Constant Reader

[Sherry]

Let's start discussing this book November 15, 2008.

[Dottie]

Here's the OFFICIAL thread everyone -- it was buried among the many seemingly unrelated threads which are showing up here.

I still have to find a copy of American Pastoral and start reading -- but I'm definitely going to get here very late. So make it a good one folks because I'll need all the help I can get, I'm sure.

[[deleted user]]

"Wilkommen! Wilkommen meine Damen und Herren" - Joel Grey in Cabaret
Welcome ladies and gentlemen!

The man who grasped the American Dream!
After three generations from rags to riches, .
Until his daughter wanted it otherwise.
So what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, but lose his only daughter?

Welcome, everyone, to an American Story.
Pastoral on the outside. Berserk on the inside.
From rags to riches . . . to what?
From rags to riches . . . to the taste of ashes, perhaps?
Here it is! What do we think?
What do we say, after Philip Roth has said so much?

[Dottie]

What an opener, Russ -- okay today somehow this book has to be found! I have to catch up quickly.

Cabaret is one of favorites and I love finding "connections" so maybe this means American Pastoral is meant to be the first Roth I actually finish reading. We shall see.

[[deleted user]]

Dottie R,
There are plenty of reviews, including one especially with quite a few comments that has quite a different take on the novel. One might call it "stimulating," or one might actually say "fire-eating." They make fun reading too.

[Gail]

Excellent opening, Russ!

I've read the book and now will read/skim the reviews.

[[deleted user]]

Great opening Russ! Yes, I'd say "fire eating" is certainly accurate! It tore at me the whole time reading.

[Al]

I may be alone on this point, but my favorite part of the book was the beginning when it was still from Zuckerman's POV and he was remembering "the Swede" and going to his high school reunion and having dinner with the Swede.

[[deleted user]]

Al, You are not necessarily alone in that view, because I too think those two scenes are fascinating. They are both the beginning of the book and the end of the story. The first time we read them we don't know all of what is to come, but after we have read the entire story, then we can reread those two scenes with greater insight in how to understand them. They are at the beginning of the book, but they take place at least twenty years after all the events we are soon to read about.

I think Roth excels at writing scenes, and there are really quite a few, in addition, that I would mention as superb with enormous dramatic or emotional impact.

[Jim]

My favorite part of the book was Lou Levov, his comment on a piece of minimalist art -- "That's a lot to pay for a first coat." -- and his exegesis of the Book of Genesis -- "You're supposed to do what God tells you." In spite of my fondness for Henry James, sometimes subtlety goes too far.

The rest of the book was nice enough, but I felt that I was being yelled at all the time even in the quiet passages, and that got tiring.

One question: Wasn't Rabbit Angstrom a more likely fate for the star athlete that Swede Levov? I felt as if Swede was just an alter ego for Zuckerman and his past had little to do with how he approached life after high school.

[[deleted user]]

Jim, Unfortunately I haven't read Updike so I'll pass on the question, but I think one can extract from the text a resonably consistent view of what makes the Swede run. His inner beliefs and attitudes are surfaced in a few places and I think that the careful study of the Swede and of Merry makes more interesting reading than all of the more obvious counter-cultural fireworks and all of the shouting. I think Swede had a core personality that was consistent from beginning to end but also showed a growth and maturation consistent with the experiences he was subjected to. I think Roth did well in writing the detailed development of those two characters. Or at least I find them fascinating.

[Melissa]

"Basketball was nothing like this, Skip."

I was so glad to get a chance to re-visit this wonderful book, thanks to this group. It was just as amazing and just as difficult to read this time around, with many passages that cut right to the bone.

I too like the opening scenes from Zuckerman's point of view, and as Russ says their re-reading is even better once we're in on the story.

There are many, many things to talk about, but I'll stick with that section for now. The line quoted above, treasured and savored over the decades, epitomizes for me the complexity of the young boy's hero worship of a man he will never really understand.

[[deleted user]]

I suppose I should mention the scene, even the single sentence, that absolutely bowls me over.

