Roth, Phillip. American Pastoral. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

I Finished! this book a week ago and blogging about it has completely slipped my mind, meaning I've already because of slogging through parts of Proust and steadily working through the new Eggers pretty much forgotten what's worth commenting on in the novel. I think I was in the minority of those in my class by loving the book as much as I did, and why I love it is its point of view. The book opens in the first person with Roth alter-ego Zuckermann narrating about his 45th high-school reunion and this mythic figure from his boyhood named the Swede, who was, like, the best athlete ever and is seemingly ripped right from the pages of any of a hundred "Ain't America Swell" novels for boys published shortly after the war. He's nauseating, if you like me are no nostalgist.

But then after running into the Swede's younger brother at the reunion and finding out the Swede's daughter was connected with a protest bombing that took place in New Jersey during Vietnam, Zuckermann is forced to rethink the ideal that he'd built up in his head all these years. And what happens is a kind of willful destruction of the myth of the Swede (which we come to understand is the myth of Old America, "Old" meaning American before the Sixties...façade America). Here's how and where it happens:

...I lifted onto my stage the boy we were all going to follow into America, our point man into the next immersion, at home here the way the Wasps were at home here, an American not by sheer striving, not by being a Jew who invents a famous vaccine or a Jew on the Supreme Court, not be being the most brilliant or the most eminent or the best. Instead [...] he does it the ordinary way, the natural way, the American-guy way. To the honeysweet strains of "Dream," I pulled myself away from myself, pulled away from the reunion, and I dreamed ... I dreamed a realistic chronicle. I began gazing into his life—not his life as a god or a demigod in whose triumphs one could exult as a boy but his life as another assailable man—and inexplicably, which is to say lo and behold, I found him in Deal, New Jersey, at the seaside cottage, the summer his daughter was eleven, back when she couldn't stay out of his lap or stop calling him by cute pet names, couldn't "resist," as she put it, examining with the tip of her finger the close way his ears fitted to his skull. (89, my emphasis)

This happens in the middle of a paragraph in the middle of chapter three and from that point on Zuckermann's "I" is not once used in the book. It drifts away and becomes a close third in the viewpoint of the Swede. The rest of the novel is the story of his life between, oh, 1965 and 1973.

It's nothing short of amazing, really, how Roth gets it done. How he both yearns for all the Swede connotes and yet also systematically destroys it and everything he stands for. Because this is what the Sixties and Seventies did, he's arguing. The Swede is destroyed because postwar idealism has been destroyed.

How this novel is, exactly, in the pastoral tradition is something I'll have to answer come the end of the term, after I write a paper about it.