Is American Pastoral a Great American Novel?

Philip Roth, even more than other authors of his cohort, has a reputation for self-obsession as a writer. Yet in one of his more celebrated works--perhaps the most celebrated of his later works--he elected to tell the tale of one man pointedly unlike himself, and through that figure tell a bigger story that was, in its way, a story of where America was, and seemed to be headed, after the turmoil of the 1960s. Thus in American Pastoral Nathan Zuckerman is the narrator, but the protagonist his old acquaintance Seymour "Swede" Lvov, the son of a glove maker who struck it rich while Lvov was still young, took over his father's business, married a beauty queen, and even made a home for himself in rural New Jersey where his wife bred bulls, and it seemed generally built himself an idyllic life--until "tragedy struck." In the telling Roth deals with, among other things, the Vietnam War and the protest movements and the counterculture, deindustrialization and urban blight, and of course that perennial theme of Great American Novels, what ever happened to the American Dream, and where that leaves us now.

However, whether Roth succeeded in his treatment of those themes is another matter. Considering his protagonist Seymour "Swede" Lvov I found myself comparing Lvov to Roth's most famous creation, Alexander Portnoy from Portnoy's Complaint--and in turn Lvov and Portnoy to two of Theodore Dreiser's creations, namely Frank Cowperwood of his "Trilogy of Desire" and Clyde Griffiths of An American Tragedy. In creating his characters Dreiser worked in two different ways. As is particularly evident when we read Dreiser's memoir, Dreiser wrote Griffiths from his own experience--and not least, his own lived anguish and frustrations as a young man, which doubtless lends his story, in David Walsh's estimate the greatest work of fiction American literature has yet produced, much of its extraordinary force. By contrast where Griffiths is the man Dreiser was Cowperwood is the man he would have liked to be--a fantasy. (Thus instead of the son of a German Catholic immigrant Dreiser regarded as mentally enslaved by religion, personally ineffectual, and a failure in business with his children suffering for all that, and that son shrinking from the "Rat Race" circumstances left him no choice but to enter, he imagined in Cowperwood the son of a well-established and affluent old-stock WASP Philadelphia banker mentally and emotionally entirely attracted and perfectly adapted to strive and succeed in the world of business.) I will not go so far as to say that the result was a cardboard cut-out, but it is at least the case that Dreiser does not imagine Cowperwood nearly so fully or convincingly as he does Griffiths (all as, I must admit, reading The Titan in particular, all too aware of the element of Walter Mittyesque authorial fantasy in the creation, I laughed out loud again and again at the goings-on when things went his way, not least with the ladies). There seems to me something of this here, with Portnoy (however much Roth disdained being associated with a character who came to seem an embarrassment, and had definitely brought him a lot of grief), a figure Roth drew from life, and Lvov a fantasy for, if not Roth, then for Zuckerman, as he probably would also have been for Portnoy--an anti-Portnoy who, the son of a successful father whose success paved the way for his own, had all the qualities a Portnoy felt himself so painfully lacking in (physically, psychologically, etc. with his distinctly Nordic good looks and high school athleticism and seemingly baggage-free agreeable good nature and conventionality and popularity with everybody) and about as well positioned as anyone he knew from his community could be to achieve that coveted thing, entry into the mainstream of Anglo-American life not "by . . . invent[ing] a famous vaccine or [being] on the Supreme Court, not by being the most brilliant or the most eminent or the best," but "the regular American-guy way." By the same token Lvov is far less realized than a Portnoy, indeed a rather less nuanced creation than the rather less idealized Cowperwood--for if Cowperwood was the man Dreiser wanted to be, in many ways he also embodied Dreiser's rejection of many of society's demands with regard to conformity quite different from Lvov's all-Americanness. (The patriotic young Lvov, earnestly wanting to do his part in World War Two, joined the Marines as Cowperwood, as the oligarchs of his generation generally did not, sitting out the Civil War to make money. Lvov--again, the anti-Portnoy--is, for all his potential to be a ladies' man, almost completely chaste in his youth and a devoted husband and family man later whose one brief indiscretion would never have occurred but for the extreme crisis in which he was plunged. By contrast Cowperwood unapologetically takes his pleasure where he can find it--and he finds plenty--in open disdain of Victorian society's even stricter attitude on the point.)

Yet if Dreiser's Cowperwood did not represent that author's characterization at its best one can say for that author that he displayed his genius in the treatment of the America in which that character had to make his way. The ex-newspaperman who, as Upton Sinclair remarked in Money Writes!, was a master at amassing and "weav[ing] . . . into a vast pattern" seemingly millions of details of "street scenes, institutions, characters, functions" from everyday life, such that if Cowperwood was a fantasy the Philadelphia and Chicago in which he fought his greatest battles were as thoroughly imagined as one could hope, with often gripping results (above all, in the climax to his attempt to secure a century-long franchise for his streetcar system in Chicago as he depicted the play of the business and the personal, politics from the governor's office to the ward heeler's office). By contrast, perhaps reflecting the postmodernist Roth's inclination to the personal and subjective the narrative never quite comes together on that level. Certainly we get the feeling here as we do in other novels by Roth that he knows and loves every inch of Newark, that he certainly put in the time to learn about the making of a glove for this tale of a glove maker. Yet the broader scene often feels hazy--and, perhaps because of that stress on the subjective, and especially the subjectivity of a figure Roth cannot imagine as well, we end up with a pack of clichés. Thus was a glorious older America ruined by lazy, shiftless, rebellious "minorities," the perversity of youths who hated parents and a country which loved them and gave them everything, and left-wing intellectuals who know nothing about "the real world" such that the successful businessman, the Atlas bearing the sky on his shoulders, is also the community's principal and most pitiable victim, betrayed by all those to whom he has been a benefactor. Thus do we see the liberal as naive, the radical as not just insane but so fundamentally insane that they will believe anything, completely opposite things, so long as they are insane, and open-mindedness and tolerance presented as dangerous. Thus do we have a vision of the world as both misanthropic and incomprehensible, where those who seem to do everything right often suffer worse than anyone else, as the only hope is to be found in the transcendent--and the only shelter in the tribe and the household gods from which one ought not be lured away by cosmopolitan notions. That the clichés were the clichés of the right delighted neoconservatives and many others on the right, who feeling themselves ill-treated by the literati generally and Roth particularly rejoiced at the thought that Roth himself had come over to their side, with this, I do not doubt, one reason why the book has been so highly esteemed. Yet clichés they are and remain, such that I suspect that even those who are sympathetic to them, if willing and able to look beyond what they sneer at as Message when the Message is not to their liking, find themselves less than fully satisfied with its conveyance--certainly, when one gets away from Roth's cosmic pessimism to concrete realities of society and history as interpreted from any political perspective. The result is that if I can picture a case for the book being a Great American Novel, will indeed agree that it can be judged as at least an attempt at one, in the execution it seems to me to fall far, far short of that ideal.