It is when Merry says to Swede, "Please go now." That to me is both the dramatic and the emotional climax of the entire story and it affects me still, even as I type this.

[Ruth]

I have two questions about the structure of the book. Why was the Zuckerman section there? What do you think it contributed to the book? If the story had just started with Swede's story what would we be missing?

My other question involves all the digressions. I'd hate to be cornered by a slightly tipsy Philip Roth at a party. He does love to wander down all the sideroads while telling a story. So what do you think the digressions add? They certainly are one reason this book is not an easy read.

[Melissa]

I think those are both important topics, Ruth. To my mind anyway the opening section provides a contrasting background for the sections told from the Swede's point of view, first of all, but then more interestingly they raise the question of the fictional or meta-fictional quality of much of the "The Fall" and "Paradise Lost" sections.

What I mean is that Zuckerman is approached tentatively about helping the Swede write a tribute to his father, and then perhaps the bulk of the book is Nathan's version of the inner turmoil that he only barely glimpses during that lunch at Vincent's.

The long monologues on glove-making or whatever I found to be quite distracting when I first read the book ten years ago, but this time I treated them as the inner dynamics of a stressed soul, trying to talk its way into some sort of clarity of mind or understanding. Unsuccessfully so, I would guess. So many of the apparently trivial details that get repeated in those digressions recur in other characters' speech, such as Ruth Cohen's cringe-inducing discussion of her size-four body.

[[deleted user]]

Ruth, My impression was that Nathan Zuckerman provided the view of Swede's story "from the outside" and that, in fact, there was next to no factual "Swede's story" available to him, or in the text we read.

Nathan begins to think of Swede's life in a general way in a reverie at the Reunion on p88, and by p89, dancing with Joy Helpern, Nathan says "I pulled away from myself, pulled away from the reunion and I dreamed . . . I dreamed a realistic chronicle" and that is the sequé away from the Reunion into the story that Nathan writes. Still later, in a remarkable passage that I can't put my finger on -- isn't that always the way? -- Nathan asserts that the story that he has just written is as valid as anyone else's memory of Swede, even though Jerry might disagree about details. Which sounds quite a bit like Roth himself throwing down the gauntlet for any who would challenge his writer's craft.

So. this is Nathan's story of Swede's story, meta-fictional as Philip notes.

[Jane]

What a great start to the discussion! I loved all of those digressions. It was sort of like reading a Constant Reader thread where we start discussing the upcoming discussion of AMERICAN PASTORAL and end up visiting Paris.

At the beginning of the book, I was struck by Nathan's description of memory. Since we just talked about Anne Enright's character Veronica in THE GATHERING saying that we can't trust our memory of the past, I found that Nathan was saying the same thing. At the reunion, his classmate Ira Posner tells him that Nathan's father was an inspiration to Ira. Ira says that Nathan's father was always asking Ira his opinion of things. Nathan says, " And I still had no idea who Ira was or what he was talking about, because, as much as I was remembering that day of all that had once happened, far more was so beyond recall that it might never have happened, regardless of how many Ira Posners stood face to face with me attesting otherwise. As best I could tell, when Ira was in my house being inspired by my father I could as well not have been born. I had run out of the power to remember even faintly my father's asking Ira what he thought while Ira was eating a piece of our fruit. It was one of those things that get torn out of you and thrust into oblivion just because they didn't matter enough. And yet what I had missed completely took root in Ira and changed his life."

I think that this is what Nathan thought about the Swede. That one line (Basketball was nothing like this, Skip.) that the Swede said to Nathan meant everything to Nathan, but I am sure the Swede didn't remember saying it and didn't know what an impression he made on Nathan. As adults, Nathan is a famous author, and Swede is a successful businessman but not famous any longer. Still that little boy is still there looking at his idol.

