Mourning the "greatest generation": myth and history in Philip Roth's American Pastoral

In a 1973 interview about his satirical book The Great American Novel, Philip Roth describes the 1960s as a "demythologizing decade" in which "the very nature of American things yielded and collapsed overnight" ("Great American Novel" 90). A self-described member of the "most propagandized generation"--a product of World War II rhetoric, Cold War containment, and mass media--Roth at that point views the sixties in terms of a Cold War battle over the realm of the social imaginaire, a

     struggle between the benign national myth of itself that a great
     power prefers to perpetuate, and the relentlessly insidious, very
     nearly demonic reality ... that will not give an inch in behalf of
     that idealized mythology. (90)

Over 20 years later, in the aftermath of the Cold War, Roth revisits this battleground in American Pastoral, at a time in popular culture when Roth's "most propagandized generation" has been elegiacally remythologized as members of Tom Brokaw's "the greatest generation." I would argue that in American Pastoral, Roth, in the guise of his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, returns to a consideration of the sixties, but with a less satirical, more elegiac voice. At the center of American Pastoral is Swede Levov, the benevolent Jewish American liberal Roth describes as "fettered to history" (5) during the apogee of US Cold War hegemony--between World War II and the Vietnam War. (1) Roth pits Swede Levov as a true believer in "the benign national myth" of the American pastoral against his 16-year-old daughter Merry, a militant radical who articulates what Roth describes as the "counterpastoral" impulse, the "demonic reality ... that will not give an inch in behalf of that idealized mythology." Encapsulating this struggle in a private family drama, Roth examines the assault against both historical and literary metanarratives that constitute the American mythic ideal, interrogating a consensus ideology reflected in a modernist vision of history and literary theory.

Critics have focused their readings of American Pastoral on its counter-pastoral puzzle--that is, on the question that haunts Swede Levov: How did Merry become the "angriest kid in America" (279)? In pondering the cause for Merry's left-wing militancy, some scholars read the novel as Roth's implicit apology for his earlier liberal perspective, while others read it as his defense of that perspective. In their discussions of the novel, both Edward Alexander and Timothy Parrish invoke Irving Howe's famous 1972 essay "Philip Roth Reconsidered," in which Howe perceives Roth's "attacks on middle-class suburbia" as pandering to "'liberated' suburban children" (79) and argues that Roth, denying himself a "vision of major possibilities" (72), has a "thin personal culture," one that cannot fully access either his Jewish heritage or the "great sweep of democratic idealism and romanticism" of the "mainstream of American culture" (79). Despite his lifelong socialist commitments, Howe was at odds with the intellectual left of the sixties, criticizing those he saw as helping to perpetuate the excesses of the decade. According to the neoconservative Alexander, Roth in American Pastoral implicitly acknowledges the truth of Howe's critique of the left, for Roth's novel is "the existential realization of Howe's criticism of the moral and political style of the New Left ... of the sixties" (184), and Merry, the "chief villain," is the "perfect embodiment" of the "leftist dabblers" who turn against their overly indulgent liberal parents, naively spout politically radical creeds, and succumb to their "fascination with violence." Timothy Parrish cites Howe's criticism of Roth's "thin personal culture" but argues that the novel, through Zuckerman, explores "the deleterious consequences of forsaking one's Jewish origins" (87). Both Alexander and Parrish perceive Roth/Zuckerman/Swede as revaluating their earlier liberal, "postmodern" stances, acknowledging both their liberal naivete and the power of the father's voice. According to Parrish, Merry, the "anarchic center of the novel" (91) and a "postmodern horror" (93), forces the Swede to confront the falsity of his assimilated self. Clearly, Parrish perceives the postmodern as a threat to stable cultural identities rather than, as some have argued, an ethical challenge to master narratives. (2) Thus, Parrish argues that Roth, reconsidering his earlier affirmation of the postmodern self over a Jewish identity, gives the last word to Lou Levov, representing the "law of the father" (96).

In contrast to Alexander and Parrish, Marshall Bruce Gentry not only sees Roth as preserving hope for assimilation as a larger goal but also sees the women--Dawn, Merry, and Marcia Umanhoff--as the true heroes in the tale, for they are the ones who challenge both the Levov males' attempt to mold the women into conventional gender roles and their self-serving acceptance of the inequities of capitalism. Whereas Alexander sees the capitalistic success of the Newark Maid factory as an indictment of sixties leftist politics, Gentry argues that the factory represents an indictment of capitalistic injustices and exploitive labor practices that serve to profit the Levovs. In contrast to Parrish, Gentry argues that these recalcitrant women, along with Jessie Orcutt, who, in the novel's final scene, attempts to poke Lou Levov's eyes out, defy the "law of the father" that Parrish sees as delivering the last word.