“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense.”
Seymour “The Swede” Levov is the perfect image of American success. He is tall, strong, muscular, athletic, blond-haired, fair-skinned –an archetypal “Swede” (who is able to pass as though he is not Jewish). In his youth, he was a home-town hero in Newark, New Jersey (hailing from the Jewish neighborhood of Weequahic). This was during the ebullient postwar era wherein people were filled with a brimming sense of optimism, a hopeful promise of the future, a desire to escape insignificance or mediocrity, embracing of the credo: “You must not come to nothing! Make something of yourselves!” In the 1940s, the Swede was an all-star high school athlete and a pillar of the community, a symbol of strength and unity for a country at war. He was the face of safety, security, hope, and consistency in the face of chaos. The Swede was beloved by everyone, especially the young Jewish boys at Weequahic High who looked up to him (he was loosely based on a real person in Roth’s upbringing). One such young boy who looked up to the Swede was Nathan “Skip” Zuckerman, a close friend of the Swede’s younger brother Jerry.
Nathan Zuckerman serves as our narrator in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (Zuckerman is Philip Roth’s alter ego in both American Pastoral as well as a string of eight other Roth novels, including the subsequent two installments in the so-named “American Trilogy,” I Married a Communist and The Human Stain). American Pastoral is framed through Nathan Zuckerman’s perspective, thus making him the most important character in the novel. Much of novel is told through his memories from many years ago. But now at age 62 in 1995, Zuckerman looks back fondly on his halcyon high school years while attending his forty-fifth high school reunion. He is now a writer, lives alone, and is about a year’s recovery from prostate cancer (the surgery has apparently left him impotent). Indeed, several characters in the novel suffer from prostate cancer (including the Swede himself).
Amidst a myriad joyful memories at the high school reunion, from teenage baseball games to masturbation and music, Zuckerman catches up with his old pal Jerry. Naturally, their conversation turns to Jerry’s older brother, the legendary Swede, whom Zuckerman saw several years earlier outside a baseball game. At that time, the Swede seemed to have reached the pinnacle of American success –he inherited his father’s celebrated glove-making business (Newark Maid, one of the last remaining manufacturers in the city), served in the marine corps at the tail-end World War II (though he was prevented from serving abroad when the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan), got married (first to a Miss New Jersey pageant queen then later to another woman), moved to the town of Rimrock, and had three sons. At the time, Zuckerman recalls how the Swede’s father Lou Levov had recently passed away and he asked Zuckerman to pen a “tribute” to him. But now at the reunion, Zuckerman is shocked to learn that the Swede, himself, has suddenly passed away from prostate cancer, just before his fiftieth birthday. And furthermore, Zuckerman learns from Jerry about a dark secret that has been hidden away in the Swede’s past.
This is the framing in which we receive the bulk of the plot in American Pastoral. What does this framing device tell us about the Roth’s intent with this novel? Why is important for to know about Zuckerman as the source of this whole story? From this point in the novel, we turn to the life of the Swede. Nathan Zuckerman realizes that the Swede’s request to write a “tribute” about his father is really about something else, namely the Swede’s troubled daughter about whom little is known. Much like the atomic bomb that was dropped in Japan, a metaphorical bomb was also dropped in the Swede’s life when his teenage daughter, Meredith “Merry” Levov, got involved in revolutionary politics and turned to violence. Ostensibly spurred on by fierce opposition to the Vietnam War, the Swede’s daughter joined communist groups of Columbia students in New York City while her parents grew increasingly concerned. But her situation only spiraled wildly out of control after she secretly joined a 1960s domestic terrorist insurgency known as “The Weathermen” (a revolutionary faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, a la The Weather Underground). She then “brought the war home to Lyndon Johnson” by making the staggering, horrifying decision to detonate bombs and blow up the local Rimrock Post Office in the General Store, killing a beloved local medical practitioner named Dr. Howard F. Conlon. This unhinged example of the “indigenous American berserk” dubs her the “Rimrock Bomber” and effectively also detonates the Swede’s picturesque life: “One day life started laughing at him and it never let up.” The Swede’s safe, conventional, idyllic world of quaint 1940s Americana is suddenly ruptured by a truly senseless act of chaotic 1960s political violence. His daughter becomes: “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—and into the indigenous American berserk” (86).