Jane

[[deleted user]]

Ruth, adding onto what Philip said, for me all the digressions and wandering and instruction on how to make a glove, for example, provided authenticity for the realism of the story. I think Roth weaves his story out of factual parts of the real world. The Weathermen existed, the tenement in Manhattan exploded and collapsed, the factory is no doubt there, rural New Jersey existed, the horrible underpass that Merry walks though is there and as described. And in addition the dialogue of Lou and Jerry Levov, for example, is pitch perfect as to attitudes, content and vocabulary. I think every attitude expressed by any character was heard in the real world of the times. These things could all be seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears, were we there. So it is out of such factual and real materials that Roth creates an exceedingly plausible and highly realistic fictional story.
For all of the non-physical introspections, ideas, speculations and agonized interior monologues, I think perhaps Roth is "showing" us, not "telling" us about the character. And doing a virtuoso job of it.

[[deleted user]]

Steve,
Thanks, :)
And this is getting to sound like a book to either love or hate. I think it was wonderful, and I am studying it in detail, to bore you all with a little later.

[Mary Anne]

Thanks, Jane, as I was also struggling with the purpose of the Zuckerman section.
And I can relate to Jim feeling yelled at. There were all those rants! Jerry was the main ranter, filling Nathan in on Swede's life at the reunion. And also his rant to Swede when he calls Jerry for some brotherly love. So much for that.
That being said, I am going to enjoy participating in this discussion, because there is so much to say.

[Dick]

Okay, now that I found this place. Is this a new Constant Reader tradition, putting book discussions under headings that have nothing to do with the book?

[Dick]

[reposted from a topic actually mentioning the book:]

Where did we leave our old pal Zuckerman?

That's right, he was dancing with an old high school sweetie at the class reunion. She wistfully mentioned she wished she'd (partially) disrobed for him on that hayride 45 years previously. Indeed, she snuggled closer and offered to allow him to disrobe her now (partially again, but clearly this is up for negotiation) .

Nathan, taking commitment avoidance to hitherto undreamed of levels, gently demured and spent the remainder of the dance drafting a Swede Lvov novel in his head while Joy's elderly breasts played soccer with his equally elderly paunch and the dulcet tones of The Pied Pipers singing Dream echoed in the background.

So I just have this to say: Zuckerman, you were a dog then and you're a dog now.

But is it art?

[Dick]

Perhaps 'ripe unto greatness in the fulsomeness of life's autumn'?

But, seriously. I think Joy Helpern's breasts are the fulcrum upon which this entire novel is levered aloft. I've got an full theory on it which I will be developing and outlining here over the coming weeks.

[Robert]

Spoilers in all my posts.

American Pastoral could almost be a novella without the volunimous details. It reminds me a little of Moby Dick—get to the story already. But it all creates a powerful verisimilitude, even after being told from the first portion of the book that this is fictional Nathan Zuckermann’s fictional imaginings. I also see the bulk of the narrative (POV: Swede Levov) as a meta-fiction. That would make the segment at the end where Merry walks to her house in Old Rimrock (with full botanical detail) and tells her grandfather that she murdered four people and he drops dead a meta-meta fiction. This meta-morphing reminds me of Ian McEwan’s Atonement where fictional author Briony reveals a meta-ending.

But I’ll accept however many levels of fiction it takes for Roth to take flight as long as a compelling story emerges, and it certainly does despite the often annoying story-interruptus.

This is my neck of the woods. Old Rimrock, NJ is a fictional community located in the greater Mendham area west of Morristown. I used to live in Mendham in an eighteenth century house. I currently live in Morristown and Roth gives many accurate details of my beloved town and its history. Yesterday I was in Newark, where Roth grew up (and where my father was born). It is a challenging place indeed. As I told Jane, my great (times 9) grandfather was Robert Treat, the founder of Newark in the seventeenth century, and when I discovered this not too long ago I felt as though I had won the geneological booby prize. Why not San Francisco? But there you have it. My work with AIDS takes me there at least once a month. A high incidence of AIDS is another level of misery for this beleaguered city. I am very moved by Roth’s portrait of Newark.

There is something quintessential about this geographical area that Roth utilizes so well. Roughly speaking, to the west of New York City the suburbs extend as far as Morristown. Beyond that is this beautiful, hilly countryside dotted with historic exurbs such as Old Rimrock. Primo real estate. Jackie O and Malcomb Forbes lived just south of this area. In between NYC and Old Rimrock is Newark, the ultimate urban wreck. Whitney Houston grew up in Newark and like Swede Levov moved to Mendham after her great success. I imagine this area west of Morristown was similarly symbolic to her.

