Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  The Swede’s physical attributes are all the more significant given that his full name is Swede Levov—he was born Seymour Irving Levov—an oxymoronic pairing of Aryan blondness and Jewish surname. His very existence is seen as an assimilative feat. For in the Jewish community of American Pastoral, being Jewish is not always viewed as just another way of being American. The handsome ballplayer—“as close to a goy as we were going to get”—is openly revered by his schoolmates as “the boy we were all going to follow into America, our point man into the next immersion.” Because of his looks, he is understood by everyone to be at home in America the way that most Jews were not: “an American not by sheer striving, not by being a Jew who invents a famous vaccine or a Jew on the Supreme Court, not by being the most brilliant or the most eminent”—but merely by living and breathing. An American by rights, taking his place in “the ordinary way, the natural way, the regular American-guy way.” For that alone he is a hero.

  But it’s also the times that make the Swede a hero. The Viking looks and the ethnic unlikeliness were part of the history of the real man, one Seymour (Swede) Masin—whose son wrote a book about him (Swede: Weequahic’s Gentle Giant) roughly a decade after American Pastoral received a euphoric critical reception and won the Pulitzer Prize, granting the obscure high school athlete a kind of secondary fame. Of the real Swede’s history, Roth used only the name and the athletic stardom; he knew nothing more. And this was all he needed to spur his invention. He began by moving his hero forward in time a few years, so that the Swede leads Weequahic High to victory after victory not in the mid-thirties but in the early forties, during the war. It’s a slight adjustment that gives his athletic feats a new significance:

  The elevation of Swede Levov into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews can best be explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and the fears that it fostered. With the Swede indomitable on the playing field, the meaningless surface of life provided a bizarre, delusionary kind of sustenance, the happy release into a Swedian innocence, for those who lived in dread of never seeing their sons or their brothers or their husbands again.

  In compensating for unbearable losses—or, at least, in distracting from them—on the very days that newspapers were reporting Luftwaffe triumphs, the unwitting boy becomes “fettered to history, an instrument of history.” This bond with history is perhaps, ultimately, the only thing he has in common with his daughter, the builder of bombs.

  The story of the Swede does not come to us directly. The first quarter of American Pastoral is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, who has been restored to Roth’s oeuvre in a sadly reduced state: impotent and incontinent after prostate surgery, Zuckerman, now in his sixties, lives alone in a house in the Berkshires. (For the biographical record, Roth has not had prostate cancer. In the nineties, the disease hit his brother, though, and, he says, “just about every other one of my friends.”) Zuckerman is wholly devoted to his work, inspired by the example of the now forgotten author E. I. Lonoff, whom, he reminds us, he visited in this vicinity many years earlier. At times it seems that Roth has written one immensely long and surging roman-fleuve.

  Zuckerman’s physical losses are not stressed. They are presented not as problems that he longs to overcome but merely as subtractions that have left him with no functional aspects of character—no life of his own—beyond his intellect, his memory, and his ability to tell a story. He retains his curiosity about the Swede, however, whom he worshipped as a boy, back in Weequahic, when—six years the Swede’s junior—he was best friends with the Swede’s obstreperous younger brother. On the basis of a recent dinner with the Swede, however, their first meeting in some fifty years, Zuckerman has scornfully dismissed his former hero as merely a “big jeroboam of self-contentment”: a man who (unlike Zuckerman) has never known what it is like to be “enmeshed in obsession, tortured by incapacity, poisoned by resentment, driven by anger,” and for whom life rolled out “like a fluffy ball of yarn.” Zuckerman’s decision to write the book we now hold in our hands is based on the fact that everything he thought he understood about the man was wrong.

  Why does Roth bring in Zuckerman to tell the story? The pleasure of his company is almost enough to distract us from the question, particularly during the delicious set piece of a Weequahic High School reunion, a swirling ensemble of comedy and regret—“No,” one former schoolmate admits, “a forty-fifth reunion is not the best place to come looking for ass”—where Zuckerman learns that Swede Levov is dead and that the youthful Apollo lived to become a latter-day Job. In fact, this first quarter of the book provides us with all the plain biographical facts about the Swede that we will ever have: after high school and a stint in the marines, he overcame his father’s objections and married a beautiful Irish Catholic girl—Mary Dawn Dwyer, Miss New Jersey of 1949 and a contestant for Miss America—but was so fundamentally dutiful that he took over his father’s glove factory in Newark rather than accept a contract to play professional baseball. When their daughter was born, he moved his family to an old stone house surrounded by a hundred open acres, forty miles west of Newark, far beyond both the old Jewish slum where his father grew up and the new Jewish suburban enclaves where his father urged him to live. His dream was too big for such confinements, a true American pastoral dream.

