Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  Progress, of course, was not as reliable as he’d thought. In American Pastoral, the rampaging crowds don’t torch the Swede’s factory, because of those cardboard signs—put in place by the factory’s black forewoman—but crowds of white vigilantes (or, the forewoman suspects, Newark cops) shoot out all the sign-bearing ground-floor windows. The factory stands, but in the middle of a burned, looted, and soon-to-be-emptied wasteland, as businesses deserted Newark en masse and virtually everyone who could get out got out. (Roth’s parents had moved away years earlier, after both their sons had left home. In 1967, they were retired and living in Elizabeth.) By the time that Roth was writing this book, in the mid-nineties, Newark had lost a third of its population and no new people had come to fill its streets; the FBI ranked it the most violent city in the country. The city no longer holds that terrible title—it ranked at number twenty in the country in 2012—and it has its share of fans and boosters. But, in conversation, Roth compares his beloved Newark to Atlanta under Sherman or, worse, he says, to Carthage, because of the finality of the destruction.

  In American Pastoral, the bricked-up factories are as monumental and as culturally meaningful as the Pyramids: “as huge and dark and hideously impermeable as a great dynasty’s burial edifice has every historical right to be.” The spree that sealed the city’s fate—“sirens going off, weapons firing, snipers from rooftops blasting the street lights, looting crowds crazed in the street”—is evoked with the awful exuberance of freedom grabbed like goods through broken glass:

  Here it is! Let it come! In Newark’s burning Mardi Gras streets, a force is released that feels redemptive, something purifying is happening, something spiritual and revolutionary perceptible to all. The surreal vision of household appliances out under the stars and agleam in the glow of the flames incinerating the Central Ward promises the liberation of all mankind. Yes, here it is, let it come, yes, the magnificent opportunity, one of human history’s rare transmogrifying moments: the old ways of suffering are burning blessedly away in the flames, never again to be resurrected, instead to be superseded, within only hours, by suffering that will be so gruesome, so monstrous, so unrelenting and abundant, that its abatement will take the next five hundred years. The fire this time—and next? After the fire? Nothing. Nothing in Newark ever again.

  James Baldwin warned of “the fire next time” back in 1963. Roth describes its arrival, four years later. The Swede refuses to close his factory and join the exodus, not because he is a hero but because he is afraid of giving his daughter one more reason to condemn him. (“Victimizing black people and the working class and the poor solely for self-gain, out of filthy greed!”) But staying in Newark makes no difference; nothing makes any difference. Merry replaces the old Weequahic football pennant that she’d hung above her desk with a handmade poster labeled “WEATHERMEN MOTTO”: “We are against everything that is good and decent in honky America. We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmares.” And then, in February 1968, seven months after the riot, she plants her bomb. (Roth was somewhat premature in suggesting Merry’s engagement with the Weathermen. The group was not formed until 1969.) First the country, then the city, then the family. No escape. All apocalypse, all the time, and no end to the torturing questions.

  The single overriding question for the Swede and, therefore, for the reader, is: how did Merry become so filled with hate? What did her parents do wrong? He thinks of many possible answers, and is informed or accused of even more, each painful in a different way. Growing up, Merry developed a serious stutter—humiliating, impossible to master—and the bomb was the way that she let out her rage. She is the ungainly daughter of two beautiful parents: more rage to be visited on an indifferent world. Or, perhaps, there was no personal rage: the bomb was the result of understandable trauma after she saw, on television, when she was very young, a Buddhist monk immolate himself in protest of the war. (“Do you have to m-m-melt yourself down in fire,” she asked, “to bring p-p-people to their s-senses?”) Perhaps they were too liberal as parents (this is his brother Jerry’s nasty charge), or fatally insistent on a WASPy decorum that she could not resist blowing to oblivion (Jerry, again). Or, more tormenting still: the Swede impulsively kissed her on the lips once, when she was eleven. Could that be it? He had pulled away from her a little, physically, after that, just to make it clear that there would never be another transgression. Had he pulled away too far? Had she even noticed? He had loved her, her mother had loved her. But responsibility had to fall somewhere. Didn’t it?