It’s a natural question to drive around these country-looking roads and wonder if the residents are beyond the reach of every day problems. It appears so transcendent. But Philip Roth has answered that question.

Robt

[Sherry]

So Mendham is Rimrock, huh? I used to live in the next town over, Bernardsville. I just finished the novel and I think I have to let it settle in before I make any cogent statements. I wonder if ANY such statements will form in my addled brain. One thing I will say is that I am having to imagine the ending of this meta-fiction. Would that be a meta-meta-fiction? I want the Swede to go in there and pick up Merry and take her home and force her to eat (like Lou with Jesse before the forking) and make her talk to him.

[Al]

Steve: I am a huge C. Booker fan myself, he is doing great things in Newark - my brother recently saw him speak and said he was terrific. Did you see that great profile of him in a somewhat recent New Yorker?

See as long as we are discussing a Roth book, we can talk about anything we want :)

I also thought Lou was a great character and I really enjoyed all the glove talk.

While he doesn't get a lot of pages in the book, I found Jerry really interesting, or I should say I had a perverse fascination with the story of his sending the dead rodent coat to the girl when he was a boy and how much that incident influenced the rest of his life.

[Al]

Sherry:

I thought the juxaposition of how Lou dealt with Jesse and Swede reacted to Merry was perfect and really summed up the difference between Swede and his dad.

[[deleted user]]

That scene with Merry coming up the walk at the end is another wonderful scene of Roth's. He makes me gape in awe at his imagination and his skill in transferring the result to the reader's imagination. The words in between just disappear for me.

[Al]

In general, the scenes with Merry in them were quite memorable - perhaps because of what Russ says above about the intersection of Roth's imagination and our own.

And what was the deal with Ms. rita Cohen? (forgive me if i have that name wrong - I don't have the book in front of me)

[[deleted user]]

Al, I thought finally we had to put the whole Rita business down as a smooth and elaborate con game, an opportunistic swindle. My imagination doesn't come up with anything else. I'm not intersecting much. :)

[Robert]

Thanks, Steve.

Yeah, what about Rita Cohen? She was scary. What makes her even more scary is not knowing anything about her. This ambient threat.

And what happens to Merry and Dawn? Sounds like their troubles are just beginning. Merry is imprisoned, widely reviled, tried and sentenced to life in prison? Dawn goes insane and commits suicide? The Swede marries a hot young blonde, has three athletic boys, moves his glove company to Ponce, has a successful new life and dies at seventy?

Sherry, I imagine Old Rimrock to be near Mendham, but much smaller in size, similar to Brookside, Green Village, New Vernon, Far Hills, Peapack or Gladstone. Then I see their house 5 miles out from the little village on one of those gorgeous roads.

Robt

[Al]

But what do we really know about Seymour's 2nd wife? Maybe she is more Rita Cohen than Miss New Jersey?

Robt: In my mind, Dawn is "cured" when she and Seymour divorce and she ends up in her dream house with her nutty architect. And I didn't see a trial in Merry's future either.

I was also curious about the courting of Mary Dawn Dwyer. Was she the "forbidden fruit" aka shiksa that brought an end to the Eden that Lou Levov had worked so hard to create? I know there's some talk by Seymour about how marrying Dawn was the only time he went against his father's wishes.

[Rosana]

All right, I am the odd one here, as I did not like the book that much. On message 18, Russ says:

For all of the non-physical introspections, ideas, speculations and agonized interior monologues, I think perhaps Roth is "showing" us, not "telling" us about the character.

I did not share your enthusiasm for the characterization at all. The characters were all too obvious. The best school athlete marries the beauty pageant queen and have the craziest daughter. He is showing all right! There is no subtlety at all. It felt just very stereotypical.