The Swede then spends the subsequent years trying to figure out what went wrong –he remembers a kiss he shared with her once as a child at her request, he reflects on her stuttering problem, her interest in reading, her ticks and leg twitches, her child psychiatrist, her exposure to violence on television news talking about the War in Vietnam, all the while searching for a wound or cause for her troubles. Why would Merry want to strike at the heart of the Swede’s world? Was it really all about her frustrations over Lyndon Johnson and the War in Vietnam? Or something else? Was she too lonely as a child? Was this somehow a result of her upper middle-class upbringing? Where did he go wrong as a father? Didn’t he do everything right? Should he not have kissed her that one time she asked as a child? Could it have been caused by her childhood stutter? Or was it that time she was exposed to a Vietnamese Buddhist monk self-immolating on television? The Swede has a painful and difficult time piecing together this meaningless act.
After the Rimrock bombing, Merry disappears (we later learn she goes into hiding at the home of her speech therapist). As time passes, the Swede tries desperately to find his daughter. One day, a mysterious young woman named Miss Rita Cohen visits the Swede. She is an activist and “provocateur who was Merry’s mentor in world revolution” who stops by the glove-making business to learn about the tannery (Philip Roth treats us to lengthy, throughly-researched passages about the history and craft of glove-making), but she later tries to aggressively seduce the Swede in a hotel room after he delivers to her some of Merry’s belongings (the Swede was hoping that Rita will reveal his daughter’s whereabouts), but the Swede soon grows disturbed after resisting her advances and he calls the FBI (though they never catch Rita). Interestingly enough, Rita is depicted with a kind of vague elusive dreamlike quality. Is she real? Or merely the figment of the Swede’s wishful imagination?
Five years pass and there are many more domestic terror attacks and riots across the United States (including the violent 1967 Newark Riots), with some 68,000 bombs detonated across the country, attacking everything from local townhouses to he Pentagon. In addition to Rita Cohen, the Swede comes into contact with a black communist philosophy professor at UCLA named Angela Davis, an activist who was being tried for kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy. From her, he learns that Merry’s group was not just opposed to the war, but also fighting against all forms of imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, and inequality (the group is also closely tied to women’s liberation and black liberation). In reality, the real Angela Davis (who is still alive as of the time I write this) was found not guilty for the Soledad Brothers incident, in which guns that belonged to Davis were used in a violent hostage takeover of a Marin County courtroom. But it is precisely this backdrop of leftist violence that has swept up Merry, and as the years pass we arrive at the Nixonian era of corruption culminating in the Watergate scandal (and the ensuing moral decay of a culture that embraces things like the pornographic film “Deep Throat”), as the whole situation leaves the Swede traumatized for the rest of his life, wondering where the Arcadian “American Pastoral” memory of his youth has gone.
The Swede eventually reconnects with Merry (now known as “Mary Stoltz”) in a heartbreaking moment. She has now converted to Jainism, seeking purity and ascetism, renouncing all forms of violence. And she lives in disgusting squalor inside a dirty boarded-up apartment covered with broken glass beside the train tracks, deep in the industrial decay of Newark where desperate thieves now roam everywhere, and garbage and dirty mattresses line the streets. She also has a filthy stench about her, she has lost a tooth, and has been raped twice (her stench is so repugnant that the Swede actually vomits onto her). It is a horrifying scene, the complete antithesis of the Swede’s vision of his perfect white bread and apple pie life. Merry admits to her father that she blew up the post office years ago, and that she also attempted to blow up Hamlin’s. In total, she has killed four people in bombings (although handling the dynamite has apparently cured her of her stutter).
This is the image we are left with of Merry before she eventually predeceases her father (we are curiously only presented with brief moments that never seem to offer full clarity). And in the ensuing years since Merry’s bombing, the Swede’s once-radiant Irish-Catholic trophy wife Dawn Dwyer (former “Miss New Jersey” and Miss America pageant contestant) falls into despair, her depression sees her institutionalized, and later, after recovering, she undergoes a facelift. In a particularly striking moment, the Swede suddenly catches her having an affair with a neighbor who is an architect (in the scene, architect Bill Orcutt is literally grinding on Dawn from behind at the kitchen sink while she shucks corn). But we also learn that the Swede had an affair of his own with Merry’s speech therapist, Sheila Salzman, while his wife was in the hospital. Clearly something is not right in the Levov household.
