I love the last sentence.

“What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”

I love the Swede Levov character.

I don’t know if I have ever identified with a fictional character (or even another real person) in the same way I identified with Levov.

(Who, whether coincidentally or by design, is a literary alter ego of sorts to the Rabbit Angstrom character.)

As a reader, I like this book.

But the way this book is written makes no sense.

You start out with I guess what is really a Prologue, narrated by a writer, Nathan Zuckerman, who knew Swede Levov as a kid. Paints an external impression of him. Thinks Levov is going to ask him to write a biography, (which he has no interest in doing). Then finds out he has died. And, at the same time, discovers something about Levov that makes him change his mind (about whether he might be interested in doing a biography).

Then you have, presumably, a biography.

But it ceases to be written from Zuckerman’s perspective. Both in the sense that it depicts things which Zuckerman could have never discovered, and in the sense that it’s not written in Zuckerman’s voice.

And then the book ends at a perfect place if you had just told the story from the beginning, but long before the “end” from Zuckerman’s point of view.

You either write the whole thing from Zuckerman’s perspective. Or you write the whole thing as a biography. Or, I guess, you come up with some credible construct for doing both.

Why, you ask?

Because, otherwise, it’s cheating.

What are you taking about? you ask. Cheating? What do you mean, cheating? This is a novel. You can do whatever you want. There are no rules.

Well, in a sense, sure.

But isn’t that the whole challenge?

You start with a blank slate, of course. No rules.

But then if the author allows himself or herself to do basically anything, how do you know whether he or she “succeeds”?

If you, as Jackson Pollock, reject “the accident”, then how do you know what’s good?

Are some “accidents” better than others?

Sure, probably.

Language. Character. Plot. Voice. Revelation. Philosophy.

But you seem to be walking in an “analog” world. Where everything is just a matter of degree. And largely a matter of taste.

It’s only by setting up rules – i.e. not a pre-defined or pre-determined set of rules, but a set of rules that the author himself or herself creates – and then developing language, character, plot, voice, revelation and philosophy within those confines, that one can truly quantify literary success.

At least that’s the only way I can do it.

“American Pastoral” writes Wyatt Mason, in a review of Exit Ghost, “is not the story of what happened to Seymour ‘The Swede’ Levov. It is not the story of the causal chain that bound his golden boy who would marry Miss New Jersey to a future that included a daughter who would become a terrorist. Rather, it is Zuckerman’s dream of that invisible chain, an attempt to confront the opacity of one man’s fate with hundreds of pages of desperate clarities: a thinking-through of what life might have been like, in its least detail, for one particular man who lost everything of real value. It is a novel that, in the face of doubt, becomes a form of certainty.”

Which, I guess, answers my fundamental question of why you have the stark division between the Zuckerman part and the two Levov parts.

As James Wood, in another review of Exit Ghost, opines: “Roth has been the great stealth postmodernist of American letters, able to have his cake and eat it without any evidence of crumbs. This is because he does not regard himself as postmodernist. He is intensely interested in fabrication, in the performance of the self, in the reality that we make up in order to live; but his fiction examines this ‘without sacrificing the factuality of time and place to surreal fakery or magic-realist gimmickery,’ as Zuckerman approvingly says of Lonoff’s work. Roth does not want to use his games to remind us, tediously and self-consciously, that Nathan and Amy and Lonoff are just ‘invented characters.’ Quite the opposite. Unstartled by their inventedness, he swims through depthless skepticism towards a series of questions that are gravely metaphysical and more Jamesian than Pynchonian: How much of any self is pure invention? Isn’t such invention as real to us as reality? But then how much reality can we bear? Roth knows that this kind of inquiry, far from robbing his fiction of reality, provokes an intense desire in his readers to invest his invented characters with solid reality, just as Nathan once invested the opaque Amy Bellette with the reality of Anne Frank. In this kind of work, the reader and the writer do something similar – they are both creating real fictions.”

Which raises two sets of questions:

First, the extent to which American Pastoral, or any of these other Nathan Zuckerman books, is dependent on the others. Am I expected to read all of them in order to understand what any one of them is really about? Or why one is arranged in a certain way stylistically? And, if so, is that good or bad? Ingenious? Or simply a collection of different works which are each in and of themselves in some way incomplete? And, if so, is there a complete whole?

Second, is this really the design? How much of this is Roth, and how much is people like James Wood and Wyatt Mason? Does the reader really “create real fictions” in terms of the Levovs? – I personally didn’t sit around and hypothesize too much about the “truth” of what “really” happened to the Levovs. Perhaps it's my failing as a reader, but (accepting Levov as what was presented by Roth) I mostly wondered how was it that Nathan Zuckerman “knew” these things. – I went back and looked for evidence that this was Roth’s design. According to the book jacket (which I understand is a marketing piece that you have to take with a grain of salt) identifies Levov as the “protagonist” (not Nathan Zuckerman, as Mason would seem to suggest). If you look at the epigram, which Roth presumably selected, there are lines from the Johnny Mercer song “Dream” – which (despite Mason’s use of the word “dream”) would seem to apply more to Levov than to Zuckerman; although, I will admit, the second epigram, “the rare occurrence of the expected” would seem to fit the Mason vision as well. On the other hand, why are the three Parts coherently divided into Paradise Remembered, The Fall and Paradise Lost? – Seems like there would be only two sections, and/or, in any event, they would be named inconsistently, (i.e. the first by Roth re Zuckerman, and what follows by Zuckerman re Levov). (Which would have been a signal as to the design, (or, as I say, "the Rules"), without doing it “tediously” or “self-consciously”.) – If the second two parts constitute Zuckerman’s “reconciliation” in his own mind about what happened to Levov, why are they told in a different voice? Thinking, or “telling”, versus writing? First person versus third person biography? And, if Zuckerman is trying to seam together “the causal chain”, why invest into the Levov narrative such things as flashbacks? Why such a conventional narrative? Which leads to:

Finally, assuming that Mason and Wood are right; that this is a stealth post-modern book within a book; is it really better than just the book itself?

I don’t know the answer to that question. Part of me would like to believe that it is. Part of me still feels that it isn’t.



[See Wyatt Mason, “I Buried a Novelist: Philip Roth and the End of Zuckerman” Harper’s Magazine, Oct. 2007, p.107; and, James Wood, “Parade’s End: The Many Lives of Nathan Zuckerman” The New Yorker, Oct. 15, 2007, p.98.]