Yes, it is the history of the American dream – from rags to riches in 3 generations, of course – and the shattering of that dream with the rebel daughter, Vietnam War, multiple divorces, face lifts, alcoholism, the migration of jobs offshore, marital affairs, prostate cancer…

It failed at making a connection with me though. The characters are all dislikeable, but I have enjoyed other books where I never really cared about the characters (the exception here is Lou – still very stereotypical, but at least likeable).

I wonder that it just felt too distant from me because of my age and non-American background. At 44, I missed the baby-boomer generation by just one year. I am not trying to discriminate based on age here, but it does seem to me that this book would be more appealing to those that have lived through it.

On another note – I think Merry died. This is what Jerry says when telling the story to Nathan, that the Swede had cried in a car on a parking lot because he missed his daughter and she was dead. (Do I remember this right or should I try and find the passage?)

[Dick]

I had (and have) trouble taking the characters seriously in the sense of wondering how they'll work things out, what comes after the last page, etc. Zuckerman makes it so crystal clear that the factual underpinnings of his narrative of Swede's life are based on almost nothing more than high school memories and the 30 minute conversation with Jerry the night of the reunion. Thus, it seems to me that the story's relationship to reality, except perhaps in some larger psychological sense, is tenuous at best. And, while this is true of all stories, in this one its imaginary qualities and the relation of imagination to reality is placed front and center by the author(s). Talk about meta.

So, is Rita Cohen only a "perfect ideologue" or is she also a harpy sent by Zuckerman to worry the bones of a blue-eyed blond over-assimilated Jew who dared fly too near the American sun? It appears the Rita Cohen character is one of the story elements created out of whole cloth by Zuckerman (and of course at a one step remove, Roth. Talk about meta-meta.)-- but to what purpose?

Perhaps to show the Swede finally brought to bay by forces his strong legs and good looks couldn't overcome? Is Rita a little flash of Zuckerman's schadenfreude over the painful and unhappy end to his boyood idol's life?

"I may be childless and impotent," I can hear Zuckerman thinking to himself, "but at least I'm not the prematurely dead father of a fat, homicidal maniac."

What are the motives of the story teller here? I've been thinking about that a lot -- more, I have to confess, than I've been thinking about any of the characters except good old Zuckerman.

That dog..

[Al]

Dick:

I think your comments about Zuckerman and schadenfreude make a lot of sense.

When you think about Zuckerman's role as string-puller in the story, do you wonder if he is doing justice to Seymour's request in the letter about his old man. I find that interesting in light of the fact that most here seem to agree that Lou Levov comes off as the most likeable character in zuckerman's/roth's novel.

[[deleted user]]

Back into the fray, refreshed this morning, and after an evening of thinking it over.

Dick I have been focusing on what to try to make of Swede's (and Merry's) mental states, and I think the episodes with Rita play into that. I think a few things can be said.

First of all, Rita serves the technical purpose of feeding Merry's location to Swede. But Roth might have accccomplished that in any number of other ways, of course, fertile imagination that he has, so that's hardly significant.

Third (and I'll come back to second) I think the shift in Swede's reaction to Rita -- from believing her, to writing her off as a nut case -- is there to mark a shift in Swede's mental state, from yearning for Merry to recognizing that she is effectively gone from his life. I think that Swede, right there, has shifted forward from one of the well-known stages of grieving (a la Kubler-Ross) to the next -- perhaps from the end of depression into the beginning of acceptance.

Now for second. What is going on with Rita? Her's is a bizarre interlude and I think there is a bizarre explanation to match it. First, I think that the episodes find themselves based in the actual, but unfortunate, reality that cranks and nuts and schemers do, in real life, appear at the doorsteps of people who find themselves in the news because they are in severe personal trouble or agony of some sort. So, I think Roth keyed on the actual reality of that to include such an interlude in his story, as he did with so many other excerpts from reality.