  And then, one day in 1968, his daughter, Merry, aged sixteen, planted a bomb in the local post office—or, rather, at the single post office window in the local village’s small, family-run general store. A man was killed. (“The kid who stopped the war in Vietnam by blowing up somebody out mailing a letter at five A.M.,” the Swede’s still obstreperous brother, Jerry, tells Zuckerman at the school reunion. “Little shit was no good from the time she was born.”) Merry Levov spent twenty-five years in hiding, and although her father managed to see her from time to time, he never got over what happened. As a result of it all, the Levovs divorced. The Swede went on to have a second family—three healthy sons, about whom he spoke with insufferably platitudinous sunniness the evening that he and Zuckerman met for dinner. That was just a couple of months before he died of cancer, as Zuckerman now also learns. These are the facts. There are no mysteries to be solved. Except for the biggest mystery of all: who the Swede was, how he thought (“if,” Zuckerman wonders, “he even had ‘thoughts’”), and how he survived.

  The Swede is just the kind of hero that Roth’s critics—most notably, Updike—had been demanding for years. (“Who cares what it’s like to be a writer?”) In many ways, Swede Levov is kin to Updike’s own memorably nicknamed hero, Rabbit Angstrom: not a writer (like Zuckerman) or a professor of literature (like Kepesh) or a frustrated artist (like Sabbath, the arthritic puppeteer) but an athlete, a factory owner, a non-intellectual, part of mainstream American life. According to Jerry, his brother was exactly what he seemed to be: “a very nice, simple, stoical guy.” “Bred to be dumb, built for convention, and so on.” “Benign, and that’s it.” Hardly self-searching, at least until the bomb. And after the bomb? Does a person like that change? Or, to view it another way, is a person ever really simple and unthinking? For a writer, presenting this sort of character is a unique challenge. How do you plumb the depths of a person who either has no depths or lacks the wherewithal to plumb them? How do you express, in words, the feelings of someone who does not channel feelings into words?

  It’s a question of consciousness. And “the problem for most seriously ambitious writers,” Roth believes, is, precisely, “how do you drive the wedge of consciousness into experience?” Speaking in a video interview with David Remnick, made for (but not fully aired by) the BBC, he continued, “If you neglect consciousness, you write popular fiction; if you have only consciousness without the gravity of experience, you have the failed experiment of Virginia Woolf, where consciousness so dominates the novel that it ceases to move through time the way a novel needs to.” (This said, Roth is a great admirer of Mrs. Dalloway.) He expands on the subject, so essential to American Pastoral: “Fictio
n invents consciousness”—not that we don’t all have a consciousness but that “in books it exists in developed language.” And “the Mt. Rushmore” of this language, of course, is Joyce’s Ulysses, from which Bellow, master of fictional consciousness, learned so much. The other American master Roth admires for this kind of interior endowment of his characters is Updike. “Rabbit Angstrom’s consciousness is totally an invention,” Roth concludes. “John’s genius is to make it seem authentic.”

  But this isn’t the method that Roth chose in American Pastoral. Rather than simply (or not so simply) endowing the Swede with his own authorial consciousness—à la Joyce, or Bellow, or Updike—Roth interposed the fiction-making mind of his longtime fictional novelist. You could call the method postmodern, or you could point out, as Roth does, that Joseph Conrad, who was post-nothing, employed a similar method with Charles Marlow, his tale-spinning sailor. “Telling the story this way was second nature for me,” Roth says today; “it thickens the stew.” In the more formal terms he uses to address a group of students, at Bard, he speaks of the “adventure of narration.”

