Between Rising and Passing: Justice Suspended in the Fiction of Philip RothJackie Weisman
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On the surface, the Swede never appears to betray anyone, himself included. As his brother Jerry puts it, the Swede was "Fatally attracted to his duty. . . Fatally attracted to responsibility." [25] But at the same time, he concedes that the Swede does not seem to sacrifice much. He describes the Swede and his wife as "all smiles on their outward trip into the USA. She's post-Catholic, he's post-Jewish, together they're going to go out there to Old Rimrock to raise little post-toasties. Instead they get that fucking kid." [26] Indeed, "that fucking kid" Merry materializes as evidence incarnate of Roth's rejection of a navigable system of justice in favor of a more fatalistic one.
In the end, the Swede's every effort toward a model life proves futile when his daughter commits political terrorism and becomes a fugitive from the law. His life following the incident falls to shambles, and he spends all of his days agonizing over what might have reasonably pushed his daughter to such violence. Though he half-heartedly entertains some possibilities and obsessively dwells on others, he ultimately comes up without an answer, which is precisely Roth's point.
Although the Swede focuses his energy single-mindedly upon his daughter, a broader perspective of the incident lends insight into its context, the quandary of Jews becoming American. As Ross Posnock observes, "The novel devastates the assimilative ideal but not on behalf of a countermodel of appropriation. Indeed, the book offers no alternative." [27] Though she is certainly no alternative, sixteen-year-old Merry Levov is the byproduct and symbol of the Swede's misbegotten attempt at assimilation. She is inexplicable, but no less likely a result of the Swede's faultless upbringing than an ideal daughter would have been. As a man convinced of moral fairness and cause and effect, the Swede commits himself to finding the root of her madness, not realizing that Roth has painted him into a world bereft of logical continuity, in which the concept of "deserving" is irrelevant. Roth has not rebuked the Swede for something he has done wrong. In the world in which he lives, he is equally a candidate for punishment as he is for success. Put in other terms, Roth's "alternative" to a pattern of justice is fate of the Greek order, to which all of his characters are uniformly subjected.
Just as Roth alludes to a Gauguin book to speak to Neil Klugman's circumstances in Goodbye, Columbus, he similarly provides clues to the Swede's situation through the use of John R. Tunis' The Kid from Tomkinsville. Roth refers to a children's book that the Swede owns, about a Connecticut orphan "whose only fault, as a major leaguer, is a tendency to keep his right shoulder down and his swing up, but a fault, alas, that is provocation enough for the gods to destroy him." [28] With several notable exceptions, Roth draws strong parallels between the Swede and the Kid, both remarkable athletes devoted to their families, who "practiced hitting in the wintertime by swinging at a baseball taped to a cord hung from the rafter." [29] Zuckerman also attests that as a child, he "thought of the Swede and the Kid as one." [30] With this in mind, the rhetoric that describes the Kid's fortune acquires greater significance. Zuckerman's allusion to "the gods" as executors of the Kid's downfall points unmistakably to the classical deities and their legendary caprice.
His reflections on the book's ending also allude to the conclusion of the Swede's story and affirm the Swede's submission to fate. The end of The Kid from Tomkinsville, in which the Kid makes a heroic catch that sends him "writhing in agony" before he is carried off "inert," leaves Zuckerman bewildered that such an end could befall "the farm orphan called the Kid, modest, serious, chaste, loyal, naÇve, undiscourageable, hard-working, soft-spoken, courageous, a brilliant athlete, a beautiful, austere boy." [31] The last line of American Pastoral is a pared-down reformulation of this ending, in which Zuckerman asks the reader, "What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?" [32] Although he omits a substantive response, Roth uses the novel's structure to provide the answer. What follows the question is literally nothing.
The Swede's absolution does not imply Roth's endorsement of the way the Swede lives his life, however. Yet neither is Roth indicting him on a moral basis, nor impugning his ethics in any way. Instead, Roth makes an example of the Swede to show how terribly misguided he is to think that forsaking his Jewish identity is the ticket to the experience he longs for. It is appropriate, then, for Roth to conclude the text with a question. Unlike the Swede, who mistakenly believes he has found the solution to the American identity question, Roth's answer is more questions. To his mind, the most American aspect of an identity is that which queries its very Americanness and which never quite settles on an answer.
"All you have to do, is do it!"
Although Roth discounts the notion of a spectrum of justice and injustice, his work indicates a belief in an alternate continuum that has little use for terms such as "worthy" or "reprehensible." [33] In his universe, where action and consequence bear no clear connection, Roth offers a model comparing those who act as they please and those who act as convention would advise. Though the heavens do not reward either faction disproportionately, those who act as they please often prevail because their actions are their own rewards. Those who act according to convention, though not punished per se, never gain the benefits that they do not seize by force.
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Jackie Weisman is a first-year student at New York University School of Law.