affliction and the minor damage it radiates with great specificity and patience...

...No one can know anyone else, least of all themselves...

...He was our Kennedy," Zuckerman recalls, ignoring this last point...

...The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway...

...the postwar Newark childhood, the Jewish petit-bourgeois milieu, the love of baseball, the many "shards of reality" that attach themselves to the memory of Swede Levov...

...his work retains its heat and thrust, its furious accumulations, its unruly obsessiveness...

...Call it his own bleak version of Secrets and Lies...

...Also in short: a man headed for The Fall (the capitals are Roth's...

...In short: an American success story...

...a man of restraint and responsibility, a factoryowner, a homeowner, a tree-owner (this is a pastoral, after all...

...banal, prosperous and uneventful life story of Swede Levov...

...it's hard not to be aware of the labor involved as the usual Rothian suspects are meticulously rounded up in long, leisurely, widebody paragraphs that never quite gather momentum...

...just a writer of prodigious energies and consummate skill making good on that clich?© of the mature artist: working at the height of his powers...

...But Swede's trajectory, as tracked by the old Weequaic High gang, shares some of that heady postwar glamour...

...he makes it feel new: the profound strangeness and remoteness of the American self...

...Tolerant respect for every position,' says Jerry...

...There is a feeling for human inadequacy that is more intimate and devastating than we have seen before, and perhaps more forgiving...

...Still, despite the book's schematic design (as reflected in the title and in Swede's wife's literally having been a Miss America contestant), its life and force derive from something messier and more subversive...

...Whether you embrace order, like Swede Levov, or ruin, like Mickey Sabbath, in the end, Roth argues, it will come to the same thing...

...That American Pastoral does make sense is a tribute to Roth's narrative energies...

...Here's Zuckerman's paraphrase: "The Swede is nice, that is to say passive, that is to say trying always to do the right thing, a socially controlled character who doesn't always burst out, doesn't yield to rage ever...

...So Zuckerman begins to conclude, as he's drawn into the...

...For none of the aggression in American Pastoral...

...there are easily two dozen such passages in the novel...

...People think of history in the long term," Zuckerman observes, "but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing...

...And doubly impossible from the outside...

...and there is a great deal ??”proves even remotely cleansing or curative...

...all are rendered with such care and precision, such sheer authorial investment, that the effect is singularly powerful and contagious...

...that is every man's tragedy...

...What kind of mask is everyone wearing...

...it's got you...

...it does seem to have enriched his perspective...

...No leaden reflections, no coy games of peekaboo with the mirror...

...The first section of American Pastoral, concerning the sudden, improbable interest taken by a certain Nathan Zuckerman in a semilegendary figure from his past named Seymour "Swede" Levov, may be off-putting to some...

...If this sounds a touch didactic, a theme baldly in search of an illustration, get used to it...

...It is no accident that this novel full of attempted answers ends with a question...

...And it goes on and on...

...Merry, who amid the benevolent fluency of late'60s American life has been cursed with a stutter...

...According to this theory, it's the no-rage that kills him in the end...

...As opposed to the geyser-like eruptions of Portnoy or Sabbath, Swede Levov, we see right off, is a "good" son in the mode of Paul Hertz and Gabe Wallach of Letting Go...

...That's how we know we're alive: We're wrong...