Next, I think Rita latched onto some facts of Merry's life and current whereabouts by being part of her environment at some point -- a co-worker perhaps -- and decided to start running the scam that we read about. I think she fed Merry's whereabouts to Swede as a deliberate calculation to carry the scam forward into a further phase. But she miscalculated, and her scam broke. So she called Swede and vented her anger at him, but clearly without understanding what had transpired between Swede and Merry. So what was her miscalculation that broke the scam? It may be that Rita was expecting that Swede would take Merry back under his protection, as one of the members here hoped -- maybe even bring her home -- and that Rita could then move forward to blackmailing Swede for harboring a criminal. Perhaps. But Swede left Merry where she was, and from Merry's point of view there never would be a further connection with her father, so those developments confounded that calculation of Rita's and ended her hold on the Swede. And ended the Rita interlude.

[Robert]

I suppose that if you liked American Pastoral the Swede and Dawn are convincingly developed archetypes and if you didn’t like the novel then they might come off as stereotypes. I’ll go with the former but I can see how you could experience the latter, Capitu. For me, there’s a real guy who was a local legend, moviestar handsome, charismatic, went on to play football professionally, whom I ran into years later. So the Swede resonates with me. Such people do exist. My local hero has had a lifelong battle with drugs and alcohol, perhaps a common story, but was still handsome and charming. I’ve had fantasies about him but that’s another kind of novel.

I can also understand feeling that Roth is hitting us over the head with his point, as someone alluded to, being crushed under giant incongruities or whatever. But I like the bold storyline. Make it mythic in size. Give us a greek tragedy where the godlike man is brought to his knees by the real gods.

That final dinner party was fantastic. Hasn’t everyone had to attend a party when you felt like dying? That Rockwellian scene had plenty of black humor in it even as it broke my heart. All those high whites in chic lighting. Lies and infidelities served up with platters of gourmet food. Nobody got away unscathed by Roth except maybe the doctor and the Swede’s best friend Shelly. I liked it that the good guys were in the minority. Token normalcy. That was quite a day for the Swede. Merry was plenty enough but the horrors kept coming. What’s for dinner? Hamlet with cloves. Yahweh’s retrobution for assimilation. You can’t have it. Your American dream will be smashed by a divine fist. Torah! Torah! Torah! So, next time you look longingly at house beautiful just count your lucky stars instead.

Robt

[[deleted user]]

Continuing now after a nice brisk walk in the autumn leaves, and with coffee now in hand.

Capitu,
You quote my comment about introspection and you take issue. As it turns out I agree with about 98% of what you say. You have it right. Mostly.

The characters in the novel are indeed steroptypes, vividly and accurately drawn and without much nuance that can be found. They are largely paper thin, with everything about them written on the front of them, and nothing written on their back. I see them as being there to voice the ideas, attitudes and arguments of the era -- as many as Roth can squeeze into his novel -- and to energize the social and ethnic attitudes of Protestants, Catholics and Jews of the time. In fact I do not find the latter aspects very appealing to read about. But Roth collects it all and voices it through his characters.

To me they constitute a Greek Chorus in this novel, which I view as having the structure of a classical Greek drama with just two characters at center stage -- Swede Levov as classical protagonist, and Merry Levov as classical antagonist. To be sure, there are other major characters in the form of Lou Levov, Jerry Levov, and Dawn Dwyer Levov. They are a major chorus surrunding Swede and Merry. But the rest -- the Orcutts, and Sylvia Levov, and the Dwyers, and Bucky Robinson, and the Salzmans, and the Umanovs are peripheral characters, each with their allotted lines to say and their limited places to occupy in the drama. They all, major and peripheral, are not given to introspection. They know the answers already. So they shout, and comment and berate. And fork.

I associate introspection with Swede and with Merry. To me, the significant dramatic and emotionl struggles in this story are carried out in their heads with themselves, and in the intellectual, not physical, encounters between themselves. And there I believe is where Roth is showing us their characters, not telling us, and there is where I believe one can follow the unfolding dramatic and emotional conflicts that form the core of this sprawling story.

[[deleted user]]

Robert, that is superb: "Torah! Torah! Torah!"

[Al]

someone earlier made the point that Rita must have known Merry somewhere along the way. it also seems possible that she may have known Seymour as well, given her efficacy as his tormentor. I wonder if she could somehow be related to the speech therapist. I thought that was a wonderful twist (and twist of the knife in Seymour's back or heart, whichever you prefer) that the speech therapist was the one that both Merry and the Swede turned to in the aftermath of the bombing.

