Books: American Pastoral, by Philip Roth

Well, it's not Portnoy's Complaint, but it's still pretty darn good. The first quarter of the book (clocking in around 100 pages, it's a bit excessive) serves as a nostalgic, emotion-padded introduction (legacy of Proust, be damned—you don't belong in Jersey!) to what turns out to be the real meat of the novel, so it's a bit of a slow slog—this is one of those books that "it's hard to get into."

The introduction takes place in part over a high school reunion where a bunch of codgers—the narrator in particular—reminisce about their youth, and the narrator, a now-famous writer named Nathan, describes in the golden sepia of recollection his memories of "the Swede" (actual name: Seymour Levov). Swede Levov earned his nickname by being the only tall, blond, alpha-male Jew in his all-Jewish Weehawken school (in his all-Jewish town, in fact), and he was as athletically adept (all-city this, all-county that, in baseball, football, and basketball) as one would imagine he must be. Nathan has dinner with him once—a month or so before the reunion, not having seen him since high school before that—and finds that he has continued to live a perfect life—Marine served in the war, took up the family business (a glove factory in Newark), has a wife half his age and three healthy athletic sons, the four of whom he takes to dinner in New York City once a month. Nathan walks away from the meal bored stiff and certain that the Swede's life has remained as tediously picture perfect as a Life magazine spread.

At the reunion, though, Nathan discovers that the Swede has just died—prostate cancer (to which the narrator has lost his potency)—and with that news (and some more tiresome meanderings into Proustian sensory nostalgia), he decides to write the Swede's story. The story is what constitutes the next 300-some-odd pages, and it's a story packed with the detail-rich Roth we love. The Swede's life, in this story at least, hasn't been without it's bumps, the biggest his only child (preceding the second marriage and three sons by decades), a daughter, Merry (Meredith), whose troubles begin in the crib when she spends her first 18 months screaming uncontrollably, evolving into a childhood and teenage stutter, and culminating in anarchistic political rage (during Vietnam) when, at the age of 16, she bombs their country town's general store/post office, killing the neighborhood's doctor, and then disappearing.

The story is that of an entire family coping with politics, economics, society, and we learn, from the Swede's (very Jewish) father each detail involved in making a glove, and we learn, from the Swede's (Irish Catholic) wife how difficult it is to be taken seriously when one was once the beautiful Miss New Jersey, and how difficult it is to redefine oneself (she takes up a very hands-on business in raising of beef cattle, but, as she ages, still insists on a face lift). We watch the Swede's parents follow the Watergate scandal on TV, and melt with the poignancy of Grandpa Levov writing letters to Senators and CCing his politically-inclined granddaughter in hopes that she'll respect him for it. Most fascinating (to me) is that the Swede speaks in the Jewish tones of his father (and of Portnoy and his father) throughout the book, which is startling after the long introduction; we are set up to expect not exactly WASP diction, but speech more easeful, less fraught, the speech, perhaps, of The Natural, the character the introduction's Swede most clearly mirrors, before, of course, his own fall.

And even more fascinating than that (to me) is the concept of what this story (the 300ish pages) constitutes in relation to the introduction. Nathan doesn't know the Swede's backstory. They hadn't spoken since high school—and barely ever then; their dinner is their first meeting in fifty years, and the Swede doesn't say a word about having ever had a daughter. So is this story "true" (within the diagesis of the novel's entirety, of course), or is it a "fantasy," Nathan's completely fictional biography of a man into whose interior life he had no access?