Reviews

A close look at the American Dream and why it is not idyllic, “American Pastoral,” by Philip Roth is a semi-autobiographical account of his life. The word ‘pastoral,’ is first encountered with the pseudo author, Nathan Zuckerman, when he says;

“The daughter who transports him out of his longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counter-pastoral --- into the indigenous American berserk.

Roth does not stylistically distinguish between Zuckerman and Seymour Levov, instead Zuckerman assumes the identity of Levov by saying that he, “dreamed a realistic chronicle,” of Seymour’s life. Instead of a realistic chronicle, what we get is a multi-layered telling of what constitutes the (American) ‘dream,’ in a stream of consciousness manner. However, Roth presents both characters as having the same dense writing narrative featuring very long paragraphs, some extending more than a page long, and lengthy expositions.

After deliberate episodic repetitions, the ending is left unresolved in a quandary of two polarized views

Spoiler

that we are not products of family and at the same time the family is upheld as the model upon which America is built

and very large questions remain unanswered,

Spoiler

how, why and when does Dawn commit suicide? And how and when does Merry die?

, as though to hook the reader into continuing their loyalty into pursuing future volumes.

American Pastoral left me with a sense of dissatisfaction with Roth for having raised the question of inheritance of ideology and not even providing a conclusion of disillusion but rather leaving it deadlocked in history. If this was done deliberately to entice me to read more to see how the story further unfolds, I think Roth could have stream-lined the bulk of the Swede’s constant reaction of one of resistance to change and further reinforced the unresolved major points of the story-line, and this would have led to greater interest on my part to read the successive volumes.

As it stands, this is Roth’s account of the assimilation of the Jewish people into the American Dream as standing in for how all cultures are inculcated by the predominant ideology.

For the examination of this process, I give this a 5, for the stylistic presentation of this ‘big idea,’ and the unresolved questions, I give this a 3, so the end result is that of a flat 4