American Pastoral

The former Miss New Jersey (and an Irish Catholic), Dawn is no frivolous beauty queen. Roth endows her with a fierce independence and the courage to stand up for her convictions. She holds up under Lou Levov’s withering interrogation, asserting her right to raise her child as she chooses. She bristles at any implication that she is just another pretty face, refusing to be defined by her former status as a pageant contestant. She defends the pageant as a scholarship opportunity and touts her credentials as a classically trained pianist. She despises Marcia Umanoff for her condescension and argues that she only entered the pageant so her brother could go to college. In middle age, Dawn becomes a successful cattle breeder, rigorously learning the business from the ground up and even breeding Count, a prize-winning bull. Like the Swede, she is so invested in Merry’s well-being that her daughter’s crimes send her into a dark depression that requires periodic hospitalizations. Unlike her husband, who relentlessly tries to repair the situation and keep the peace at home, Dawn cannot face what Merry has become, eventually choosing a new life over the pain of the old one.

Dawn also serves as a symbol of the Swede’s only defiance of his father—choosing to marry a non-Jew. Although the Swede successfully manages the family business, he also seeks to acquire markers of assimilation into the WASP establishment, choosing to live in the predominantly Anglo village of Old Rimrock, in an old house with ties to Revolutionary history, and envying Bill Orcutt’s colonial lineage. Dawn is another piece of that puzzle, an Irish Catholic girl from Elizabeth, New Jersey, whose participation in that most American of cultural institutions—the Miss America Pageant—represents his entry into an elevated social order. For her part, Dawn wants none of that. Her aspirations are simple: a happy family and a career as a music teacher.

Merry represents the unraveling of the Swede’s perfect life. Driven by a need for moral clarity, she cannot reconcile herself to the moral compromises that the Levovs’ bourgeois life requires. She wants to right the wrongs she sees around her, but the moral world is messier than she realizes, and her actions have devastating consequences—for herself, her family, and the families of the four people she inadvertently kills. When Jerry first tells Zuckerman that Merry was the “Rimrock Bomber,” Roth only provides Jerry’s biased perspective: Merry was an ungrateful monster who ruined his brother’s life. As Zuckerman peers more closely into the Swede’s life, details emerge: Merry always had a defiant streak; she had a debilitating stutter that wreaked havoc on her emotional development; she was overweight, which, for the daughter of a former beauty pageant contestant, became a badge of shame; and she became involved in a radical fringe of the anti-war movement. All these factors—and more—may have been the perfect storm of events that caused Merry’s homicidal actions. When Merry converts to an extreme form of Jainism, living in filth and slowly starving herself to death, the pain is too much for the Swede to bear, and he walks away from his daughter a broken man.

As a narrative device, Merry is the primary driver of the Swede’s tragic collapse. Roth sets up the Swede for a fall of Shakespearean proportions as generational divides and the contradictions of the American dream become too much. After devoting his life to his business and his family, and building his ideal life, Merry tears it all down, and Roth suggests that his protagonist, for all his good deeds, cannot count on remuneration from an uncaring universe.

The Swede’s father, Lou, is the bridge between the “old world” and the new. A second-generation son of immigrants, he builds Newark Maid into one of the premier glove manufacturing companies in the country, passing that obligation on to his dutiful son. Lou, more than any other character, represents Roth’s Jewish voice. He’s an unapologetic traditionalist who sees the world as an us-versus-them battlefield. When Seymour wants to marry Dawn Dwyer, he can’t understand why his son isn’t satisfied with the selection of Jewish girls out there. He carries the traditions (and suspicions) of his own father who, as a new immigrant, experienced firsthand the antisemitism of his new country. Lou, perhaps with good reason, is leery of all non-Jews (although he eventually comes to accept Dawn as part of the family).

Lou is a dedicated craftsman, taking pride in the quality of his gloves. Having worked in the toxic environment of a tannery, he has a keen understanding of the business. Cutting corners is anathema to Lou, for whom a well-made product is a matter of personal honor as well as business survival. Like many of his generation, the turmoil of the 1960s catches him utterly off-guard. While he sympathizes with the plight of Black communities—especially in Newark—the violence of the protests repulses him. As a retiree living in Florida, he urges the Swede to get out of Newark and move production to a friendlier (and cheaper) location. Lou provides the voice of all those of his generation who saw the looser social mores of the 1960s as a warning sign of America’s decline. The Swede is caught in the middle, doing his best to navigate a rapidly changing world.

The itinerant voice of the narrative, Zuckerman fades into the background as soon as the Swede’s biography takes center stage. Often referred to as Roth’s literary alter ego, Zuckerman is the narrator of nine other Roth novels. In American Pastoral, his role is to document the life of a man whose fall from grace exposes the cracks in the foundation of the American dream. Less self-referential than some of his earlier Zuckerman novels, including The Counterlife (1986), the Zuckerman of American Pastoral exists to observe and comment on the tragedy of the Swede’s life. Zuckerman, a writer, learns of the Swede’s death from his former classmate, Jerry. In these early chapters, Zuckerman is an active participant in the narrative action, but once he begins to recount the life of the legendary Swede, he becomes virtually invisible, a fly-on-the-wall observer, dispassionate and objective. The character of Zuckerman allows Roth to explore the connections between author and character while at the same time using Zuckerman’s voice as a stand-in for his own passions, opinions, and fears.

Rita is an enigmatic character. She becomes, for a time, the Swede’s only connection to his fugitive daughter. Posing as a business student interested in the leather industry, she insinuates herself into the Swede’s life only to subvert it entirely. She reveals herself to be a vicious antagonist, using the Swede’s love for his daughter against him, even aggressively trying to seduce him in exchange for revealing Merry’s location. Rita’s seduction of the Swede is so aggressive and laced with explicit language that he becomes ashamed of his own desire and flees the scene. After several contacts, during which she coerces out of him Merry’s beloved possessions as well as $5,000 in cash, she fades into the woodwork, emerging only to send him a letter informing him of Merry’s whereabouts. Near the end of the novel, the Swede begins to suspect that Rita may have no actual connection to his daughter at all. She speaks in a voice that channels Merry’s angry condemnation of all things bourgeois, using the Swede’s guilt and confusion as tools of coercion. Roth never clearly defines her or her real identity, suggesting that she exists more as a literary catalyst, provoking and inflaming the Swede, forcing him to question his life choices and to realize that his daughter is not his possession but an independent adult who makes her own choices, however unconscionable he may find them.

Merry’s speech therapist during the worst of her stuttering years, Sheila becomes a savior for the Swede and Dawn, the one person who can relieve Merry’s emotional pain and “cure” her of what has become a life-altering disability. When Merry goes into hiding—harbored for the first few days by Sheila and her husband—and the Swede is distraught, he falls into the arms of the woman who once represented for him the path to an emotionally healthy child. When he discovers that Sheila had given sanctuary to Merry and never told him, he becomes furious with her, and his former passion turns to loathing. Their relationship epitomizes the ease with which love can transform into hate. Sheila is also a symbol of one of the Swede’s very few ethical lapses, one he can point to as evidence of divine retribution. Hypocritically, the Swede glosses over his affair with Sheila while fixating on the appearance of an affair between Dawn and Bill Orcutt. For one who is so quick to shoulder the blame, when it comes to Sheila, he seems remarkably un-self-reflective.