There is a general sense in American Pastoral that something has gone horribly awry in American culture. The youth are angry and some are turning to acts of violence, the politicians are leading the country into a war of aggression for no clear reason, meanwhile the strong working-class union manufacturing jobs that once filled the cities like Newark are being outsourced to other countries. White flight and urban crime are on the rise, and for citizens like the Swede, his own bourgeois household is in complete disarray. His daughter is a murderer and an outcast, she is violated and impoverished, while he and his wife have both been unfaithful to each other (this is foreshadowed in his wife’s sudden hatred of their traditional family home). What is evident in American Pastoral is that things have gone off the rails. The warm inviting imagery of the gentle, familiar past has vanished: old mills and forges, mines and factories, visionary craftsmen like glove-makers, towns with steepled churches and rolling gentle pastures, upstanding farmers, Johnny Appleseed and the noble Founding Fathers, the presidency of Warren Gamaliel Harding, simply things like a flirtatious evening with a girl, dancing at a sockhop, summer evenings on front porches, shopping at local cornerstores, attending baseball games, and even the desirability of an old stone house with a white picket fence. This is the great tragedy of American Pastoral, the death of a traditional vision of an “American Pastoral.”
After receiving these various scenes in the life of the Swede (told in three sections “Paradise Remembered – The Fall – Paradise Lost”), the novel ends on a particularly striking, haunting image (perhaps not unlike the closing imagery in other Pulitzer Prize-winning novels like The Grapes of Wrath). American Pastoral ends with the scene of a disastrous dinner gathering in which the Swede’s father, Lou Levov, is trying to feed apple pie to a drunken alcoholic woman, Jessie Orcutt, the wife of Bill Orcutt, before she suddenly grows irate with his lecturing demeanor and she attempts to stab him in the eye with a fork, only narrowly missing and piercing his forehead instead. Here we end the novel, with the elder Lou Levov having blood dripping down his face. This shocking scene is a stark parallel to the wild pandemonium that seems to have been unleashed across the country at all levels, from a violent post office bombing to drunken housewives stabbing their elders, seemingly nothing is held sacred anymore. And note the rich imagery used here by Philip Roth: alcohol and blood in a violent scene juxtaposing the young and the old, in which apple pie is the central motif. And, after all, what is more quintessentially American than apple pie?
Curiously, we never return to Nathan Zuckerman’s framing narrative following the forty-fifth high school reunion. American Pastoral simply ends with this disturbing moment from the Swede’s past, depicting the fallout of the Levov family in the ensuing years after Merry’s post office bombing. Though, as earlier chapters explain, we know that the Swede and Dawn are eventually divorced and that the Swede remarries and has three sons before dying of prostate cancer shortly before his fiftieth birthday.
American Pastoral is Philip Roth’s powerful lament at the state of post-1960s America, an elegy for a vanished world, a sorrowful, cynical portrait of a dying American myth. It is conservative in tone, yet it is also deeply skeptical about that same pain-loving conservatism that pines for a narrow artist’s image of the past. It looks backward with nostalgia while also being very much aware of the questionable nature of that activity. Suffice it to say American Pastoral is not a polemical novel. And the very title of the novel invites us to draw comparisons to the literary pastoral tradition as a whole. It’s worth noting that pastoral poetry, a classical literary genre, was often composed during turbulent times in ancient history, dating back to the Greeks and the Romans (i.e. poets like Theocritus, Hesiod, Virgil, and Ovid). Pastoral poetry often invokes a romantic depiction of simplistic carefree rustics wandering around in bucolic countrysides, like Arcadia, singing and tending to sheep, yearning for lost lovers or wistfully grieving the downfall of society, decrying urban corruption while praising rural innocence. This is the literary tradition in which we are invited to consider Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. However, in a unique twist, American Pastoral is more than simply a pastoral poem. It is a lament for the loss of the possibility of an “American Pastoral” itself. It shows us the brutal tearing down of the respectable midcentury nuclear family through inexplicable outbursts of nihilism. There is never a definitive reason given in the novel for Merry’s decision to bomb the post office, aside from her righteous contempt for President Johnson and the Vietnam War. But, of course, no reasonable person would defend her actions on these grounds. And yet Merry’s true perspective remains heavily obfuscated in the novel. She is the centrifugal force around which the whole novel turns. And her character still remains somewhat elusive and befuddling. Why does she decide to bomb the post office? Does she regret it? Is she happy in her life of squalor? What does her later life look like? How does she die? Roth filters her perspective through numerous layers, concealing key aspects of the full story, giving us a deliberately filtered version of events from the perspective of the writer Nathan Zuckerman digging into the secret life of the Swede trying to channel his daughter (both of whom have passed away by the time Zuckerman presents this story).
