Philip Roth’s American Pastoral puts the American Dream on trial. It interrogates the pretenses of the American 20th century, and all of its promises of prosperity and of stability. It traces its origins from the founding mythos of what America is. It traces its failure in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, and of its continuing failure since then.
American Pastoral is set during the 1960s, precisely when the Dream begins to crack. Our protagonist is Swede Levov, the personification of the Dream. For the 20 years after World War II, Swede has built up the perfect American life. He’s affluent, married to Miss New Jersey, and has built a life in the suburbs outside Newark.
Post-war American life was constructed in historically anomalous material conditions. The rest of the world, having collapsed and needing to be rebuilt from scratch, left America as the world’s single functional society of the time. This power and economic imbalance permitted, for the first time, consistent upwards social mobility for an unprecedented amount of Americans. All of this could have never been sustained long-term, but Americans were under the pretense they were entering a permanent Pax Americana.
The war. Winning that war. Victory, victory, victory had come! No more death and war! p. 209
For many Americans, the Vietnam War was the first obvious time the “American contract” to everyday people was broken in how the American dream has shaped out. It was the first instance that American-manufactured turmoil, always present outside the imperial core (in Korea, Guatemala, Iran, and Indonesia), was broadcast translucently around the nation. For the affluent middle class, it was the first time this turmoil was turned inwards. And it was the first time the American pretenses of the post-war consensus, American moral superiority, and a promise that assimilation and hard work meant something, that all of these were broken. And indeed, the result is that Americans began to interrogate the substance of the Contract, which was implicit.
And indeed, it was inevitable that some contradiction would shatter the Dream. It was inevitable that imperial violence would one day be turned inwards. This “American berserk” is no less homegrown than the “American pastoral”.
In the name of progress, the Dream abandoned a permanent underclass. Here, we’re forced to reckon with what happened in the spaces the Dream left behind. Downtown Newark, where Lou Levov and the Swede built their fortunes, becomes a hollowed-out zone of poverty and violence. And
But Roth has no nostalgia for the old immigrant Newark, either. Indeed, throughout the novel, he very carefully stops short of pointing fingers or explicitly commenting on the structural causes of the Dream’s collapse.
Just like Vietnam, the 1967 riots in Newark are an obvious mirror for the failure of the Dream, where they’re portrayed as having pushed out the now affluent white/Jewish middle class, who were themselves originally poor immigrants. The undercurrent of this is Jewish identity in the Dream. What enables this flight is assimilation. Swede attempts to erase his Jewishness and assume an all-American identity. It is what journalist Steven Malanga describes as, “a contradiction of Jews who want to fit in and stand out, who insist they are different and no different”.
From here, the Swede goes even further back to inspect the origins of the Dream. Of course the founding mythos of America was a walking contradiction (just as Hamilton may happily paper over). The “pastoral” fantasy (in land and in order) erases and sanctifies its inherent American violence. If Vietnam and the 60s horrified Americans, but it grew out of the myths they cherished, then who is guilty? History isn’t accidental, it isn’t something that just happens to people. It was structured in the American context. The farther back you go in search of innocence, the more violence you have to explain away. The Dream was always a myth. Violence was always inherent in its construction.
From here, we can look forward. If Vietnam was the first breaking point in the Dream, then what next? What next of the rest of the 20th century? Here, we can establish causality in each subsequent rupture: Reagan, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. I almost wonder what a Rothian novel of the current time would be like. For ordinary Americans, the relative stability of the Bush and Obama years compared with the turmoil of the Trump years, that lead into COVID, then more Trump. Genocide in Palestine, ICE deportations, and imperialist violence in Venezuela. Continuous upheavals of American society.
But the Dream was the structural foundation for America in the 60s. What do we have now? It’s like America has been living in the aftermath of the Dream’s shattering for decades. Our baseline is that fragmentation. And maybe the managed decline of empire isn’t sustainable either.
Finally, the writing in American Pastoral is beautiful. Roth is possibly the top 1 user of the English language of all time. It is dense, and sometimes slow. I could’ve spent many more months attempting to understand it all.
That can happen when people die — the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality — the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward — even an outsider can't judge. The sight of a coffin going into the ground can effect a great change of heart — all at once you find you are not so disappointed in this person who is dead — but what the sight of a coffin does for the mind in its search for the truth, this I don't profess to know. p. 66
5/5
Written 31 January 2026
Adapted from my review on Goodreads.
Notes
- “That can happen when people die — the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality — the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward — even an outsider can’t judge. The sight of a coffin going into the ground can effect a great change of heart — all at once you find you are not so disappointed in this person who is dead — but what the sight of a coffin does for the mind in its search for the truth, this I don’t profess to know.” - p. 66
- Roth is possibly the top 1 user of the English language of all time
- a commentary on the promises of the American dream
- in the 1960s, when the book is set, the dream begins to crack
- Dawn as the personification of womanhood in the American dream
- objectively she had to give up her needs and wants and desires for domestic life
- “The war. Winning that war. Victory, victory, victory had come! No more death and war!” - p. 209
- An obviously vacuous statement in light of the Vietnam War
- The post-war beliefs shattered by Vietnam
- Merry’s home
- The urban form of pre-war America (density, brownstone buildings) contrasted with the wanton construction of freeways and highways
- 1967 Newark riots
- as having driven out the now-affluent white/Jewish middle class, who were themselves originally poor immigrants
- mirror for the failure of the American dream
- Roth so far refuses to comment on the structural causes of the riots
- nvm, pp 276
- the foil to this is really Swede’s attempts to “erase” his Jewishness and assume an all-American identity (Johnny Appleseed)
- pp 276, call between the Swede and his brother
- the American Dream as obviously an idealised and almost fake ideal
- the moment they step out of the idyllic suburbs, things are violent and
- Roth goes even further back
- the foundations of Americana as idealised
- kinda boring in the end
- post book ---
- American Pastoral (Philip Roth) — EXCELLENT talk from the National Association of Scholars
- “a contradiction of Jews who want to fit in and stand out — and he’s thinking about himself here — who insists they are different and no different”
- “And it’s the sense of, how did America go from — not only coming out of the Second World War to leaving the Cold War — but also, how do we account for the tumult of the 1960s and the 1970s. How do we account for the violence of those years. And what I think is so brilliant about American Pastoral is that it does two things, I think. It speaks for the desire for causality, for a narrative to explain things, while also negating that ability to construct a narrative that explains everything”
- stutter, incestuous kiss as invented. none of these really account for the violence of the 60s
- “desire for a comprehensible historical narrative, while also suggesting the history itself is not explainable”
- “He describes history as the relentless unforeseen. We feel that in American Pastoral, in what Nathan Zuckerman identifies as the indigenous American berserk. The notion that there is this sort of violence that is an inherent part of American history. It reoccurs but it’s inexplicable in a sense.”
- Roth’s work as being contextualised with a group of writers belonging to the Silent Generation (Morrison, Pynchon, Updike)
- “Roth is a deeply patriotic writer. He’s a writer who deeply loves America. On the other hand, he was also a highly vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, highly vocal opponent of Richard Nixon. […] Very outspoken against George W. Bush and Trump, so very critical of his nation at the same time. In many ways, his love of America is instilled in him as a child growing up in the Depression, and then in the patriotism of the Second World War. But then he becomes disillusioned, first in the McCarthy years, and then certainly by the violence of the late 1960s”
- the turmoil of the 2020s
- a quality of multiple simultaneous ruptures
- a quality of acceleration, of things that were supposed to be contained suddenly becoming uncontainable