  The answers that readers gave to these questions—their opinions of the arguments and the characters who make them—prompted a new look at Roth’s position in regard to the upheavals of the sixties. He had long been considered a spokesman for the counterculture, however much he rejected the position, thanks to the unforgettable Portnoy and to the not-quite-forgotten Our Gang, in which Trick E. Dixon ends up campaigning for Devil, in Hell, on his claim of having turned Southeast Asia into Hell on earth. It wasn’t difficult for some readers to view American Pastoral, with its anti-war heroine so out of control, as a social and political recantation. In Commentary, by then a home of liberal recantation, Norman Podhoretz wrote that he “detected in this book a born-again Philip Roth” who appeared to have “changed sides,” and he claimed there was a question in the air: “Had Philip Roth turned into a neoconservative?” Outside of Podhoretz’s assumptions, supporting the various movements of the sixties hardly meant supporting the Weathermen. Even the less ideologically entrenched, however, wondered if the book contained a condemnation of “the culture of liberal permissiveness,” and assumed that the Swede’s ideals of parenthood had created a monster.

  Nixon aside, Roth aims to keep his books from representing any single position. “I don’t write about my convictions,” he insists. “I write about the comic and tragic consequences of holding convictions.” There is hardly anything that he considers more crucial to his work. Indeed, one of the great strengths (and sources of confusion) in Roth’s novels—as opposed to his political satire—is that he rarely takes an open stand. Countervoices clutter up every discernible argument, even shout it down. The long-simmering Jerry, for instance, finally unleashes the competitive little-brother fury of a lifetime, letting the Swede know, in no uncertain terms, that he has brought his fate upon himself, through both the hubris of his aspirations and his sentimental misunderstanding of the country:

  You wanted Miss America? Well, you’ve got her, with a vengeance—she’s your daughter! You wanted to be a real American jock, a real American marine, a real American hotshot with a beautiful Gentile babe on your arm? You longed to belong like everybody else to the United States of America? Well, you do now, big boy, thanks to your daughter. The reality of this place is right up in your kisser now. With the help of your daughter you’re as deep in the shit as a man can get, the real American crazy shit. America amok! America amuck!

  Jerry has no doubts about anything. He possesses the strongest voice in the book, and he wields it like a weapon. Continuing his rant against the Swede, he provides readers with all the evidence that they might want to blame the catastrophe of Merry on liberal ineffectiveness:

  You’re the one who always comes off looking good. And look where it’s got you. Refusing to give offense. Blaming yourself. Tolerant respect for every position. Sure, it’s ‘liberal’—I know, a liberal father. But what does that mean? What is at the center of it? Always holding things together. And look where the fuck it’s got you!… You made the angriest kid in America.

  The trouble with Jerry’s accusation is that we, the readers, have already seen the Swede maintain a firm line with his daughter. In forbidding her to go to New York, in insisting that she carry on her anti-war activities in their own small town, he is not being particularly permissive. True, he isn’t the old-time grandfather pummeling his son into obedience in the basement. He persuades Merry through endlessly patient discussion—but, still, he gets he
r to do what he wants: restrict her activities to a safe and harmless place. And his actions literally blow up in his face.

  Or, as Roth says to me about Jerry: “Of course, he’s wrong.” The character was tremendous fun to write—“to beat somebody down is wonderful!” Roth shouts, imitating Jerry, whom he freely describes as “a kind of brute”—but that doesn’t mean he has any insights into his brother’s life. “That’s what you want to do if somebody is wrong,” Roth adds. “You want to make him persuasive.” (In Operation Shylock, a liberal Israeli journalist fears that the loudmouth settler leader will have just this kind of persuasive power if “Roth” puts him in a book.) But what has the Swede done wrong? The detailed realism of the book obscures a problem that goes back to Job, not to mention Kafka’s Joseph K., who is arrested one fine morning without having done anything wrong. The Swede’s search for an answer only adds to his anguish. Because there is no answer, or only an answer that doesn’t solve anything. “He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach,” Zuckerman concludes about his hero: “that it makes no sense.”