In my view, American Pastoral is a true American classic. I was surprised by just how much this deserving Pulitzer Prize-winner forced me to think, investigate, and mull over its deeper meaning, particularly in light of the lower opinion I developed of other authors of the same ilk (like John Updike). But American Pastoral reaches deep into the American psyche and tries to grapple with something unexplainable –the rise of nihilistic domestic terrorism in the Vietnam era only a handful of years after the exhilarating spirit of hope following the World War II years. What causes a country to go from triumphalism to fatalism? The troubling theory explored in American Pastoral is that there is no single clear explanation for this moral decay. No matter how many causes the Swede posits as the catalyst for his daughter’s actions, he is unable to pinpoint the roots of her radicalism. It is all in vain. And this leaves us readers in a state of horror as the mystery of what killed the dream remains ultimately unresolved.
Of the two epigraphs at the start of American Pastoral, the quotation from Johnny Mercer’s 1940s hit song “Dream” from is particularly striking (in the novel Nathan Zuckerman feels the pangs of nostalgia when he hears it at his forty-fifth high school reunion):
“Dream when the day is thru,
Dream and they might come true,
Things never are as bad as they seem,
So dream, dream, dream.”
Lastly, I will close these reflections with a brief quotation from the now-famous early review of the novel penned by celebrated New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani (who also won her own Pulitzer Prize in 1998 in the Criticism category):
“The resulting book is one of Mr. Roth’s most powerful novels ever, a big, rough-hewn work built on a grand design, a book that is as moving, generous and ambitious as his last novel, Sabbath’s Theater, was sour, solipsistic and narrow… In the end, the saga of the Levov family is one of those stories out of the headlines that make the reader’s head reel, one of those stories Mr. Roth once characterized as a threat to the novelist’s powers of invention. It is his achievement in these pages that he has not only tackled and imaginatively harnessed such a daunting subject but has also used it to create a fiercely affecting work of art.”
Notable Quotations:
“The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city’s old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete. The name was magical; so was the anomalous face. Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov” (3, opening line).
“The elevation of Swede Levov into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews can best be explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and the fears that it fostered. With the Swede indominable on the playing field, the meaningless surface of life provided a bizarre, delusionary kind of sustenance, the happy release into a Swedian innocence, for those who lived in dread of never seeing their sons or their brothers or their husbands again” (4).
“Mr. Levov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, college-educated Jewish sons: a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them” (11).
“Let’s remember the energy. Americans were governing not only themselves but some two hundred million people in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Japan. The war-crime trials were cleansing the earth of its devils once and for all. Atomic power was ours alone. Rationing was ending, price controls were being lifted… Our class started high school six months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history. And the upsurge of energy was contagious. Around us nothing was lifeless. Sacrifice and constraint were over. The Depression had disappeared. Everything was in motion. The lid was off. Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together” (40).
“Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention” (43).
“‘My brother was the best you’re going to get in this country, by a long shot’” (66).
“That was back in ’68, back when the wild behavior was still new. People suddenly forced to make sense of madness. All the public display. The dropping of inhibitions. Authority powerless. The kids going crazy. Intimidating everybody. The adults don’t know what to make of it, they don’t know what to do. Is this an act? Is the ‘revolution’ real? Is it a game? Is it cops and robbers? What’s going on here? Kids turning the country upside down and so the adults start going crazy too” (69).
