American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
Award: Pulitzer Winner 1998
Nominations: Dublin Longlist 1999, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 1997
Dates Read: May 5, 2009 & May 2, 2021
By far, out of all the Roth I’ve read so far, this is my favorite and perhaps the most difficult. And I’ve read a bit of Roth – The Anatomy Lesson, The Counterlife, The Ghost Writer, My Life As A Man, Sabbath’s Theater – and I still have quite a few to go. American Pastoral focuses on the Swede, a high school hero that writer Nathan Zuckerman is beguiled by and blatantly missing from a high school reunion. At the reunion, not only does Zuckerman learn that the Swede has died but that his daughter was responsible for several domestic terrorism bombings in protest of the Vietnam War.
Zuckerman begins imagining what may have transpired in the Swede’s life leading up to his daughter’s murders, as well as the messy aftermath and how an “all American” family would recover. The long and short of it is – a family most likely cannot recover.
Merry is a precocious child with a gift for expression and voicing her opinions. She is raised by two loving parents in an idyllic setting on a farm in a comfortable, middle class lifestyle. As she enters her teenage years, she becomes more politically aware and begins vehemently opposing the Vietnam War. In defiance of her parents, she travels to New York to network with other protesters and often doesn’t come home when she’s expected.
When the local general store is bombed, killing a local doctor, everyone suspects that Merry was involved. Her father doesn’t just suspect it, he knows it in his bones. Merry goes into hiding and essentially vanishes from her parent’s lives. This loss is enough to drive any parent mad but to also know that you raised a human being who could murder someone is absolutely devastating.
After a bizarre blackmail incident, the Swede finally learns where Merry has been living and he sets off to find her. I have to say that the first time I read this, I hadn’t become a mom yet. And now that I am, the Swede thinking about the rape of his daughter, the defiling of her body, juxtaposed with the image of her in her crib, learning to stand on his stomach, the purity and goodness of her absolutely rips my heart to shreds. This book is almost an homage to all the fears that parents have of what their children could become or what could happen to them. The hope for a healthy, happy and successful child is so common that it’s mind boggling for the Swede to wrap his head around this near-woman who lives in filth, smells like refuse and human waste and has ended more life than he previous knew of.
He also has to wrestle with the fact that Merry will most likely take her own life through malnourishment. Considering that Dawn, his wife, nearly lost her mind after the bombing, the Swede carries what he has learned about their daughter on his own shoulders.
Roth explores personal responsibility, race relations, economic privilege and the lack thereof, madness, and social solidarity throughout in a way that only Roth can. Magnificent.
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