American Pastoral (Paperback)

As the novel opens, Skip Zuckerman, the childless, unattached, first-person narrator of the trilogy has a chance meeting with a boyhood hero at a baseball game. This hero is Swede Levov, an older man who is still, impossibly blonde, blue-eyed and youthful; a legend within his predominantly Jewish neighborhood. Swede is the very embodiment of "America" and all that "being American" stands for. He is, Skip is sure, incapable of living anything but the perfect, and perfectly rewarding, life.

Swede's brother, Jerry, was Skip's best friend, so when Swede asks for a meeting with Skip, Skip is a little puzzled but not all that surprised. Swede, however, doesn't ask anything specific of Skip, but talks of his sons and his memories of Newark before and during World War II. This meeting, though, is pivotal to the novel's central question and its meaning soon becomes crystal clear.

As the novel progresses, Skip attends his high school reunion and, while making note of the various deficiencies shared by the sixtyish men and women in attendance, becomes convinced that no human being ever really knows or understands another. He is depressed by all the conversation about cancer, divorce and the various problems associated with growing older. It is Jerry, though, Swede's brother, who tells Skip the one thing that will disillusion more than any other.

Roth's brilliance as well as his masterful and well-crafted prose draw us into American Pastoral and allow us to participate in the mundane life experiences of its characters as if those experiences were our very own. We live through school reunions, failed marriages, duplicity and waste as Skip proceeds to a more detailed examination of the life of Swede Levov.

Swede's life, Skip finds out, was nothing like he had imagined it would be. Obsessed, Skip begins a novel that focuses on the life of Swede Levov. Although Skip is making up a lot of his book as he goes along, the story is nonetheless true and it is a story that will resonate painfully with anyone who has ever felt alone, in control, out of control, or who has thought that he or she knew all about someone they have cared about deeply. As the facts about Swede Levov's life slowly unfold, as his secrets are unearthed, the glossy veneer of satisfaction, contentment and perfection begins to slip away from his life. As the man behind the persona is fully revealed, we come to realize, with Skip Zuckerman, that in anyone's life, one torment can, and often does, lead to more and more agony until its inevitability is appalling.

American Pastoral is more of an impassioned dialogue with its readers than a convincing and linear story. This is not a warm and comforting book that will leave a glow in your heart after the last page. In fact, its most convincing and most powerfully-written passages are those in which Swede and Skip discuss and reflect upon human nature's congenital loneliness.

American Pastoral is a painful book; it is a book that explores a dark and lonely side of human nature. But it is masterfully written, in prose that is spare and elegant and, above all, authentic. At its heart, American Pastoral is a gorgeous elegy for the American Dream; a funeral ode to an innocence that has long since passed away.

In American Pastoral, Roth outlines an America where religion, or even the retreat from religion, makes for unsettling living. Only one day a year does the disquiet fade. And that is not enough. No matter how perfect Seymour "Swede" Levov tries to make himself, nor how perfect his attempts to make his family's lives - and who if not this heroic specimen of sporting prowess, physical beauty and miraculous modesty is equipped even to try - the auspices of Thanksgiving are only ever a momentary respite. For Roth in this book, life is a trial of self-preservation and self-representation, where even the hermetically sealed perfection of Swede Levov fissures under the pressure of trying to keep control.

There are not, I should tell you, any answers in this novel. There are questions. Good questions, probing questions, put to reader with a dialectic force and vicious beauty that only Roth is able to manage. To follow the example of sport: as a stylist he is Tiger Woods. Graceful, poetic and open to the very limits of possibility, but simultaneously unremitting, unforgiving. An animal.

The more I read of Roth's work, the more it seems true that despite evincing quite specific plots, hewn from American archetypes, and sitting proudly at the beginning of his opening chapter, he tends to wander - perhaps I should say range - around the world he has created, sometimes frustrating the reader by the lack of cohesion. There is an almost thriller-like compulsion in the narrative at first, a page-turning imperative. But this sometimes gets shuffled out of sight.

Swede surely cannot be so perfect; he must have a secret. Indeed he does. Despite being true to all the traditional conceptions of goodness, and despite being a hero to a great welter of his peers, Swede has not managed to create the perfect family. He has tried. He married the beauty queen with a strong, intelligent mind. He was the most understanding father he could be, more understanding often than he could have wanted. He did everything he could conceive to help his daughter Meredith with her stutter, and he did it with such compassion and dedication, that surely he deserved to be the great father, just as he was the great first baseman at high school, the great Marine during the War and the great businessman in his father's Newark glove factory. But ticking all the boxes on the questionnaire has not given him the forecast results.

Merry - as his daughter is affectionately know - becomes a free spirit in a staid and conservative New Jersey backwater, an argumentative and precocious child burning with the fires of truth and justice: you split that how you want to. But she is the secret that Swede has had to keep. She is the child who, at sixteen, became implicated in a bombing that killed a local doctor. She is the child who then disappeared into nothing more than the fears of her parents minds, leaving behind a family as freakishly wrought as the ironwork at the local store after the explosion.

American Pastoral is the history of a family. But it is not a chronological one. Like the tales told around a dinner table, strands of memory weave around each other, creating a fabric of detail coloured by all the variety of perspectives encoded in the family unit. In the course of playing out the vicissitudes of the plot, Roth digresses, remembers new things, reshapes familial nostalgia, and rewrites the past with the painful clarity of those who have just realised how little they were aware of at the time. Doubtless, this does interfere with the narrative unity in the strictest sense, but the novel acts as one sustained, glorious effort of declamation about the state of America. The procession of ferocity that Roth manages to lead along the page is startling in its elemental beauty. That the young Merry can be raped so graphically by and in the helpless imagination of her father, whilst elsewhere Roth can level you with an image of perfect lyrical clarity, bears vital testimony to the importance of this author and this book. American Pastoral is a novel of rare qualities. Its brilliance fumes.