“But who I was thinking of was the Swede, the Swede and the tyranny that his body held over him, the powerful, the gorgeous, the lonely Swede, whom life had never made shrewd, who did not want to pass through life as a beautiful boy and a stellar first baseman, who wanted instead to be a serious person for whom others came before himself and not a baby for whose needs alone the wide, wide world of satisfactions had been organized. He wanted to have been born something more than a physical wonder. As if for one person that gift isn’t enough. The Swede wanted what he took to be a higher calling, and his bad luck was to have found one. The responsibility of the school hero follows him through life. Noblesse oblige” (79).
“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach –that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one’s history” (81).
“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—and into the indigenous American berserk” (86).
“But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy –that is every man’s tragedy” (86).
“What is the grudge? What is the grievance? That was the central mystery: how did Merry get to be who she is?” (138).
“How does a child get to be like this? Can anyone be utterly without thoughtfulness? The answer is yes. His only contact with his daughter was this child who did not know anything and would say anything and more than likely do anything –resort to anything to excite herself. Her opinions were all stimuli: the goal was excitement” (139).
“Life was laughing at him” (216).
“They are crying intensely, the dependable father whose center is the source of all order, who could not overlook or sanction the smallest sign of chaos –for whom keeping chaos far at bay had been intuition’s chosen path to certainty, the rigorous daily given of life—and the daughter who is chaos itself” (231).
“Yes. I am the abomination. Abhor me” (248).
“The unfaithfulness to the house was never unfaithfulness to the house –it was unfaithfulness” (335).
“Without transgression there is no knowledge” (360).
“The outlaws are everywhere. They’re inside the gates” (366).
“Is Merry lying? Is Merry brainwashed? Is Merry a lesbian? Is Rita the girlfriend? Is Merry running the whole insane thing? Are they out to do nothing but torture me? Is that the game, the entire game, to torture and torment me?” (369).
“And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” (423, closing line).
The 1998 Pulitzer Prize Decision:
The 1998 Pulitzer Fiction jury consisted of returning chair Gail Caldwell (who previously served on the jury a couple times including as chair in 1996), as well as former fiction chair Joel Conarroe, and newcomer Darcy O’Brien who died in 1998 shortly after serving on this jury.
- Chair: Gail Caldwell (1951-present) was born and raised in Amarillo, Texas and attended Texas Tech University before transferring to the University of Texas at Austin where she obtained two degrees in American studies. She was an instructor at the University of Texas until 1981 and taught feature writing at Boston University before working as the arts editor of the Boston Review and wrote for other publications like the New England Monthly and the Village Voice. However, she was primarily renowned for her many years serving as the chief book critic for The Boston Globe (1985-2009). Caldwell would later win the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. She served several times on the fiction jury for the Pulitzer Prize; serving as chair of the jury in both 1995 and 1997. As of the time I am writing this review, she apparently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has written three memoirs: A Strong West Wind (2006), Let’s Take the Long Way Home (2010), and New Life, No Instructions (2014). She has been open about her childhood bout of polio and her struggles with alcoholism.
- Joel Conarroe (1934-2024) was an American arts administrator and professor. He was the head of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from 1983 to 2003 (the third president of the organization). He was also a trusted personal confidant to countless writers, most notably Philip Roth. He previously served as executive director of the Modern Language Association and president of the P.E.N. American Center. He served as a chairman of the National Book Award fiction jury and also the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury and other similar roles. He published analyses of the poetry of William Carlos Williams and John Berryman and edited multiple poetry anthologies, including “Six American Poets,” a widely circulated 1993 survey of works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and others. He received a bachelor’s degree in English from Davidson College in North Carolina in 1956, a master’s degree in English from Cornell University the following year, and a doctorate in English from New York University in 1966. A gay man, he developed a long-term relationship with the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici. He died at age 89 in 2024 due to advanced melanoma.
- Darcy O’Brien (1939-1998) was a writer and literary critic, but he was perhaps most famous for his true crime writing. A Los Angeles native (the son of the movie stars George O’Brien and Marguerite Churchill), he attended Princeton and Cambridge before receiving his master’s degree and doctorate from UC Berkeley. In the late 1970s, he relocated to Tulsa, Oklahoma and taught at the University of Tulsa for many years. His first semi-autobiographical novel A Way of Life, Like Any Other won the PEN/Hemingway award. O’Brien was married three times and had one daughter named Molly O’Brien. He died of a heart attack in 1998 in Tulsa (he died shortly after completing his tenure as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction).