[Jim]

While I wouldn’t want to dispute with anyone who finds this book a great work of art, I sympathize with those who got worn out before the end. For some of us hearing that a book is just like Moby Dick doesn’t necessarily make us rush to the bookstore.

I think of the unremitting intensity of passages like:

“Monkeys, gorillas, they have brains and we have a brain, but they don’t have this thing, the thumb. They can’t move it opposite the way we do. The inner digit on the hand of man, that might be the distinguishing physical feature between ourselves and the rest of the animals. And the glove protects that inner digit. The ladies glove, the welder’s glove, the baseball glove, et cetera. This is the root of humanity, this opposable thumb. It enables us to make tools and build cities and everything else. Maybe more than the brain. Maybe some other animals have bigger brains in proportion to their bodies than we have. I don’t know. But the hand itself is an intricate thing. It moves. There is no other part of a human being that is clothed that is such a complex moving structure”

While I will give Roth credit for being interesting and inventive, I tire of the rhetorical flourish that gets applied to every single subject. In isolation this section is just fine. Obviously Swede is getting frantic trying to connect with Vicky. My problem is that he is always frantic, filled with guilt, anger, and resentment. He needs to breathe once in a while.

The part of Swede I don’t believe is that this character was ever the star athlete. Rabbit Angstrom kept thinking back to his glory days and stayed athletically active after a fashion. Swede’s athletic past seems to have happened to another person, and I am not convinced that people forget their past achievements that easily. Perhaps the meta-fictional nature of this book gets Zuckerman a free pass here.

On a more positive note, I did enjoy the tour of the glove factory overall. It definitely ranks right up there with the tour of the gin distillery in Brookland earlier this year.

[Wilhelmina]

I found that the "story within a story" construct made it difficult for me to connect with the characters in the book or to care enough to speculate about their fates. For me, the outcome was whatever Zuckerman might decide to make it. He's already told us everything that he knows to be true in the first part of the book. Everything that comes after told me more about Zuckerman himself than it did about Swede, his family, and the supporting characters. So Rita, for example, seemed more of an opportunity for Zuckerman to examine what horribly destructive forces could have brought down his idol than a character whose own motives were of interest to me. How Merry died just seemed to be something about which he didn't bother to speculate.

Steve, I agree with your comparison to the details about whaling in Moby Dick. I enjoyed the details about the glove industry. For me, those details, the history of the area, and the characters, like Lou, who were actually known by Zuckerman, were the only things that tethered the story to reality.

[Dick]

I think we agree, Wilhelmina. All stories are exercises in imagination. However, this story differs somewhat in that the author is at pains to tell us how the story has been imagined. Since Roth doesn't seem given to idle scribbling, I think the "why" and the "how" may be the paramount issues in understanding the novel.

And yes, Steve, I do think there may be an element of schadenfreude in the Cohen character. If I recall correctly, the only reference to any real friends of Merry's is a an oblique and dismissive mention of her "friends" by Jerry. So Rita, with all her passionate viciousness, is a pure creation of Zuckerman's. And here's a question that occurred: can there be any doubt that Zuckerman, in his prime, would have hesitated a moment about f**king Rita? From Zuckerman's standpoint, isn't Swede's embarrassed refusal to respond to her "I'm a lefty tart" pitch merely a display of impotence -- impotence without the excuse of the surgeon's knife? I thought I definitely caught a whiff of contempt for Swede's weakness in that scene.

Similarly, I thought there was almost a sense of authorial exultation in the chaotic, destructive grand finale of the dinner party, during which emotional and psychosexual band-aids are being ripped off Swede's hairy body right and left. Maybe I'm taking this "novelist dancing on the graves of his demons" thing too far but so far it feels right to me.

[Ruth]

I agree with you, Mina. It gave a feeling of unreality to the whole story, regardless of how many tons of real incidents and places Roth packed in.

I admit to enjoying the glove info, tho. I'm old enough to remember wearing gloves. Everybody I knew had a white pair for summer and a black pair for winter, and mine never fit because I have large hands.

