Recent Reading: American Pastoral

Continuing with my deep dive into the work of Philip Roth, today I finished one of his truly great books American Pastoral. The book is summarized on goodreads as follows:

In American Pastoral, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Seymour 'Swede' Levov—a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory—comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.

For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. 

The character of Merry has some similarities to Bernadine Dohrn, but there are also many differences. I would say that the book is much more a book about Swede Levov and his attempt to understand how he has become Job or Joseph K from Kafka's Trial. I learned from Blake Bailey's biography that Roth was a lifelong student of the writings of Franz Kafka. 

But for all this rather serious meditation on violence and what it might do to a family and a father, Roth also has some rather touching language. Consider, for instance this section where Swede Levov thinks about the historical and almost legendary figure Johnny Appleseed:

he felt like ... Johnny Appleseed. ... Johnny Appleseed, that's the man for me. Wasn't a Jew, wasn't an Irish Catholic, wasn't a Protestant Christian -- nope, Johnny Appleseed was just a happy American. Big. Ruddy. Happy. No brains probably, but didn't need 'em -- a great walker was all Johnny Appleseed need to be. All physical joy. Had a big stride and a bag of seeds and a huge, spontaneous affection for the landscape, and everywhere he went he scattered the seeds What a story that was. Going everywhere, walking everywhere. The Swede had loved that story all his life. Who wrote it? Nobody, as far as he could remember. They'd just studied it in grade school. Johnny Appleseed, out there everywhere planting apple trees. That bag of seeds. I loved that bag. Though maybe it was his hat -- did he keep the seeds in his hat? Didn't matter.

I was also impressed by this passage about hand holding:

There are a hundred different ways to hold someone's hand. There are the ways you hold a child's hand, the ways you hold a friend's hand, the ways you hold an elderly parent's hand, the ways you hold the hands of the departing and of the dying and the dead. He held Dawn's hand the way a man holds the hand of a woman he adores, with all that excitement passing into his grip, as though pressure on the palm of the hand effects a transference of souls, as though the interlinking of fingers symbolizes every intimacy. He held Dawn's hand as though he possessed no information about the condition of his life.

So, yes, there is an act of terrible violence that a daughter commits that wreaks havoc on her father. But American Pastoral is also filled with a great number of carefully written sentences describing quite beautiful things.