Aside from American Pastoral, the other Pulitzer finalists in 1998 were Underworld by Don DeLillo and Bear and His Daughter: Stories by Robert Stone. The jury report submitted by chair Gail Caldwell in December 1997 included half-age analyses of each finalist. The write-up for American Pastoral stated as follows:
“The comic genius from New Jersey has done something more defiant than ever: He has written a heartrending and yet merciless novel about the life of a good man. In its depiction of Swede Levov –the highschool (sic) sports hero of Zuckerman’s Newark— ‘American Pastoral’ delivers the promises and myths of a post-war America, then watches with helpless compassion as the dream discharges. That Roth has told this story of bucolic yearnings through the eyes of his ever-ironic narrator, Zuckerman, gives the novel a dual sensibility; it further allows us the edge of experiencing idealism’s rosy hues within the uncaring chaos of history… As triumphantly unselfconscious as anything Roth has written, ‘American Pastoral’ feels almost deliberately idyllic, and has about it the blush of tragedy from its opening pages. The novel possesses moments of pure Rothian brilliance, whether the voice of aging Levov pater or a dinner party of Proustian proportion. Coming of age with all the mid-century hopes of a Jewish kid from Jersey, the Swede erects a life bearing most of America’s covenants, only to see it disappear in the ruin of social upheaval and familial anguish. Roth’s depiction of that fall from grace is his Camelot Unbound, where innocence seems as transient as it is doomed, where Learesque cruelties can (and do) happen to anybody.”
Notably, three of Philip Roth’s prior novels were also Pulitzer finalists: The Ghost Writer, Operation Shylock: A Confession, and Letting Go, but it was American Pastoral that finally won him the prize (thus making him one of the most decorated American authors, winning every major prize aside from the Nobel Prize for Literature, though he was often apparently considered a top contender). But I do wonder to what extent the presence of Joel Conarroe on the jury in 1998 helped nudge American Pastoral over the finish line, especially against a a highly celebrated work like Don DeLillo’s Underworld (also now regarded as an American classic), considering that Joel Conarroe was a trusted personal confidante of Philip Roth. But this is pure speculation on my part.
Who Is Philip Roth?
Philip Milton Roth (1933-2018) was born in Newark, New Jersey into a Jewish-American family. His father was an insurance manager for Metropolitan Life who apparently always felt snubbed by his non-Jewish company executives. In fact, Philip Roth grew up at 81 Summit Avenue in the Weequahic neighborhood (a neighborhood which is featured prominently in American Pastoral). In fact, Roth’s childhood home is still standing in Newark and it proudly features a plaque outside highlighting the fact that it is a historic site, the “Philip Roth House.”
After graduating from Weequahic High School (where Roth was known for being both an intelligent student and a bit of a comedian), Roth attended the Newark branch of Rutgers University in Newark for a year to study pre-law before transferring to Bucknell University in Pennsylvania where he earned a BA magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in English. He received a fellowship to attend the University of Chicago where he earned an MA in English literature in 1955 and briefly worked as a writing instructor. It was around this time that his work first appeared in print. The following year, he enlisted in the army but was medically discharged due to a back injury and he returned to the University of Chicago for a PhD in literature but he dropped out after one term.
Roth served for many years as a comparative literature teacher at the University of Pennsylvania before he retired in 1991. He then took a part-time visiting lecturer position at Bard College alongside his friend Norman Manea.
Roth’s first book Goodbye, Columbus (featuring a novella and four short stories) was published thanks to a Houghton Mifflin fellowship. It went on to win the National Book Award in 1960. He later won a second National Book Award in 1995 for Sabbath’s Theater. In 1969, Roth published his fourth and most controversial novel Portnoy’s Complaint (it may have set a record for most masturbation scenes per page). He won three PEN/Faulkner Awards for Operation Shylock (1993), The Human Stain (2001), and Everyman (2007). He won National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife and another for his memoir. He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2011 for his complete body of work. He produced his “American Trilogy” in his ‘60s, an extraordinary string of novels (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain). From the age of 73 onward, he worked tirelessly and produced a new book per year. In 2005, he became only the third living writer (after Bellow and Eudora Welty) to have his books enshrined in the Library of America. In 2010 after the publication of Nemeses, he decided to retire from writing, leaving a post-it note on his stand-up desk computer reading: “The struggle with writing is done.”
