Book Review: American Pastoral

Family and Country in Parallel

[Spoiler Alert: Please read the book first before considering my evaluation!] American Pastoral is a wonderful novel by the Jewish-American author Philip Roth. Roth documents the rise and then the tragic downfall of a character by the name of Seymour Levov, known colloquially as “the Swede.” Roth inundates us with detail about various family members and the family business of manufacturing gloves, but there is always a clear plot thread that keeps one’s attention. The Swede is an athletic young man successful at multiple sports, large and formidable with red hair. He is the envy of the Jewish community, composed largely of immigrants trying to fit into the WASP elite of 1950’s America. The Swede has a perfect exterior, which includes his marriage to a Catholic woman who wins the beauty pageant of the entire state of New Jersey. At the time, the country is triumphant after winning World War II.

However, the Swede’s life begins to change, along with the fate of the country. Terrible race riots wrack Newark, where the Swede’s family factory had been successful. The manufacturing sector begins to depart the United States, in the hopes of cheaper labor costs in places like Puerto Rico and Turkey. The Swede’s father urges him to flee Newark, which has become a dangerous, desolate place.

In the meantime, the Swede has a daughter named Merry, short for Meredith. She has a stuttering problem, and there is a conflict with respect to the Swede’s discomfort with his wife’s Catholicism. In the country at large, there is a controversial war in Vietnam. Merry starts to involve herself in radical movements in New York City. The Swede loses track of her, and she becomes increasingly radical, to the point of bombing a post office and killing someone. Merry becomes a fugitive from the law.

America continues to lose its prestige in the world after establishing itself as a superpower after World War II. The radicalism of the sixties breeds cynicism and growing unrest. The Swede tracks down his daughter in a miserable New Jersey slum, looking rail-thin. Merry has embraced Jainism, and is refusing to harm any living thing. Her diet barely enough to keep her alive, Mary is languishing in a dangerous New Jersey city, while the Swede lives among the WASPs whose ancestors founded the country.

At the close of the novel, Nixon is in the process of resigning under a cloud of scandal. The American pastoral has become chaotic and dark. Revolutionary movements of the sixties have shredded the WASP unity of the mid twentieth century. An entrenched bureaucracy and a vindictive media seems to be controlling the political system, having pushed out, under suspicious circumstances, two presidents, JFK and Nixon. Any kind of traditional culture is under assault by sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. Stable employment for the working class has fled to poorer countries abroad. This decline is embodied in the tragic fall of Merry, and in the Swede’s futile quest to assimilate and achieve the American dream.

I enjoyed this novel because I think Roth has his finger on the pulse of American culture and the American struggle. I would love to read a book of his on the age of Trump. Trump represents a nostalgia for the bygone era when America represented a moral and political authority, as well as a manufacturing hub—the American pastoral. Trump is also incredibly polarizing. Most families cannot even bring up his name at the dinner table. But, he is the most impactful political figure of our time, whether you like him or not. Trump represents the last gasp of a country before a rapacious globalist push to erase any borders, and to push forward the sexual revolution, taking sex more and more away from family creation. The globalists are pumping fentanyl into our streets, pornography into our school libraries, and subjecting us to cruel medical mandates during the COVID crisis. Can we ever get back to the “pastoral,” the dream of unity, strength, and peace?