American Pastoral, Beach Reading, Breaks

Just finished: American Pastoral, Philip Roth

Now reading: Sex at Dawn, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha

On deck: Do You Dream of Terra-Two? Temi Oh

Guess what? I didn’t read for the first week after school ended. Oops. Instead, I drove down to Virginia, and while I did bring a book with me, I was too busy doing other stuff to sit down and read it. Even the couple of hours that I could have spent reading, I didn’t, because the new season of The Bear dropped. Then, I read a little bit on Tuesday night, after cleaning my apartment and working out, and then I didn’t really read that much on Wednesday, read a little bit on Thursday night when I couldn’t go to sleep, and realized Friday morning that the only way I was going to finish this book was going to be if I took myself to the only place where reading is basically the only thing you can do: The Beach.

It’s not the only thing to do at the beach, but I don’t go in the water, I tend to go by myself, and it’s too bright for me to even think about using my phone (plus, it overheats), so when I really need to read in the summer, I go to Scarborough Beach in Narragansett, I try to ignore the inherent obnoxiousness of large groups of people, and I camp out until I finish whatever it is I’m trying to finish. I’m very lowkey in my beach attendance, bringing with me only the serape I bought out west last year, my glass milk bottle for water, sunscreen, and sometimes headphones. My dermatologist will have work for years since I never bring an umbrella. In any case, I finished reading American Pastoral by Philip Roth, which I started reading during an oil change before my road trip.

“Swede Levov’s life, for all I know, had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore just great, right in the American grain,” (31).

Sometimes I get frustrated with myself as a reader because, lately, I tend to read almost exclusively nonfiction. Some of it is still narrative, but I know that I’m doing myself a disservice when I’m not reading literature, because good narrative fiction really is what I live for. And I get frustrated, too, because I worry that I’m procrastinating in reading books like American Pastoral because it’s going to ask my brain to work in a specific way and the muscle feels weak. Cormac McCarthy, for example, is one of the authors I have to work myself up to read despite his being one of my favorites, and something similar happened with American Pastoral. If I were putting together a table, I would probably put Philip Roth on the same table as Cormac McCarthy.

The frame narrative of the novel, which is left open, no bookend, by the end of the story, creates the expectation that this is, ultimately, a fictionalized interpretation of (fictional) people’s lives based largely on the desire to make a good story out of limited facts. The point is that we all do this, every day, which Roth makes early in the novel, when Nathan, narrating, says, “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,” (35), and, later, to Jerry, “Writing turns you into somebody who’s always wrong,” (63). Within the narrative that Nathan creates about the Swede, the characters frequently (compulsively?) create stories about each other, deflecting in part from the way they recreate the stories about themselves with as much frequency. Nathan creates the story about the Swede after hearing Jerry’s way of telling what happened, and in that story, the Swede invents stories about his daughter, who creates stories about her past; about his wife, who creates stories about the man she eventually cheats on him with, who creates stories about wife and about his family tree; about Rita Cohen, who creates stories about the Levovs; about the Umanoffs; about himself. Each story is a branch which demonstrates exactly how often we do “get them wrong.”

It’s not a uniquely American problem to create these stories about the people around us, nor is it uniquely American to face shifting generational ideals, but America has a chokehold on its paradoxical identities which Roth illustrates well in the uncomplicated version of the Swede, the noble high school sports hero, the one for whom responsibilities are obvious, the one who does all of the “right things,” versus the version of him following Merry’s post office bombing. Merry is “the daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral—into the indigenous American berserk,” (86). Roth places an emphasis on othering: the guy who is granted full admittance to America, the America as idealized by WASPs, or an America that doesn’t exist, which has never existed, but people have always wanted to exist—that pastoral vision—through the labor of his father and grandfather before him, is now denied it by the actions of a daughter who hates the America which created her. The Swede never hates Merry for blowing up the general store and its post office, though Jerry’s sure that the inability to rage about it is what kills him. Jerry’s wrong in his assertion that his brother isn’t angry enough over what Merry did, though: Merry is part of the Swede’s ideal vision of what it means to be American, had been figured into his fantasy with his stone house even before he knew that he would make Dawn the mother in that fantasy. The Swede gets mad about it when thinking about the dichotomy between himself and his embrace of America versus Merry’s rejection of it: “That violent hatred of America was a disease unto itself. And he loved America. Loved being an American. But back then he hadn’t dared begin to explain to her why he did, for fear of unleashing the demon, insult….Imagine the vileness with which she would have assaulted him for revealing to her that just reciting the names of the forty-eight states used to thrill him back when he was a little kid,” (206-7), and he “wander[ed] deeper and deeper into an American’s life, forthrightly evolving into a large, smooth, optimistic American such as his conspicuously raw forebearers….Who was she to sneer at all this, to reject all this, to hate all this and set out to destroy it?” (208). Part of the divide between them might be that the Swede had to work to become American (despite being born in New Jersey) while Merry, born into privilege, did not, and didn’t have the ideal to aspire towards, but rather something to reject. At the end of the day, though, the America of the 1960s and 70s doesn’t let the Swede have the America he wants. His factories are moved out of New Jersey over safety and production quality concerns. His Irish Catholic wife cheats on him with an old WASP who can recount his family history through a cemetery tour dating back to the 1700s, her own need for a “normal” American life away from the Gothic of the stone farmhouse and failed family Swede gave her. He has his own affair, and while, thanks to the frame narrative, we know that he gets to have another family, we also know that he’s never fully able to move on, that he still cries about Merry, and that he dies from the same cancer—prostate—that appears as a specter ready to claim any of the other men at Nathan’s reunion, the same cancer that has left narrator Nathan himself impotent and incontinent. Even if you do all the right things in America, you still will be denied access to the American dream—or, worse, you’ll have it and then it will be taken away.