  Roth had no trouble suggesting the origins of pain and anger in troubled characters in earlier books: Lucy Nelson in When She Was Good, with her weak and drunken father, or even Alvin Pepler in Zuckerman Unbound, with his lifetime of corrosive disappointments. But Merry Levov is a child of the sixties, and the facts of history may be all that is required to explain her tragedy. American Pastoral is a book about a time in national history. The wartime sixties are not merely glimpsed in the background but constitute a force that “comes up and smacks you right in the face,” Roth said in an interview on Dutch TV: “The history is vivid, gross, overwhelming.” Talking about Kathy Boudin to me one day, he says that he believes “she wouldn’t have killed anybody” had she grown up in another era. The same thing, he adds, is true of Merry: she would have stuttered, she would have rebelled, but it’s highly unlikely that her rebellion would have resulted in anybody’s death. “Somehow the moment joined with their temperamental rebelliousness,” he says about the well-brought-up American kids who blew up buildings.

  Merry’s mystery is preserved, dramatically speaking, by a narrative that never presents her alone. We watch her develop through the Swede’s eyes, we hear her voice as she argues with him, but we are never privy to her thoughts, and, once the trouble begins, we never follow her to wherever she goes when she leaves home. This is deliberately done: we have no more information than her bewildered father does; we are assaulted by the same uncertainties. This identification with the father, rather than with the child, may be seen as a shift in Roth’s perspective, hardly surprising for a writer in his sixties. Yet even in the early seventies, just a couple of years after Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth was unable to move forward with a book built principally around the bomber. He says that he was “too close to the war” at the time. But there is also a question of authorial temperament. Portnoy’s rage is based on unseverable love; Our Gang is fiercely protective of a country under assault by its leaders. Roth is fully able to characterize the kind of destructive rage that Merry and her gang represent, or to satirize it, but it does not seem that he could comfortably inhabit it. In a serious book, he could apprehend the bomber only from the distance of another’s eyes.

  The tension of being confined within the limits of the Swede’s mind becomes almost unbearable, however, with the appearance of another young female terrorist, who presents herself as an emissary from Merry, in hiding, and who calls herself Rita Cohen. Roth has described Rita, to his Bard students, as his hero’s “real nemesis,” and one can see why: she torments him sexually (Roth tells me that in writing Rita he had “the sex symbol of the Weathermen,” Bernardine Dohrn, in mind), she cons him out of a lot of money, and she makes no sense in terms of anything that he ever thought he knew about young women, systems of values, or the human heart. As Roth sees it, she is the worst sort of ideologue: a figure incapable of change—fixed, immovable, a monomaniac. The Swede’s lack of knowledge about her, or, especially, about her connection to Merry, is true to his point of view but also frustrating and sometimes confusing to the reader. (Is Rita protecting Merry? Is she exploiting Merry? Does she even know Merry?) She is ultimately too mysterious—a force, rather than a character.

  Merry herself makes even less sense to her father when he finally locates her, on a tip from Rita, living in a horrific dump in downtown Newark, just an hour’s drive from Arcady Hill Road. Emaciated, reeking of her own filth, she tells him tonelessly that she has killed three more people, out in Oregon, with another bomb. But she is now a Jain, part of an Indian religious sect that harms absolutely nothing: she doesn’t wash because she reveres even vermin, she veils the lower half of her face with the foot of an old stocking to keep from inhaling microbes in the air. She speaks sensibly, without a stutter, and she is completely mad. The Swede, driven nearly mad himself, wants to bring her home. But he can’t tell his long-suffering wife what he has found.

