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Review by Charles Flowers
The arresting opening of Philip Roth's latest novel, American Pastoral, recalls and builds upon his most accomplished self-referential fiction of the past. As in the so-called "Zuckerman trilogy," a famous writer grumbles through scenes that seem shaped from memory and occasionally vengeful.
At a high school reunion that flickers between the touching and the grotesque, our childless, unattached first-person observer notes various deficiencies of other sixtyish men and women he last saw beside wall lockers. He hides his own impairment: after surgery for prostate cancer, he is incontinent and impotent. He is also convinced that no human understands another, or ever can. This impossibility seems to him now an essential truth of the human condition.
Roth's high-resolution intelligence and flexible prose draw us into the most mundane of life experiences, from school rituals to failed marriage, revealing fault lines of failure, duplicity, and waste. Bemused, his alter ego decides to explore the seamless life of the golden boy of his mostly Jewish high school, a blue-eyed blond athlete known as The Swede.
This cool paragon has expanded his father's glove manufacturing business, married a gentile Miss New Jersey, later married a young trophy wife, and retained his looks and air of almost aromatic self-confidence. But when he dies suddenly, his younger brother reports that he has suffered miserably for decades. American Pastoral is Roth's struggle with that apparent anomaly.
It turns out that the one child of The Swede's first marriage, a bright girl afflicted with a stutter, came to hate her picture-perfect parents, their bland life in Jersey "horse country," and America's involvement in Vietnam. One night, she blew up the local post office, killing a beloved physician, and disappeared underground.
Is The Swede responsible because of a moment of incestuous playfulness? Has he betrayed his origins by intermarrying? Is the whole American success story of generations moving from immigrant poverty to the precincts of the gentry a sick delusion? Roth has often dealt with the ironies of materialism, but never before has he attempted such an epic sweep through American history.
American Pastoral is finally more impassioned dialogue with readers than totally convincing story. The most authentic passages are The Swede's and the narrator's reflections upon our congenital solitudes: no love, no belief avails in these pages. What comfort there is comes solely from the implacable certainty of Roth's masterly writing.
Charles Flowers's next book, A Scientific Odyssey, will be published by William Morrow next January.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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