American Pastoral

The final chapters play out during a dinner party and reveal the slow unraveling of the Swede’s self-image and his world. He is forced to reckon with both his daughter’s terrible crimes and his wife’s infidelity. His encounter with Sheila Salzman—her unnatural calm, her betrayal, her academic detachment—convinces him that their affair was a mistake and that she is nothing compared to Dawn, although in typical Swede fashion, he cannot envision his wife as she is, but only as she once was. He will always see her as Miss New Jersey, the petite, dark-haired Irish Catholic who faces Lou Levov’s pummeling interrogation and stays true to her religious roots. Although he tries to remember Merry the same way—her six-year-old charm and innocence on a European vacation—the stark and shocking reality intrudes: Merry, the killer of four innocent people, who embodies The Fragility of the American Dream. All the Swede’s long-buried fears and resentments rise to the surface in the wake of these personal tragedies. Dawn’s affair with Bill Orcutt, the ultimate Gentile, implies to the Swede that he, as a Jew, is unworthy of her. Merry’s crimes violate everything he holds sacrosanct—order and respect for the law and for human life (not to mention gratitude for everything he’s given her). Jerry accuses his brother of being little more than their father’s sycophant, and although he denies it, it turns out that all the values Merry has shunned and trampled upon are really Lou’s values. In addition to facing the transgressions of his family, the Swede must also face his own cowardice, his failure to expand his own self beyond the simple behaviors he’s held since his youth. They’ve always worked for him in the past, so why change? Now, however, he realizes that, although those traits have helped him succeed on the athletic field and in the business world, they have utterly failed him when dealing with the messiness of real life. The hard lesson the Swede must learn is that no one person can protect the world from itself. He cannot save his daughter, he cannot save his father, and in the end, he cannot save himself.

The narrative ends with a question: “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth could be less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” (423). The question sounds like one the Swede might ask, rhetorically, pleadingly, and clearly indicating that the Levovs are spotless. It’s not the Swede, though, who asks this question; it’s Zuckerman, and coming from him, the question demands to be considered, as it appears to be less biased. It may be that a less reprehensible life is impossible—certainly, Merry’s attempt to rise above the moral compromises of her family has backfired spectacularly—but this does not necessarily mean that the life of the Levovs is not reprehensible. The Swede has endeavored to always do the right thing, to treat people fairly, and to be kind and tolerant, but he has valued the appearance of success and the respect of his peers above all else. This approach to life has yielded terrible outcomes. If the universe is ruled by a benevolent god, the only possible conclusion he can draw is that he has sinned in some grand fashion, as he refuses to look to politics to understand his downfall. He wonders whether Jerry is right, and he has indeed subjugated his true self for the sake of his father, his wife, his daughter, and his business. He struggles to believe that such a “sin” warrants the kind of punishment the universe has meted out. The only other possibility is that the universe is capricious and arbitrary, that nothing would have made a difference, and that all his sacrifice and dedication to good behavior has been for nothing. It’s a nihilistic and terrifying possibility, but he is left with little else. The fact that Roth poses this question at the end—with no resolution about Merry or Dawn—suggests that the world, a world in which people create artificial and fragile paradises, does not care about virtue, integrity, or exacting revenge. These paradises are merely houses of cards vulnerable to the whims of fate, with the American dream as no exception.