This book was published almost thirty years ago, and is ostensibly about that great period of disillusionment, the 60s and 70s, but it’s worth thinking about how America, culturally, always has these cycles of endorsement of an American dream and the dismal realities of Being American. Maybe what American literature teaches us most about being American is the way that this country of opportunity regularly betrays the people who believe in it most. America as mirage, America as temptress, the Unreal Pastoral America giving way, always, to the America of Violence. The Swede is the man capable of great violence who refuses it; Merry is the child who becomes violence and then internalizes it, her conversion to Jainism methodology to turn that violence inward, a perversion of ahimsa.

A few lines I highlighted while reading:

• “There was a factory where somebody was making something in every side street. Now there’s a liquor store in every street—a liquor store, a pizza stand, and a seedy storefront church.” (25)

• “Or, for reasons I couldn’t understand, he didn’t want his world to be interesting.” (28)

• “The idea of himself neighborhood stardom had wreathed him in—had that mummified the Swede as a boy forever?” (36)

• “He’s all about being looked at. He always was. He is not faking all this virginity. You’re craving depths that don’t exist. This guy is the embodiment of nothing. I was wrong. Never more mistaken about anyone in my life.” (39)

• “There was a big belief in life and we were steered relentlessly in the direction of success: a better existence was going to be ours. The goal was to have goals, the aim to have aims. This edict came entangled often in hysteria, the embattled hysteria of those whom experience had taught how little antagonism it takes to wreck a life beyond repair.” (41)

• “Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention…somehow we even dimly grasped how every family’s different set of circumstances set each family a distinctive difficult human problem.” (43)

• “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.” (55)

• “The body, from which one cannot strip oneself however one tries, from which one is not to be freed this side of death.” (79)

• “He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach—that it makes no sense.” (81)

• “It doesn’t matter if he was the cause of anything. He makes himself responsible anyway.” (88)

• “No one begins like this, the Swede thought. This can’t be what she is….this child who did not know anything and would say anything and more than likely do anything—resort to anything to excite herself.” (139)

• “If he was a child, it was only insofar as he found himself looking ahead into responsible manhood with the longing of a kid gazing into a candy-store window.” (192)

• “And probably, the Swede thought, what made it so frightening for them is that they believed Dawn could get their husbands—they’d noticed how men looked at her and how attentive they were to her wherever she went…You have to enjoy power, have a certain ruthlessness, to accept the beauty and not mourn the fact that it overshadows everything else.” (195)

• “Hate America? Why, he lived in America the way he lived inside his own skin. All the pleasures of his younger years were American pleasures, all that success and happiness had been American, and he need no longer keep his mouth shut about it just to defuse her ignorant hatred. The loneliness he would feel as man without all his American feelings. The longing he would feel if he had to live in another country. Yes, everything that gave meaning to his accomplishments had been American. Everything he loved was here.” (213)

• “Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success. Three generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people. And now with the fourth it had all come to nothing. The total vandalization of their world.” (237)

• “You got it! Exactly! We are not enough. We are none of us enough! Including even the man who does everything right!...Even a monster has to be from somewhere—even a monster needs parents. But parents don’t need monsters.” (280)

Is this book light beach reading? No. Did I still finish it while reading it on a beach? Yes. Is America always inaccessible in literature? Yes, but I think that that’s because, in the same way that all of these characters are telling stories about themselves and about others which are not necessarily true, and likely get things wrong, we get the story of America wrong every time we try to tell it. There’s no complete picture. What’s true about America for one person, one generation, one race, is not going to be true about it for the next.

On an unrelated note, I’m almost at the end of the “unread books” in my apartment and am going to be making my next anxiety-driven book purchase in the next couple of weeks. This happens about three times a year, since that’s usually about how long it takes me to get through the books I order. If there’s something I should read, please send me recommendations. I can’t guarantee that I’ll actually read the book this summer, but I will read it eventually.