  Zuckerman is neither an omniscient eye nor a participant in the story; rather, he is a fully conscious (if wholly invented) inventor of consciousness. “Anything more I wanted to know,” Zuckerman says to himself near the end of the class reunion, “I’d have to make up.” And we see him begin to make it up, bit by bit. (Or, as Roth puts it, “You see how the book is made, bit by bit.”) A conjecture here, an alternative conjecture there, and then, after he has eased us into the notion that he is thinking for his hero as well as about him, and after warning us that all these conjectures may be wrong—if no more wrong than people usually are about other people—Zuckerman vanishes into the Swede without a trace.

  “I dreamed a realistic chronicle,” Zuckerman says, and transports us, like the Chorus in Henry V, straight into its midst: a long-ago summer morning when young Merry is always in her father’s lap, and when paradise seems a reasonable reward for working hard, following the rules, and being brave enough to reject the suburbs. There is no Zuckermanian irony to ruffle the Swede as he exults in owning “a piece of America” or, striding across the fields, imagines himself as Johnny Appleseed. “Wasn’t a Jew, wasn’t an Irish Catholic, wasn’t a Protestant Christian—nope, Johnny Appleseed was just a happy American.” And so is Swede Levov, a big and happy American man in an American landscape, “going everywhere, walking everywhere.” Roth’s nod to the famous closing section of Augie March—“Look at me, going everywhere!”—is all the more touching for not having been deliberate. (One afternoon when he was enthusiastically quoting Bellow’s finale, I mentioned that he had used one of these phrases for the Swede. He was momentarily surprised and then said, simply, “I guess I stole that from Saul.”) But pleasure in the land comes from Roth himself, not from literature—from his own piece of America in Connecticut, seen here in bucolic splendor rather than under winter snow.

  Every Saturday morning, the Swede walks the five hilly miles to the general store in the village of Old Rimrock—the intact, as yet unbombed general store, with the American flag flying out front—to get a newspaper and sometimes milk and fresh-laid eggs. And then he turns and walks back:

  past the white pasture fences he loved, the rolling hay fields he loved, the corn fields, the turnip fields, the barns, the horses, the cows, the ponds, the streams, the springs, the falls, the watercress, the scouring rushes, the meadows, the acres and acres of woods he loved with all of a new country dweller’s puppy love for nature, until he reached the century-old maple trees he loved and the substantial old stone house he loved—pretending, as he went along, to throw the apple seed everywhere.

  Roth is a master of the rapturous list. Like Mickey Sabbath’s conjuring of the Atlantic shore of his childhood, or his catalogue of the bounty of female lingerie, the Swede’s account of his American paradise is a godlike naming of things that requires no embellishment: there is sufficient beauty in the names themselves, and a sense of sublime abundance in the way the sentence tumbles on and on. Swede Levov lives in America “the way he lived inside his own skin.” He is intensely grateful for the progress that began with his grandfather, an immigrant who spoke no English, and continued through his father, who slowly built up the factory, and culminates in his daughter, brought up in the old stone house in the midst of all this beauty and abundance, on Arcady Hill Road. How could he live anywhere except America? “Everything he loved was here.”

  This love marks the Swede as the perfect opposite of Mickey Sabbath, who is unable to carry out his long-planned suicide because “everything he hated was here.” (One wonders if Roth was also half remembering Moses Herzog’s tender comment on his own childhood: “All he ever wanted was there.”) Roth builds seriatim, book to book, offering up reversals and alternatives—counterbooks, counterprotagonists—and forging links in a continuing chain of thought. For the Swede, fate and history and his daughter will work to expel him from paradise. Although he remains steady and controlled, the antithesis of Mickey Sabbath, he is no less an example of the “assailable man.” Roth says that this vulnerability, even of the apparently strong, is the essential subject of these two very different books, although he didn’t realize it for some time. “Here is someone not set up for life’s working out poorly, let alone for the impossible,” Zuckerman observes of the Swede. But who is? “Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man’s tragedy.”