I'll have more to say in a while.

[Dick]

[I do think the Moby Dick comparisons are a bit overdone, though. After all, Roth's entire book would have been just a few chapters for Melville.:]

[Robert]

Thanks, Russ.

Evidently American Pastoral is the first of a loosely constructed trilogy along with I Married A Communist and The Human Stain. Has anyone read the other two novels? The Human Stain was made into a movie which I didn’t see.

Robt

[[deleted user]]

"novelist dancing on the graves of his demons" is I think the question.

I think one way to see the novel is indeed as a montage of scenes and attitudes and conflicts from that tumultuous era -- the American berserk as Roth calls it in the novel.

But is the montage the message?

Or is there a deeper message? And where would one find it?

For myself, I think it resides in the story of Swede and Merry. Typing that sentence out makes it seem obvious and easy. But it may be that the target of Roth's final thrust with his sword is not so easy to find. Because, when I closed the back cover, the reaction left ringing in my head was: "Now, what on Earth was that all about?"

[[deleted user]]

Robert, yes, I have read I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, after now having seen the movie, is up next for reading. Next among Roths that is, but who knows when?
Thinking about them, now, I would risk the thought that Pastoral seems like the loudest but with the least focused message. In the other two there is no doubt what Roth intends to say.

[Dick]

I thought it was interesting that Zuckerman revealed, in his conversation with Jerry, that until the night of the reunion he had been totally unaware of Merry's alleged bombing of the post office. Perhaps I'm being too lawyerly here, but I don't think "alleged" is too strong a word to use. Clearly, Jerry (and apparently Swede and family, although we only have Jerry's word on this, and how trustworthy a narrator is a ping-pong player who went to medical school, anyway?) believed she was involved and the perpetrator. But just as clearly, the Lvov family had bought into a great many destructive untrue things in their lives and I'm open to the possibility that Merry's career as a terrorist might just be one more.

And is Merry dead? I think that question is wide open and perhaps even not important. What is important is that she's gone from the Lvov family, perhaps in a way analagous to Swede's departure via marrying a shiksa. We're back to assimilation issues here -- one of Roth's old favorites.

Oh, and who's going to open up the incipient incest can of worms for us? Who, exactly, was sticking his tongue down Merry's 14 year old throat -- Swede or that dog Zuckerman? Clearly, I have my own opinion on that one....

[[deleted user]]

That kiss, though very highly unusual, was Swede's misplaced target for why he thought things had gone wrong with Merry (I am so brash as to say!). I do indeed think that one of the major unresolved questions is why Merry took the path she did. That was certainly a major question of the era: why are these kids, who shoud be happy with what they have, instead angry at what they have? In the book it just happens, and the Weatherman slogan on the wall of her bedroom is the only hint. Maybe that's all that many of the affected parents knew. But my thoughts and probing lean in another direction.

Merry's rebellion is indeed the eruption that causes the rest of the book to happen, but I think a lot depends on how we view Swede, the protagonist of the story. Did he get on with his life, so that his is a success story in living through his agonies and triumphing over them? Or is he a tragic hero brought down by the weight of events? And if tragic hero, then the very next words are "tragic flaw" and the cause of his downfall will be found within himself. It won't be Merry, and it won't necessarily be that kiss, I don't think.

But it won't be easy to pin it on Swede either. In many glimpses in the novel he is the perfect open-minded tolerant person. Dawn asks him about potential resentment against Jews in Protestant Old Rimrock before they move there, and he says that he is sure that if he treats people fairly and respectfully they will treat him fairly and respectfully. When Merry wishes to go into the City alone, he tries to reason with her in a magnificent set of exasperating conversations. But as I see it, he ultimately respects her right to have her own thoughts which will only be addressed with reason, not countermanded by putting his foot down. When she asks him to leave her hovel, at what I regard as the climax of the novel, he leaves -- again because he respects her right to choose to live as she wishes, however repugnant it may be to him. Swede is stymied by his own tolerance and respect for other people. But that cannot be a flaw. Can it?