A review by chrisssl
American Pastoral by Philip Roth

challenging reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character

5.0

This is an incredible novel, a harrowing study of a man suffering an unrelenting tragic downfall, wrapped in a nuanced though somewhat distorted portrait of the post-war American boom and one generation's reaction to the countercultural movement.  At its heart is the thoroughly realized character of Seymour "Swede" Levov: the city boy who loves the bucolic lifestyle of countryside living; the full-blooded Jewish son but every inch that blond-haired Aryan look and athletic predisposition that makes him both the envy and the oddity of his Jewish community; a man for whom stoic ordinariness of American living is the highest calling though whose early path through life is so charmed, fated and privileged this can hardly be written without inducing a snort of contempt in the reader;  a thoroughly decent man whose entire world is turned upside down by the extreme actions of a wayward daughter; and, summarily, an avatar of the Silent Generation struggling and failing to understand that Man was expelled from Eden many millennia ago.

If you're looking for plot, this book is not it.  There are certain moments where a smoother progression of thrilling events is hinted at: the mystery of how such a good-man as Swede and his pretty, multi-dimensional wife Dawn manage to raise a terrorist.  But the author teases these things only to subsequently bury the promise of pace by way of protracted, comprehensive digressions into the Swede's past.  But each of these stifling adventures into the Swede's memory is so effusively and lushly written, and forms such a complete account of Swede's bewilderment and shattered unity of spirit, that it should be appreciated for what it is.  An attempt to write down particularly moving sentences from the novel had to be abandoned as I ended up nearly transcribing an entire third of the novel up to that point.  The prose and writing is staggering: everything from turns of phrase, deep psychological conceits and sincerities, the instability of the perspective and framing (in which 3rd person point of view gives way to fevered, passionate 1st person and 2nd person interludes, as if in extreme moments, the reader can see, on the page: the nascent Id, the repressed furious interiority of Swede smashing its head against the immovable gates of his agreeable countenance), and a great thematic preoccupation with the truth about people, how little we know about them, and they about themselves; a somewhat meta-textual aside about the powers and limits of analysis and fiction, subtext and surface.

...and yet you never fail to get them wrong.  You might as well have the brain of a tank.  You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again.  Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception.  And yet what are we to do about this terrible significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims?  Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day?  The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway.  It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.

In many ways I feel like this is as close as it gets to the definitive post-war American novel.  The countercultural movement is not written in an especially flattering light (through Swede's perspective and that of the frame-writer Zuckerman belonging to that same generation), but it all serves less as an academically truthful inspection of a moment in history and more as a revealing truth of Swede's own limits of world-view and imagination, the men behind their heroic myths, the eternal inter-generational struggle, the broken social contract of that fabled American Dream for which earlier ancestral immigrants broke their backs for the sake of their grandchildren, the sheer horror of a world, which at the turn of one dramatic moment, becomes utterly unreasonable for those whom the world had, for a time, conspired for their success.

And who can adjust then?  Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossible.  But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen?  Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering?  Nobody.  The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy - that is every man's tragedy.