American Pastoral

DEAR Zuckerman:

Well, you've done it again. You've held me enthralled page after page.

American Pastoral, which you narrate, has everything one could want in a novel. Its rapid-fire insights into the human condition tumble down upon each other. Yet, they are delivered with just the right degree of irony, ambiguity, and humble humor, which we have come to expect from you. The book is even mercifully free of the off-color detail we have sadly come to associate at times with you and more consistently with your frequent competitor, Roth.

Roth himself, though, has been showing us a gentler, softer side of late with his autobiographical The Facts and The Patrimony. The latter is a masterpiece that I have frequently reread in recent years, each time gleaning fresh insights into that foundation of our existence, parent-child interaction, where love, fidelity, guilt, failure, and assorted other ties all uncomfortably mingle.

In The Patrimony, Roth bathed the mundane in love and showed us how to cherish the imperfect devotion of parents. Thanks to him we can now appreciate the grandeur not only of Herman Roth but of parents, however flawed, everywhere. In Sabbath's Theater, though, Roth was up to his old tricks. Frenzy and insight went hand in hand with a hearty dose of vulgarity.

Zuck, can't you talk to him? After all, he is often described as your "alter ego." Just tell him that he really doesn't need all that schmutz to convey his message. Or, if "message" would be too pretentious a word for the old Newark smart aleck, then just tell him the schtick has grown routine and obvious -- like that of an old man who hopes to impress the young with dirty jokes. Actually, that is what he's doing all too often, isn't it? Since you've gotten a little out of hand at times yourself, but now seem to be largely free of the need to scandalize, it should be easy for you to explain to Roth that he need not be scatological to entertain.

Here, though, Zuckerman, you've accomplished it. American Pastoral is readable and riveting. And aside from the odd extramarital affair, seemingly tossed in as an afterthought, it has been done without the Rothian need to epater les bourgeois.

And, if I may say so without giving offense, it is a serious tale as well. "Swede" Levov, Jewish all-American boy from Newark, was a successful athlete and businessman. He married Miss New Jersey, believed in and lived the dream of all good Americans of midcentury. He was truly kind, gracious, moral, and hard-working. A volunteer hitch in the Marines solidified his commitment to the land he loves.

Zuck, you knew Levov as a kid in Newark. Worshiped him really, because the Swede was, as you are, a Jew, and yet he outgoyed the goys at their own games. As you point out to us often in this book, my friend, you've gotten on in years. (That portrayal of your high-school reunion is must reading for anyone who has a past he feels like remembering or a sense of mortality he feels like confronting.) Recently you saw the Swede again. He told you about some troubles he has endured.

The troubles turned out to be beyond anyone's wildest imaginings. The Swede's daughter, Merry, had become a New Left terrorist in the Sixties. She bombed and killed in the name of the "revolution." It was a tale so horrible that you had to get to the bottom of it. It's unclear whether the result of your investigation is fantasy or fact. (Another literary trick borrowed from Roth.) But no matter.

The breakdown of the Swede's relationship with his daughter is presented as a metaphor for the breakdown of an entire generation. Or should that be nation? Civilization? "The old intergenerational give-and-take of the country-that-used-to-be, when everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously . . . turned pathological."

There is no reasoning with Merry. She blows up the local post office, kills a man in the process, and flees. For the Swede it was incomprehensible. "That violent hatred of America was a disease unto itself. And he loved America. Loved being an American."

Yes, Zuck, I know you're wondering what Roth is thinking as he reads these lines, lines that exude a love for home and hearth the likes of which even most conservatives are embarrassed by these days. Are the Swede's thoughts as he views his daughter similar to yours as you view your nation now that, as Irving Kristol puts it, "The culture wars are over and the Left has won"?

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 no longer need keep his mouth shut just to defuse her ignorant hatred. The loneliness he would feel as a man without all his American feelings. The longing he would feel if he had to live in another country. Everything he loved was here.

The Swede even calls into question the cherished Enlightenment dogma of tolerance, when he remembers his failure to remove from his daughter's room a sign which declared, "We are against everything that is good and decent in honky America. We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmares."