American Pastoral

Philip Roth is known for his self-referential, semi-autobiographical style. Many of his novels are set in his hometown of Newark during the post-war years; his frequent narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, is often described as his literary alter ego. In his obituary for The New York Times, Charles McGrath writes, “In the course of a very long career, Mr. Roth took on many guises—mainly versions of himself—in the exploration of what it means to be an American, a Jew, a writer, a man” (McGrath, Charles. “Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America, Dies at 85.” The New York Times, 22 May 2018). As a Jewish writer, those questions inform his exploration of World War II and its aftermath, the lives of Jewish immigrants, and antisemitism in America. The Swede is the descendant of Jewish immigrants who work in the glove manufacturing business. Roth, like the Swede, was a second-generation Jewish American who attended Weequahic High School—the same school in which the Swede’s athletic heroics become legend. In fact, Roth references in his fiction many of the same towns and even local businesses of his youth. As his characters reminisce nostalgically about the Newark of the past, Roth himself develops a more complex picture of a changing city and of the politics of memory.

Roth’s work is well-known for its frank depiction of sexuality. His 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint launched him into literary stardom with its scandalously explicit descriptions of sex and masturbation. While not as overtly sexual as Portnoy, the Swede nevertheless treats sex and sexuality as central to its characters’ lives and identities. When the Swede learns that Merry has been sexually assaulted, his mind obsesses over her body as a young girl: “The cleft, as though an awl had made it—that beautifully beveled joining that will petal outward, evolving in the cycle of time into a woman’s origami-folded cunt” (271). Rita Cohen—a young woman—tries to seduce the older Swede using extremely suggestive language. In the sense that Roth is willing to express those hidden male desires other writers might not touch, his work is transgressive yet also problematic. He’s been accused of misogyny and “hypermasculinity,” and yet, in his review of a recent Philip Roth biography, Jesse Tisch writes, “[I]f he’s pious about anything, it’s transgression: saying the unsayable, describing messy, shameful, conflicting desires” (Tisch, Jesse. “The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography.” Jewish Book Council, 18 Oct. 2021). Much of Roth’s fiction rails against the rigid social order of non-Jewish European American culture, with its presumed superiority and exclusion. Roth’s graphic depictions of sex and anatomy may simply be his way of mischievously upending the puritanical mores of Anglo-Protestant society.