American Pastoral: Philip Roth rages against the machine

In American Pastoral (1997), Philip Roth uses three major sections to tell the remembrance, the fall and the loss of the paradise-like life of Seymour "The Swede" Levov. I say paradise-like because the ultimate concern of this novel is to reveal that what its protagonist once enjoyed was never really a paradise, only a delusion of one. And Roth channels all his creative powers towards achieving this "eye-opening" end.

All that really lies at the bottom of this book, however are the embittered beliefs of its author—that man is an irrational animal, determined by social forces, whose defining trait is selfishness. Pretending things can be otherwise will can only lead to a bomb exploding in your backyard or a fork landing in your eyeball. This is how Roth envisions domestic America.

Roth's announcement comes as nothing new. Almost a century ago, Joseph Wood Krutch said that because society no longer believes in noble men, nobility no longer exists. Writing in The Modern Temper (1929), Krutch says, "We can no longer tell tales of the fall of noble men because we do not believe that noble men exist. The best that we can achieve is pathos and the most that we can do is to feel sorry for ourselves. Man has put off his royal robes and it is only in sceptered pomp that tragedy can come sweeping by." Though he was trying to identify new territory for modern tragic drama, Krutch offers some insight into the fiction of Roth.

As Krutch admits, literature loses its grandeur under this new outlook. If man has nothing greater in him than an animal, all his loss can achieve is pathos. American Pastoral adheres to this theory. In spite of all of Roth's thundering, which at times can be quite resounding, all one can feel for Levov is pathos. In other words, Sorry Swede. You were dealt this. So you can't help it. Good luck to you. Roth finds nothing more to admire in his hero than the best cultural conditioning of a dried out day. The novel awakens Swede to this fact and leaves him there, broken and boiling.

All this would be just fine, if such psychological critics did not insist that their assumptions be taken as absolute and universal. Mr. Krutch betrays such a perspective in his use of the first person plural voice. Simply put, he thinks he speaks for all. In spite of his claims, another view, albeit an unpopular one, still survives in literary criticism and among aspiring authors.

Writing more than a decade after Krutch, the great literary critic F.O. Matthiessen hints at it. Though his immediate topic concerns the history of allegory, Matthiessen concludes this long passage from American Renaissance (1941) by suggesting that literature occupies more territory than what many of its practitioners are currently treading:

Today we have felt an even greater necessity to be on guard against the abstractions of allegory. For after the ruminations of Tennyson, which allowed poetry to escape into mere idealization, it was imperative to get back to the poetry of sensation, of dramatic immediacy. This need called into being Eliot's work, as well as our revival of Donne and our increasing taste for Baudelaire. But in our satisfaction with the dramatic lyrics of these poets, there is the danger, as Eliot has already realized in his own later work, that in exalting the poetry of sensation, we may overlook that we are also prolonging the circumspection of poetry's scope which came in with Coleridge and Keats. With the romantic movement, poetry tended, in spite of Wordsworth's prefaces, to become divorced from "knowledge," which, with the drift of the nineteenth century, became more and more the special province of science. As a result we have lost living touch with the great poetry of contemplation; we have almost forgotten in our own practice that poetry can deal with epistemology, as Dante showed in his exposition of the soul in Purgatorio.

Perhaps I am overextending his meaning, but Matthiessen seems to believe that literature still possesses an untapped power, one that believes in a human soul—hence, one that can recover the lost nobility of the human race. What I would call its Image of God. It is a view that underlies the Western Literary Tradition, and contemporary novelists such as Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and Mark Helprin seem—in their different ways—to be at least reconsidering, if not practicing it.

I wouldn't avoid Roth altogether; he is certainly one force to be reckoned with. But if you're looking for something more than 400+ pages of repressed anger, I'd recommend that you start somewhere else.

An Author with a Soul: Marilynne Robinson and Home

"Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home."

For those of you who have sampled the field of contemporary literature, only to discover mouthful after mouthful of postmodern insincerity, or for those of you in search of a rewarding new read, permit me a moment to introduce you to Marilynne Robinson—particularly, to her latest novel, Home.

Home marks her third novel in a span of 27 years, a detail that could lead one to mistakenly describe her career as long on duration and short on return. The quality of that return, however, suggests something different. Her first novel, Housekeeping, which considers the relationships between mothers and daughters, appeared in 1980 and won the Pen/Hemingway award. Gilead, her second novel, arrived in 2004, over two decades later, but it soon proved worthy of the wait. For this novel, a meditation on the relationships between fathers and sons, Robinson earned the Pulitzer prize. Robinson may not publish often—her everyday occupation as a creative writing professor at the University of Iowa no doubt impedes her ability to—but when she does, it counts.