Roth was married twice. First in 1959, Roth married Margaret Martinson, whom he met when she was waiting tables in Chicago (she was a divorcee with two children). By all measures it was tumultuous relationship; Martinson tricked Roth into marrying her by claiming she was pregnant. They separated a few years later in 1963, though Martinson refused to grant Roth a divorce. Martinson later died in a car crash in 1968 (naturally, she served as the inspiration for female characters in several of Roth’s novels). He married a second time in 1990 to his longtime companion, English actress Claire Bloom (they had been living together since 1976). They divorced in 1994, and Bloom published an unflattering memoir in 1996 entitled Leaving a Doll’s House, which depicted Roth as a misogynistic, psychotic, control freak (apparently, Roth refused to let Bloom’s daughter, from her previous marriage to actor Rod Steiger, to live with them because she bored him). Roth never publicly addressed these allegations however he issued vociferous denials in private. Regardless, the explosive claims forced Roth, an already reclusive author, to retreat even further from the public eye.
In the 1980s, Roth nearly had a breakdown. He became addicted to the sleeping pill Halcion after knee surgery in 1987 and suffered from severe depression after emergency bypass surgery in 1989. Despite often writing about Jewish characters and themes, Roth was an atheist (he forbade any religious rituals from his funeral service). In his later years, Roth spent much of his time alone in his 18th-century farmhouse in northwest Connecticut, only returning to Manhattan in the winters. He often joined friends in New York City and communicated with his official biographer Blake Bailey (while apparently furiously editing his own Wikipedia page).
Roth died of congestive heart failure in Manhattan in 2018 at the age of 85. Roth was buried at the Bard College Cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He did not have any children.
Film Adaptations:
- American Pastoral (2016)
- Director: Ewan McGregor
- Starring: Ewan McGregor, Jennifer Connelly, Dakota Fanning
Further Reading:
- Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
- Ghost Writer (1979)
- Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993)
- Sabbath’s Theater (1995)
- The “American Trilogy” (1997–2000)
- American Pastoral (1997)
- I Married a Communist (1998)
- The Human Stain (2000)
- The Plot Against America (2004)
Literary Context 1997-1998
- 1997 Nobel Prize Winner: awarded to Italian playwright and actor Dario Fo (1926–2016) “who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.”
- 1997 National Book Award Winner: Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
- 1997 Booker Prize Winner: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- According to Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1997 was The Partner by John Grisham. Other notable bestsellers that year included Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier as well as several Danielle Steel and James Patterson books as well as a few other popular writers.
- Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie was published.
- Raymond Benson published two James Bond continuation novels: Tomorrow Never Dies and Zero Minus Ten.
- Roberto Bolaño Last Evenings on Earth collection was published.
- Two short story collections by Agatha Christie were posthumously published (The Harlequin Tea Set and While the Light Lasts and Other Stories).
- Ann C. Crispin’s two Han Solo Star Wars books (The Hutt Gambit and The Paradise Snare) were published.
- Don DeLillo’s Underworld was published.
- Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent was published.
- Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain was published.
- John Grisham’s The Partner was published.
- Barbara Hambly’s Star Wars novel Planet of Twilight was published.
- Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son was published
- Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love was published
- Toni Morrison’s Paradise was published
- Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” was published
- Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon was published
- Michael Stackpole’s Star Wars Expanded Universe book The Bacta War
- Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake was published
- Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars Expanded Universe book Specter of the Past was published
- Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now was published
- The first book in Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series
- J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published
Did the Right Book Win?
While I am not typically drawn to the more pessimistic middle-class novels of the so-called Midcentury Misogynists (see my Pulitzer reviews of John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom novels for reference), I found Philip Roth’s American Pastoral to be an extraordinarily deep, penetrating, traumatizing, puzzling, haunting novel. Sharply written, maddeningly mysterious, painfully nostalgic, at times frustratingly obtuse, I would rank American Pastoral among the most exemplary of the Pulitzer Prize winners.
Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. Vintage International, a division of Penguin Random House, New York, New York, 1997. Dedicated to J.G.
Click here to return to my survey of the Pulitzer Prize winners.
I read American Pastoral a number of years ago. Your review brought it all back. Outstanding review.