whatcathyread

A couple of months ago (at the time of writing) Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer made a speech about how Britain risks becoming an “island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together” due to uncontrolled immigration. He later said he deeply regretted his choice of words, but it got me thinking about the idea of national “values”. What values need to be shared and how do we measure “integration”? Is it acquiring a certain level of knowledge of British history and tradition (to pass the Life in the UK test prior to applying for British citizenship)? Is it which national team you support (Norman Tebbit’s ‘cricket test’)? Or is it something deeper, some unwritten understanding of what it means to be ‘British’? Is that even remotely possible when there are 60 million of us on an island that includes three different countries and four recognised native languages? Is it even necessarily the case that the same values are shared across different generations of the same family?

Seymour Irving Levov is a third-generation Polish-Jewish immigrant to Newark, USA. Nicknamed ‘Swede’ because of his blond hair and blue eyes, he excels at sport in college, serves in the Marine Corps in WW2, marries Miss New Jersey, runs a successful family leather-ware business (built from nothing by his “slum-reared” father), and lives on a “hundred-acre farm…in wealthy, rural Old Rimrock, New Jersey…a long way from the tannery floor where Grandfather Levov had begun in America”.  Seymour isn’t merely living the American Dream; he embodies it.

But if Seymour is Uncle-Sam-and-Apple-Pie “quaint Americana”, his teenage daughter, Meredith (Merry) is here-and-now “real time”; “an angry kid”. Seymour “played ball – there was a field of play”, whereas Merry “was not on the field of play…nowhere near it…out of bounds, a freak of nature, way out of bounds”. Aged just sixteen, as a protest against America’s involvement in the Vietnam war, Merry plants a bomb in Old Rimrock general store, killing the local doctor, and goes on the run.

“Pastoral” in literature traditionally refers to a form of escapism concerned with the idealization of country life. In American Pastoral Roth turns that tradition on its head by having Seymour’s dream of a perfect, rural life “blown up” by his daughter. “A sliver off the comet of the American chaos had come loose and spun all the way out to Old Rimrock and him.” He never recovers from being “placed outside his life for the rest of his life,” “a captive confined to a futureless box.”

The novel is structured in three parts: Paradise Remembered, The Fall, and Paradise Lost – an obvious nod to Milton but for Roth there is no Paradise Regained. Roth uses the device of a story within a story to good effect, with Seymour’s tragedy playing out as an imaginative retelling by writer Nathan Zukerman, who used to be at the same high-school as Seymour and hang out with his younger brother, Jerry.  Nathan had been star-struck by ‘Swede’ Levov at school and, based on a brief conversation with Jerry at a school reunion dinner and some follow-up research, he sets out to explore “the brutality of the destruction of this indestructible man”.

Seymour’s flaw isn’t jealously (like Othello) or ambition (like Macbeth), but being “fatally attracted to his duty…to responsibility.” Is that a ‘flaw’? Yes, in our self-righteous, majestically self-obsessed, superbly selfish time.

American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, and Roth himself won the Man International Booker in 2011 when it was a biennial prize for a body of work (rather than an annual award for an individual book written in a language other than English, as it is now).

American Pastoral is the first book in Roth’s American Trilogy. The other two, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain are now firmly on my “to read” list.

Rating: **** One of the best books I’ve read this year.