O My Newark!
GRANN, DAVID
O My Newark! Philip Roth's Triumphant American Pastoral' By David Grann At 64, Philip Roth has decided there may be more to life than masturbation. Until now, he has spent most of his literary...
...And with one nonsensical act, Merry—the Communist idiot, the viper, the stuttering imp—destroys her father and all he embodies...
...It is a stunning confession...
...No mischief...
...Blind antagonism and infantile desire to menace—those were her ideals...
...At the height of the Vietnam War, Levov's daughter blew up a local post office in protest and disappeared...
...So what is extraordinary about Roth's latest novel, American Pastoral, is its ordinariness...
...Roth is not interested in playing his usual cat-and-mouse game, making us guess what part of Zucker-man's life is simply borrowed from the author's and what part is invented...
...Together, the Levovs are Newark's Kennedys...
...It is a paean to old Newark, its family-run factories and crowded neighborhoods, to all the ordinary people whom Merry and her modern disciples have destroyed...
...Irving Howe ruefully observed that Roth's writings "betray a swelling nausea before the ordinariness of human existence...
...And, oddly, her nothingness is what makes American Pastoral so powerful...
...Indeed, by the end of the book, she has spouted so many ideologies, she has none...
...He dutifully runs the family glove business, Newark Maid, while she breeds cattle at their farm...
...This style of truth-telling has a vapid ideology all its own...
...And so begins Zuckerman's effort to reconstruct the Swede's rise and fall, a rise and fall that self-consciously parallels the American century...
...Roth, too, has left himself bare, especially to those who will charge he has renounced everything he himself has wrought...
...He seeks out Zuckerman, the worshipful childhood friend of his brother Jerry, ostensibly because Levov wants the famous novelist to write a tribute to his recently deceased father...
...and bedded the beatific Anne Frank...
...She is a Weatherman, a mad bomber, "chaos itself...
...He is home...
...His characters have, in no particular order, found sexual release in a handful of liver...
...Her vision has "nothing whatsoever to do with 'ideals' but with dishonesty, criminality, megalomania, and insanity," writes Zuckerman...
...his characterization of Merry, the one type he has always gotten right, is off...
...This guy is the embodiment of nothing...
...In the process, he has pitted his id against nearly every imaginable Jewish, middle-class, American, and literary taboo...
...he is flesh and blood...
...I destroy plant life...
...Or so it seems...
...She is all catalyst and no character...
...American Pastoral closes with despair...
...Zuckerman learns that the Swede, who has just died of cancer, had concealed more than his illness during their encounter...
...Where was the irrationality in him...
...The Swede signifies order, faith, law, reason...
...His life was blown up by that bomb," says Jerry, the Swede's brother...
...drowned a naked President Nixon in a bag full of water...
...No guile...
...She has killed not just one person, but four...
...The literary uprising, which began with the sardonic Neil Klugman of Goodbye, Columbus, inevitably led to the petulant Portnoy, which inevitably led to the soulless Sabbath, which finally produced the murderous Merry...
...In American Pastoral, he has produced his most radical work since he began his literary rebellion 40 years ago by producing a conventional book, a testimony and elegy to the bourgeoisie...
...In Sabbath's Theater, the eponymous protagonist sums up the Rothian credo in four words: "F— the laudable ideologies...
...Where Roth's most notorious character, Portnoy, fantasized about and had tortuous relationships with goyim, the Swede settles down happily with one: Miss New Jersey of 1949...
...Zuckerman's encounter with the Swede over dinner at a New York restaurant confirms what he has always suspected: Levov is empty, a kind of Matroshka doll with nothing inside...
...But just as we seem to be heading back to the couch of Port-noy's shrink, Roth subverts his ordinary subversions...
...Even her name is pat: Merry is unmerry...
...he is Newark...
...Unlike the Swede, who embodies America at her best, she truly is the embodiment of nothing...
...While the mythical Swede contains an unmistakable inner life, Merry has only a stutter and a bomb...
...But something is lost in Roth's conversion to middle-class ideals...
...But Zuckerman is not the novel's protagonist...
...The contradiction in Jews who want to fit in and want to stand out, who insist they are different and insist they are no different, resolved itself in the triumphant spectacle of this Swede...
...Until now, he has spent most of his literary career reflecting on himself, dissecting himself, portraying himself, disguising himself, and, at times, artistically and otherwise playing with himself...
...In Merry, Levov's daughter, Roth finds the ultimate vessel for civilization and its discontents, the Oswald of ideologies, a woman who could bestill even Sabbath's heart...
...What should be did not exist...
...Actually, Roth is present in American Pastoral, or rather his longtime alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, is...
...Merry is the logical outgrowth of Roth's relentless revolt against convention...
...No Roth...
...Nor is it about his usual obsession, which is to say, Philip Roth...
...turned into a 155-pound, watermelon-shaped female breast...
...The real victim of that bombing was him...
...Roth has revolted against his own revolt, and has embraced the Swede's pastoral as the antidote to Sabbath's theater...
...It is only soon after, at his 45th high-school reunion, that Zuckerman realizes he has committed the novelist's worst sin: He has misread a character...
...Where was the Jew in him...
...Tall with striking blond hair and blue eyes, "Swede" Levov is the mythical Other: an Aryan Jew, a football star, a Marine...
...Nothing blunt remained within him for bludgeoning deviancy to death...
...Spanning from World War II to Watergate, American Pastoral sets out in familiar territory: the Jewish section of Newark, amid the hum of leather factories and smoke shops, the smell of Syd's hot-dogs and Tabachnik's pickle barrels...
...Thirty years ago, Portnoy's Complaint literally ended with a punchline...
...Zuckerman confesses for Roth: "Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong...
...Once all ideologies are found wanting, there is only chaos itself...
...The old system that made order doesn't work anymore...
...There's nothing here but what you're looking at," Zuckerman concludes at the end of their meal...
...All that was left was his fear and astonishment, but now concealed by nothing...
...And that is perhaps the point, and why ultimately she doesn't destroy the novel along with her father...
...Years later, when she has converted from communism to cultism, she screams: "I am bound to harm no living being, neither man, nor animal...
...At the book's start, the Swede is in his late 60s...
...Deviancy prevailed...
...Rather than lampoon the Swede, Roth gives his life a lyrical quality and lacerates Merry for destroying Swede Levov's American pastoral...
...Instead, there is Seymour Levov, the hero of Weequahic High School...
...It seems that somewhere along the way from Portnoy to the Swede, Philip Roth decided that even literary rebellions have consequences...
...It is as if, after all these years, Roth himself has joined the ranks of the Patimkins, the middle-class Jews he satirized so ruthlessly in Goodbye, Columbus...
...It is not David Grann is managing editor of the New Republic...
...about Roth's usual compulsion, which is to say, sex...
...You couldn't find it and yet you knew it was there...
...Where were the wayward temptations...
...The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on...
...I am insufficiently compassionate as yet to refuse to do that...
...Where was the crybaby in him...
...No artifice...
...When Lyndon Johnson appears on TV, she screams: "You heartless mi-mi-mimiserable m-monster...
...Unlike his other books, American Pastoral is very much a political book, and, stranger yet, a conservative one...
...Zuckerman is here to observe...
...Only this time there is no Portnoy complaining about stifling Jewish mothers or millennial guilt...
...The combatant had borne all the disappointment he could," Zuckerman writes of the Swede...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 37
