Philip Roth is one of America's most prolific and successful authors. Many critics have marked him as a likely recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature at some point during the coming years. When the New York Times asked hundreds of the most prominent critics, writers, and editors to pick the best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years, six of Roth's novels made the top spot repeatedly. The essay accompanying the results of this survey stated that "[i]f we had asked for the single best writer of fiction over the past 25 years, [Roth] would have won."
Roth was born in 1933 and grew up near Newark, NJ--much like the protagonists of American Pastoral and many other Roth novels. He was recognized at a young age, publishing Goodbye, Columbus in 1959 (when he was just 26). After receiving the National Book Award for this volume in 1960, he went on to publish a number of other texts that form the fundament of postwar American literary fiction. From 1969's Portnoy's Complaint to 1979's The Ghost Writer to more recent works, such as American Pastoral (1998), The Plot Against America (2004), and The Human Stain (2000), Roth has managed to write books richly evocative of the era in which he and his readers live. The book we'll be reading in class--American Pastoral--is one of Roth's more recent, but it manifests many of the themes that have preoccupied the author since the beginning of his career. Dubbed the first of Roth's "American trilogy" (I Married A Communist and The Human Stain being the second and third members of the triumvirate), American Pastoral marks the birth of a new historically-conscious and socially- panoramic Roth at the same time that it continues to explore the relationship between men and women and the way they negotiate the vagaries of power in their sexual relationships, one of Roth's long-time themes. In American Pastoral, Roth is also deeply interested in the links between autobiography and writing, as well as those between the family and the individual, in American Pastoral. As you read American Pastoral, think of how its rendering of American culture compares to that put forward by Diaz and Danticat. What picture of contemporary America emerges in Roth's novel? What does it say about the conflict between Depression era and Vietnam era America, not to mention the links between Jewish American and American postwar exceptionalism?
While I don’t think that Dandicat and Diaz portray the US as a squeaky clean, “American Dream” kind of place, I think as compared to Roth their America maintains some positive connotations. It is still a place of refuge. It seems obvious to say that refuge doesn’t equate in either Dandicat or Diaz with happiness, but it does equate with a certain amount of surface safety from the badness their characters have fled from. Again, the escape isn’t 100% effective, of course, as I think both Dandicat and Diaz want to make the point that a simple physical escape from the location of oppression does not, in fact, free one from that oppression or the fallout of the trauma endured in that location. Still, at the very least, for the Dew Breaker and Beli the US is a place where some physical safety has been achieved, some escape from certain death. So, at least, there’s that. Obviously, this quality is probably due to the fact that these are diasporic works.
ReplyDeleteRoth’s America, on the other hand, at least from what I’ve read so far (2/3 of the novel), is truly a “paradise lost.” There is no real “hope” except in accepting the gritty, screwed-up nature of reality. And even then, I’m not yet sure if that’s the answer or not.
What’s problematic for me is the sense that the novel is trying to suggest that US used to be “better” before, that there was a time when we didn’t have to accept the harsh truth because there was no harsh truth. All this talk about Newark fading away, the riots, indeed the whole way that the story of Swede is introduced via the class reunion—all this screams nostalgia. But, in my post-modern estimation, it’s nostalgia for something that doesn’t and didn’t ever exist. The question I have now is: does Roth intend for me to think this or not? Is he asking me to see this story as a calling to account of his generation or is this an elegy for his generation’s America?
I’ve just got to the point where Swede is being reamed out by Jerry on the phone, so I’m leaning now—in this second—to thinking Roth wants to critique his generation’s nostalgia or imagined America. At least, he intends to critique the kind of blindness that accompanies nostalgia, that dream-like haze that lets us see in the past what was never there, that allows one to see something that isn’t true. But, there’s still this sense that the whole country is ruined. I’ve yet to figure out if he feels like this ruining was a good or bad thing. At the very least, you could say that Roth’s America is one in which reality denied results in devastating consequences.