  Dawn Levov is an unusual figure in Roth’s work: a wholly loved and (for most of the book) loving wife. Dawn is proud, hardworking, self-invented—she rejects her given first name, Mary—and she dismisses her beauty pageant past as embarrassing and superficial. (Roth himself treats this past with considerable interest: the buzz of Atlantic City, the frighteningly long runway, the ever-present chaperones, and, of course, the gloves. A friend of his, the actor Ron Silver, had been having an affair with an ex–Miss America, and through her Roth met the more vintage Miss America of 1950, who schooled him in the elements of postwar pageantry.) Dawn isn’t particularly funny or winning or unusual—she’s no Drenka—but she’s strong enough to have married outside her narrow Catholic milieu, and she is illuminated by her husband’s love.

  The book includes a few pages of the couple having passionate and loving sex, which Roth admits were not in his original drafts. One of the trusted readers to whom he gave the manuscript, Judith Thurman, told him that it was important to know about the couple’s sex life. He had thought that it did not much matter—and, he tells me, “I wanted people to get off my ass about sex”—but he realized that she was right. And since “the cliché would be that he’s such a square kind of guy and she’s such a good Catholic girl that the sex would be inhibited,” he says, he decided to go in the opposite direction and to make the Levovs “an exceptionally passionate married couple.” Happily monogamous, too, until the bomb.

  The Swede has one brief and unimportant affair in its aftermath, when Dawn has turned away from him, and from life. He has been leading her back to both ever since. He takes her to an expensive European clinic for a face lift—to erase the signs of grief—and he spends the night after the surgery on a bed beside hers, getting her through the pain. (Roth tells me that he based this scene on an experience that he had with his famous actress wife, and for a moment he’s as enthusiastic as the Swede about the surgical restoration of a beauty’s beauty.) He is building a new, modern house for him and Dawn to live in, because she can’t bear the memories of Merry in the old one. The architect delivers a cardboard model, very like the model that Roth had made when he was intent on leaving his own memory-filled house. It turns out to be a terrible portent. On the same day that the Swede finds Merry, he realizes that Dawn is having a not brief, not unimportant affair.

  They are giving a party. A barbecue, really, at the old stone house, since the Swede’s parents have arrived from Florida for their usual end-of-summer visit—it is Labor Day 1973, five and a half years since the bombing—and the Swede has invited a few other couples whom the elder Levovs will be glad to see. He spies Dawn with the architect, in the kitchen, doing more than just shucking corn. The new house, he realizes, is being built not for him and Dawn but for them. He will be cast aside with the rest of her old life. Yet, in the very midst of these betrayals, with every reason for resentment and rage, he sits down and takes his wife’s hand:

  There are a hundred different ways to hold someone’s hand. There are the ways you hold a c
hild’s hand, the ways you hold a friend’s hand, the ways you hold an elderly parent’s hand, the ways you hold the hands of the departing and of the dying and of the dead. He held Dawn’s hand the way a man holds the hand of a woman he adores, with all that excitement passing into his grip, as though pressure on the palm of the hand effects a transference of souls, as though the interlinking of fingers symbolizes every intimacy. He held Dawn’s hand as though he possessed no information about the condition of his life.

  Come what may, he continues to hold her hand right up until the end.

  The party scene is a narrative tour de force. Beginning just after the book’s personal universe has been reduced to its most claustrophobic—the father and daughter facing off in her tiny, airless room—it opens the view in all directions. Set on a terrace behind the old stone house, looking onto the surrounding fields, and with a dozen candles burning as night comes on, the scene is a much grander version of the Chekhovian late-summer dinner that concludes The Professor of Desire, and offers a deeper mixture of emotions. There are now ten at table—including a number of people we have never met before, each distinctively limned—plus the strongly felt specters of the child who is gone forever and, for the Swede, of the terrifying woman that she has become. People come and go, connive and betray, have arguments and assignations, in a Mozartean ensemble that extends over ninety-seven pages, with duets ceding to trios and septets, with tragedy punctuated by comedy (or is it the other way around?), while the Swede drifts in and out of his memories and seems entirely alone.