Tom's Two Cents : American Pastoral by Philip Roth

 

 

The Pulitzer Prize winner for 1997, American Pastoral belongs in that distinguished category with "Great Gatsby" and "Death of A Salesman" of works that both extol and condemn American materialistic values. As a character, the Swede, Seymour Levov, stands right up there with Willy Loman and Jay Gatsby as a man more sinned against than sinning.  That said, this book is light years away from the others in terms of style and presentation.  It is harsh, at times didactic--at least through its characters-- and quite possibly the most disturbingly pessimistic work I've ever read by an American novelist.  It also raises a highly perplexing question: what in these days is a novel really for?

 In the 19th century the English/American novel was perceived as a source of upper and middle class entertainment, but in the later 20th not so much.  Admittedly, the nature of entertainment fiction has changed dramatically since my generation grew up.  Dickens straddled the fence beautifully between being an entertainer and a moralist at the same time, but nowadays with no holds barred in fiction authors seem less likely to walk the Dickensian line. I won't go so far as to say emphatically that shock value has replaced entertainment value in fiction, but I will say that shock (and I'm not talking about horror fiction, which has always been with us) is very high on the entertainment list today.  Thus the insensitivity to shock gets higher and higher.  What's left today to shock us?  Not much, if anything. 

What does all this have to do with American Pastoral? In my opinion, a lot.  It is a shocking novel about a shocking subject: a violent crime (a bombing) committed in the 60s by a fifteen year old girl from a prominent New Jersey family, and no, we aren't talking about the Sopranos here.  We are talking about a respectable, hardworking, law abiding upper middle class Jewish family, who seemingly had it all.  Phillip Roth's central question in this work seems not so much to be where did this family go wrong as when and how did America go wrong in its dream of equality for all and making the world safe for democracy?  Perhaps it's inevitable in such a work that no conclusions are reached, though many possible answers are presented.

All of which brings me back to my earlier question of what's a novel for? The serious (and sometimes comic) literary novel has always been about enlightenment within the human condition, enlightenment and catharsis--what the Greeks meant by that was a purging of the emotions that involved  both understanding and empathy.  American Pastoral is big on crisis, but not on enlightenment or catharsis--it's a story that could well be on the national news this week or any week-- basically it takes the perspective that life makes no sense, and that's it--the Classical Greeks would not accept that or even understand it--they managed to render at least some order out of chaos-- of course they had their pagan gods to blame for all the bad stuff, and we don't!

 There's an old tenet in literature that every good novel, despite its subject, should have some "redeeming social value."  If American Pastoral has any, please do tell me what it is.  It is very successful in pointing out the social ills of our time, but not in offering any solutions.