ROTH REDUX

THE WICKED IRONIST IS BACK - WITH A COMPASSIONATE VERSION OF THE `AMERICAN PASTORAL'

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, April 20, 1997

Page: N15

Section: Books

Now Roth has done something more wicked than ever before: He has dared to write a wrenching, compassionate, intelligent novel about the life of a good man. ``American Pastoral'' is as fine and warm as white linen left in the sun; it is also -- because it is Roth -- merciless in its comprehension of the social forces that shape and sometimes wreck a life. As sweet in its ode to the never-never land of pastoral myth as Updike's first tribute to Rabbit Angstrom, ``American Pastoral'' is as triumphantly unselfconscious as anything Roth has written. That doesn't mean he isn't hovering about. Zuckerman the aging novelist is the narrator of this tale, but he is so omniscient in the best sense as to be transparent. The story here is of an America at play in the fields of the Lord, until the Lord looks down and decides to scorch the earth. The story of a life, in other words, this one following that heartbreaking arc of postwar America's idealistic march into the cruel realism of the '60s and beyond.

Roth's retort to Tolstoi's Ivan Ilyich is Seymour Levov, nicknamed ``the Swede'' in high school, where he was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jewish kid who lettered in every sport known to man. A young hero who tried to be as good -- as decent -- as he was talented. A simple guy, really, in those midcentury years, joining the Marines in the last days of World War II only to be held back to play ball stateside. The Swede fell in love with a shiksa, broke it off at his father's request, then fell for another one -- this one Dawn Dwyer, a.k.a. Miss New Jersey of 1949. He married her, had a beautiful baby girl, took over his father's business, a glove factory in Newark. Assured that the pursuit of happiness was as manageable as a 50-yard end run, the Swede moved his little family to an old stone house in rural New Jersey and set about building the life that, for so many, postwar America seemed to promise. He made gloves the way his father had made them; Miss New Jersey, in search of a more lasting image, became a mom who raised cattle on the side. Then Merry Levov, the beloved teenage daughter whose name was no testament to temperament, planted a bomb in the Post Office of her hometown, in Old Rimrock, in 1968. She killed a doctor on his way to work, went underground, and relentlessly, chaotically, ruined the lives of everyone who loved her.

This peculiarly American tragedy -- Camelot Unbound -- happened in various degrees to much of a generation; Roth makes it indelibly personal by giving us Swede Levov's story through Nathan Zuckerman's sensibility. That way nothing is sacrificed to point of view: We get to witness the Swede's innocence by way of the narrator's all-knowing, sympathetic savvy. We experience the order of the rose-colored dream within the chaos of history; the hope of Lou Levov's rise as a Jewish glovemaker within the bitter fact of a burned-out Newark decades later. Soft-spoken and kind, a master of impotent diplomacy, the Swede cannot articulate his ruin, but Zuckerman can: ``He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach -- that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one's history.''

Levov's descent into ``the indigenous American berserk,'' as Zuckerman calls it, is discovered by way of the narrator's 45th reunion at Weequahic High School in Newark in 1995. This exercise in nostalgia -- Zuckerman himself is now living alone in New England, wracked by prostate cancer -- presents the famous author with a bushel of bucolic memories, including the lofty day the Swede called him by his nickname (``Skip''), as well as the usual encounters with old girlfriends, buddies gone to seed, death and dying. Not to mention the Swede's younger brother, a brilliantly cast cardiac surgeon, who angrily gives Zuckerman the tragic sketch of Levov's fall -- all our author needs to retrace the tale, in other words, spinning into the gold of fiction everything he can never really know.

It's a beautiful study in contrasts, Skip to the Swede, and Zuckerman gets out of the way as soon as the tale is laid: Like the elusive narrator of ``Madame Bovary,'' who disappears after the first page, this storyteller is so concerned with his characters that he soon fades from the reader's consciousness. The ensuing drama of ``American Pastoral'' unfolds in retrospect -- the Swede is dead by the opening of the novel, his daughter's crime is a quarter-century old -- and yet its unfolding is so immediate that the jumps in time are hypnotizing, rather than disruptive. Only Roth could turn a dinner party into 150 pages of stream-of-consciousness memories, or take a man's adolescent regret and turn it into a conditional clause of Proustian proportion. That he has chosen the likes of the Swede to star in his plummet from paradise is humble testimony to the force of suffering in this novel, and to Roth's emotional range in depicting him. The protagonist of ``American Pastoral'' was born without the irony gene; he is a simple man who gets sucker-punched by the fraudulence of happiness -- and hasn't a clue how to go on when the dream goes belly up.

But if Roth has given us the big old American metaphor here, he has also wrapped within it exquisite cameos and portraits: a bombed-out Newark after the riots of 1967, where even the streets were stolen; the careful art of a glove cutter; even the misspent rage of a crazed adolescent. (``You are unrevealed,'' the Swede's brother tells him. ``You made the angriest kid in America.'') With its vistas of detail, its Miltonian grasp of a country heady with victory until the inevitable stumble from innocence, ``American Pastoral'' almost feels deliberately idyllic -- an aura of intent that explains a great deal about the wingspan of Philip Roth, who can visit Eden and the River Styx in one fell swoop. This novel is the careful antithesis of Roth's last book, ``Sabbath's Theater,'' which was a labor of wicked genius and depravity that absolutely dared you to stop reading. That Roth has taken the last line of Mickey Sabbath's story and inverted it here, into the middle of Swede Levov's sorrows, only confirms the maestro's grand design. Where ``Sabbath's Theater'' was dark as squid ink, ``American Pastoral'' is flooded with sunshine; where Sabbath himself was irredeemable, the Swede is beyond reproach -- and born into a grace-filled existence, which doesn't help him a damn bit in the end. The blows of this thing called life -- what Merry, as a child, defines as ``just a short period of time in which we are alive'' -- are dealt in equal measure. My God, I thought in the middle of this infuriatingly gorgeous novel, this time he's finally done it.

``Let me finish, please. Don't interrupt me, please. Al Haberman was a great reader. No schooling but he loved to read. His favorite author was Sir Walter Scott. And Sir Walter Scott, in one of his classic books, gets an argument going between the glovemaker and the shoemaker about who is the better craftsman, and the glovemaker wins the argument. You know what he says? `All you do,' he tells the shoemaker, `is make a mitten for the foot. You don't have to articulate around each toe.' But Sir Walter Scott was the son of a glover, so it makes sense he would win the argument. You didn't know Sir Walter Scott was the son of a glover? You know who else, aside from Sir Walter and my two sons? William Shakespeare. Father was a glover who couldn't read and write his own name. You know what Romeo says to Juliet when she's up on the balcony? Everybody knows `Romeo, Romeo, where are you, Romeo' -- that she says. But what does Romeo say? I started in a tannery when I was thirteen, but I can answer for you because of my friend Al Haberman, who since has passed away, unfortunately. Seventy-three years old, he came out of his house, slipped on the ice, and broke his neck. Terrible. He told me this. Romeo says, `See the way she leans her cheek on her hand? I only wish I was the glove on that hand so that I could touch that cheek.' Shakespeare. Most famous author in history.''

``Lou dear,'' Sylvia Levov said again softly, ``what does this have to do with what everybody is talking about?''

PHILIP ROTH

From ``American Pastoral''