Philip Roth's 18th novel, American Pastoral (Houghton Mifflin, $26), presents this famous writer's attempt to examine one of the defining moments of the 20th century, the anti-war movement and the 1960s. With his portrayal of a good man and his errant daughter, Roth has produced a novel both fascinating and infuriating, infused with brilliant passages and long stretches of boredom.
Surprisingly clumsy in its structure and storytelling, American Pastoral spotlights Seymour "Swede" Levov, a star athlete in high school, a successful businessman, and a man puzzled by how the goodness of his life goes without reward.
Roth starts the book with his perennial protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, narrating the story of Swede's rise and collapse. But Roth suddenly abandons the device, and the rest of the book transpires in various voices, jumps around in time, and sometimes seems incomprehensible.
The Swede's daughter, Merry, becomes his chief tormentor. As a child she was a stutterer. As she matures, the stutter diminishes and her political views assume center stage. As a rabid opponent of the Vietnam War, she demonstrates her fury by setting off a bomb in a post office, accidentally killing a physician posting letters. Merry (an ironic name, of course) disappears into the 60s underground, not to emerge for years.
Meanwhile, Swede ponders what he might have done to change the tragic course Merry had taken. As the prosperous owner of a glove factory in Newark, New Jersey (a favorite haunt for Roth, who was born there in 1933), he attempts to examine his actions, devastated by the hatred of his beloved daughter, desperately seeking to find answers.
Principally because Swede is such a generous, forthright and honest man, he becomes a rather boring protagonist. Merry, naturally, captures attention at every point, although her puzzling struggle against family and the world aren't sufficiently explained.
Philip Roth, whose previous books include Goodbye, Columbus; Portnoy's Complaint; and last year's outrageous Sabbath's Theater, concerns himself this time around with the inevitability of one's final years, the stark realization that the end may be near, the need to find an answer for the way life turned out.
Sometimes compelling, often overwritten, but with snatches of brilliance, American Pastoral will take a place in the Roth lineup somewhere in the middle: not his best, not his worst. An elegiac try, perhaps, but eventually less that Roth's best.
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