  The Swede’s tragedy derives from the fact that his daughter hates America. She has made that clear, with her furious rhetoric, even before she plants the bomb. Her parents were against the war, too—the Swede even traveled to Washington with New Jersey Businessmen Against the War, if mostly to appease his daughter and deflect her anger. For the loving little girl has grown up to hate her parents, too—for being bourgeois capitalists, for continuing to live their superficial lives while the Vietnamese suffer. At sixteen, she can hardly tell her parents and her country apart. Among the most affecting scenes in the book are the face-offs between father and daughter: she, arguing with all the outraged moralism of youth; he, trying desperately to protect her from the potential consequences of her idealism. Neither seems completely right, or wrong; the author’s understanding enfolds them both.

  To keep Merry from getting into trouble, the Swede forbids her to go to New York to meet with other, older protesters. Instead, he encourages her to campaign against the war right there in stalwartly Republican Old Rimrock, where she might really have an impact. (“Bring the war home,” he says. “Isn’t that the slogan?”) And she does. The result: the death of a beloved country doctor out mailing a letter before heading to work at the local hospital. And Merry vanished. Not that her father cannot imagine her wending her way home, “walking northwest into a horizon still thinly alive with light, walking up through the twilight call of the thrushes”:

  up past the white pasture fences she hated, up past the hay fields, the corn fields, the turnip fields she hated, up past the barns, the horses, the cows, the ponds, the streams, the springs, the falls, the watercress, the scouring rushes … the meadows, the acres and acres of woods she hated, up from the village, tracing her father’s high-spirited, happy Johnny Appleseed walk until, just as the first few stars appeared, she reached the century-old maple trees that she hated and the substantial old stone house, imprinted with her being, that she hated, the house in which there lived the substantial family, also imprinted with her being, that she also hated.

  Roth has never been afraid of risk. He hadn’t been afraid of anything, really, since The Counterlife, after which his freedom as a writer just seemed to keep growing. In this book, there are garlands of sentences that go on for nearly a page; there are paragraphs that go on for three pages. Unlike Sabbath’s Theater or Operation Shylock, American Pastoral is filled with different kinds of writing, from this rhapsodic Johnny Appleseed poetry, whether illustrative of love or of hate, to a rigorous realism that tells us more about t
he manufacture of gloves than we might ever wish to know—but that gives us the stuff of these people’s lives. The Swede’s deliberately ordinary tenor of mind excludes the buoyancy and antic humor that characterized those earlier works and, particularly in the book’s more expository middle section, inclines toward a flatness of tone that is nearer to that of The Facts. Not all of Roth’s risks paid off equally. But this was a story different from any that he’d ever told before, and he had to tell it in its own way. This book, he says, no less than Sabbath’s Theater, came as a kind of “outpouring”—“not that it wasn’t hard work,” he adds, “but I loved getting to my desk every day”—and it made him feel, well into his sixties, that he was beginning anew.

  For one thing, he was taking on the subject of Newark with a fullness that he had never dared before. Not the thriving immigrant city of his idyllic youth—growing more idyllic in his memory year by year—but the city apocalyptically destroyed by its own long-cheated and suffering black citizens, during several days of riots, in the summer of 1967, when Roth has the Swede barricaded in his factory behind windows plastered with cardboard signs reading “Most of this factory’s employees are NEGROES.” Roth had touched on the squalor of post-1967 Newark in Zuckerman Unbound, in the rants of Alvin Pepler and in Zuckerman’s own final ride through his old neighborhood, in a hired limo with an armed driver, saying to himself, “Over. Over. Over. Over. Over.”

  Some eight years before the riots, however, in Goodbye, Columbus, Roth gave us a very different and, in retrospect, extremely poignant view of the city in transition. Neil Klugman, on an errand, goes to visit Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks in central Newark, in the old Third Ward, a neighborhood formerly Jewish but even then “the heart of the Negro section.” And he is struck not only by the changes but by the continuity. The kosher delicatessens and the Turkish baths are hanging on; the lingering smells of corned beef and sour tomatoes now mix with the odors of auto-wrecking shops, a leather factory, and a brewery. Instead of hearing Yiddish on the streets, he hears the shouts of Negro children playing at being Willie Mays. The older Jews have died off and their prospering offspring have left for the mountains west of the city; and “the Negroes,” Neil observes, “were making the same migration.” Those left behind live in hopeless poverty. But Neil’s only uncertainty is whether any new people will come to fill these streets when both the Jews and the Negroes have moved on.