As her previous novels attest, Robinson has a preoccupation with the family, and her newest novel renews it. Home returns to terrain set forth in Gilead—as in Gilead, Iowa—which tells the story of John Ames, the town's Congregationalist minister, and his family line; in her newest tale, which is set in the same place and time, the 1950s, she presents an account about the family of Robert Boughton, the former Presbyterian minister and Ames' best friend.

Incidentally, her portrayal of these clergymen is anything but cynical. Robinson is a professing Christian, with a respect for mystery and theology uncommon to her profession. In The Death of Adam, an exceptional collection of essays she published in 1998, Robinson dares to unpack Darwin, defend Bonhoeffer, dignify Calvin, and extol the eighth Psalm. In Gilead and Home, she performs a similar act of ennoblement: she invests the man of God with a depth of dignity he has not received in serious literature for nearly a century and a half. Father Mapple, in an early chapter of Moby Dick, which was published in 1851, is a minister who comes to mind as one given a mostly serious representation. But as early as Middlemarch, which was published between 1871 and 1872, and which is far from, but not unaffected by, the pessimism that was about to follow in the wake of Darwin, a new kind of religious figure begins to emerge in the character of Mr. Farebrother. In contrast, with Ames and Boughton, Robinson has introduced men gifted with both a substantial doctrine and a gracious disposition. In light of these virtues, Farebrother comes up short; he is void the former principle, while Mr. Tyke, his antithesis, lacks the latter. And in spite of Robinson's admiration for them, she is not blind to their faults; by bringing them to light, she manages to show that a pastor may still be faithful in his fallenness.

Home, then, tells the story of Boughton's lone reprobate son who, after an absence of 20 years, comes home. That man is Jack Boughton, the proverbial "black sheep" of his family. Jack spent his childhood getting into trouble, trouble that grew in severity as he grew in age. His private misdemeanors have grown into public ones: stealing a beloved baseball glove from Ames turned into stealing the hunting rifle of the mayor's son. And his personal foibles have spawned civic affronts: his propensity for alcohol led to the impregnation of a local high-schooler; on top of that, the baby girl that follows died during his 20-year disappearance.

The life he has lived prior to his return has exhausted, but not quite defeated, the ability of his family to forgive. Glory, the youngest Boughton, who has come home to care for their father, describes its effect on him: "She had heard her father say, in the depths of his grief, 'Some things are indefensible.' And it was as if he thought a great gulf had opened, Jack on the far side of it, beyond rescue or comfort. She felt that she could not allow that to be true, especially since it was her father who seemed to be in hell. He had come to the last inch of his power to forgive, and there was Jack, still far beyond his reach. So he stood at the verge of despair ... despite every prayer and text old Ames could muster." Loving Jack bears a resemblance to loving the Israel of the Old Testament: little but pain ever comes in return. And, unlike Israel's Father, Old Boughton is only human.

In his own homecoming, Jack is no "prodigal." Though financial and emotional destitution have led him home, like they do the young man in the gospel parable, Jack has yet to experience a bankruptcy of intellect. As Old Boughton puts it, Jack has never "felt at home in the house where he was born," an alienation which includes the faith of his father. Making this outsiderness more specific, Jack says, "It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them. That's where the problem lies. In my case." But his problem grows out of soil far deeper than the emotions. Though when he speaks with Ames and his father he tends to toy with the idea, making his seriousness about it seem flippant, Jack seems to believe himself "an instance of predestination." As he describes it in one of his more serious moments, "Somehow I have never felt that grace was intended for me, particularly" (271). Jack believes himself consigned to his carnal nature. In Home, and especially in the character of Jack Boughton, Robinson seems to be asking one of the fundamental questions about human nature—namely, can people change?

Her answer—which I will not spoil for you—is both complex and hopeful. Home is a quiet novel, one that proceeds through an abundance of conversation. It is full of thoughtful meditations, on the home, on the family, on prayer, on the soul. I recommend all the books mentioned previously, but this one in particular, because it shows a family trying to love its own, when loving them is anything but easy. I leave you with one of my favorite reflections in it, one on prayer: "Prayer is a discipline in truthfulness, in honesty … you open up your thoughts, and then you can get a clear look at them. No point trying to hide anything."