This has been a tough week. Reading Roth alongside Frederick Barthelme (his new novel is Waveland, and I absolutely recommend it) has kind of left me wanting to throw myself off a bridge whist harmonica-ing an ode to some sad, lost, corrupt America. Not a lot of hope in these books, but the prose! The prose in both is gorgeous.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that struck me reading American Pastoral was the memory of a Roth quote that came up in last quarter’s Updike/Atwood course. Reflecting on one of the Rabbit novels, Roth said, “Updike knows so much about golf, about porn, about kids, about America. I don’t know anything about anything.” The quote reads, at least to me, as half-compliment, half-indictment for Updike’s writing another big, baggy, meandering American novel. But the indictment’s either tongue-in-cheek, or Roth took Updike’s cue and later followed suit, winning himself a Pulitzer for American Pastoral, which, though I liked it more than Updike’s later Rabbit books, is precisely the kind of book that Updike writes. I mean, having spent a week with Roth, I now feel fairly confident that, if push comes to shove and this whole writing thing doesn’t pan out, I can either raise cattle or start my own glove business. For Roth to claim that he doesn’t know anything about America, or anything about anything, proves that he’s either exceedingly humble or exceedingly shameless.
From a craft perspective, I have a lot of questions about the way in which the book is organized. The throughline—Merry blows up building, Swede searches for Merry, Swede finds Merry—vanishes, at times, for such great lengths that I’d forget what I was reading for. And, at the end, we’re left to wonder what’s to become of Merry. How much of Swede’s conjecture, that Jerry or Orcutt will call the police, is true? And how much is paranoia, the “suspicion” that everyone in America has for “everyone else” (402)? I have to admit that while I did not find the novel’s ending unsatisfying, I did find it a surprising moment to end the book on. I was also surprised that we never returned to what I thought would be our bookend of Nathan Zuckerman’s exploration/narration. Having read The Ghost Writer, I knew Zuck, but I was at a loss for what he was doing in these pages. The opening seemed to prompt that we’d see him again, but we don’t. What does the narrative gain by his presence? If the story is actually the thought experiment of Zuckerman, an imagined history to fill in an unknowable blank (the Swede), than is the novel meant to tell us the most about Zuckerman, about Swede, about America, or about ourselves?
I would like not to answer those questions but to simply state that the book is one of the best books I've ever read. I'd say it's on my Top 5 list. When I read the last page, I threw the book on the floor, fell onto my bed, buried my face in a pillow, and wept.
ReplyDeleteI'm not kidding.
While reading The Act of Reading for Gary's class, I came upon a quote which provides an interesting way to view Roth's use of history in American Pastoral. In one portion of the book, Iser is discussing emplotment (though he doesn’t use this term). Life as we live it is a series of disconnected, unrelated moments; however, life as we remember it is a narrative. We establish causal relationships and eliminate (or revise) those elements which don’t fit the overall “story.” Thus, according to Iser, fiction isn’t representative of reality, but rather, of memory. He writes, “Thus the gestalten [Don’t worry, I don’t know what this word means either] of memory extract meaning from and impose order on the natural heterogeneity of life. If this is so, then the traditional realistic novel can no longer be regarded as a mirror-reflection of reality, but is, rather, a paradigm of the structure of memory, since reality can only be retained as reality if it is represented in term of meaning. This is why the modern novel presents reality as contingent and ‘meaningless,’” (215). Possibly, Roth is writing towards this. Recognizing that the “mode” of fiction is a kind of fabricated nostalgia (and, I think you could argue the same for poetry) and history as the inverse of that, a kind of antidote (I don’t know if that’s the word I mean) to nostalgia (a kind of “anti-nostalgia?”). Roth could be seen as actively working against memory and its constant efforts to negate (or even actively erase) history.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, Mark Bowden (the guy who wrote Black Hawk Down; I don’t know why, but for some reason I really like his stuff) quotes Roth as an epitaph to his Guests of the Ayatollah. The quote is as follows, “The terror of the unforeseen is what science and history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.” It’s an interesting quote, and if we bring it to bear on American Pastoral it can really complicate the book. Should we view the work as admonishment to the Levov’s of America that we shouldn’t turn history into an epic, lest it come back to bite us on the ass? Or, is it admonishing the American left not to valorize the 60-70’s, using the tumultuous decades as the background for a type of origin myth similar to the Swede’s memories of the 40-50’s? Fortunately, the book doesn’t really provide any help on this front.
-Matt