American Pastoral - Philip Roth

It's been almost two months since I've posted, but that means neither that I haven't been reading nor that I've been neglectful in posting. I've just been behind in finishing things! Since Moby-Dick, I've gotten through half of The Portable Faulkner with the library reading group, read the first half ("Combray") of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way, and read Philip Roth's 1997 novel American Pastoral.

The Faulkner has been set aside the last few weeks, but I had really become enthralled by his world at the point in that collection where I left off. Proust's book (especially the famous "madeleine cake in tea" passage) is absolutely breathtaking, but a little exhausting at times because of the density and length of its beautiful sentences - I'll go back soon and read the rest: "Swann in Love" and "Place Names: the Name". I just decided I needed a little break before I stepped right into the world that I'm guessing will continue to unfold itself over the course of the whole Proust novel.

The only Roth I'd read before this was the story "Goodbye, Columbus" out of his first book, Goodbye, Columbus and Other Stories. This one comes almost forty years later, and it is a book makes you feel the experience, maturity, and sadness that comes with aging. This was, then, my introduction to Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's author alter-ego, who narrates many of his novels. Zuckerman begins by being very present in the narrative, relating his memories of the star athlete of his high school, Seymour Levov, from the adoring perspective of a younger student who looked up to him. After the Swede (Levov's nickname) gets in touch in the 1990s with Zuckerman about writing a tribute to his father, Leo Levov, all of Zuckerman's worshipful feelings come back. Levov's apparent shallowness and self-unawareness is like a punch in the stomach to Zuckerman, and he wonders if that all-American beginning turned into all-American boredom and banality.

Shortly after, Zuckerman finds out from Levov's younger brother that the Swede has passed away, and that his life was not as he had guessed. The pivotal moment in the downfall was the day in 1968 when his young daughter Merry Levov blew up their small town's general store as a protest to the war in Vietnam. From there Zuckerman's mind sets to work, imagining what must have gone wrong, and he disappears, allowing his guesses to become the heart of the novel we are reading.

I mention all of this framework because it really fascinated me. You start to forget later that this story of the Swede's adult life isn't necessarily what happened but a fiction that an author has dreamed up to try to make sense of a story about which he only possesses skeletal parts. Keeping that in mind reminds us we're reading fiction, but the story itself feels somehow startlingly real.

Being the story of a father whose daughter has let him down but who can't let go of his feelings for and memories of her, I found certain parts frightening (as a new father to a daughter who seems to me just about perfect) and other parts heartbreaking (there is a beautiful passage where the Swede with the sadness of fuller knowledge remembers Merry's growth from unknown newborn to beloved child). There is a lot more to it than that, but the father-daughter themes definitely struck a chord with me personally.