As You Dislike It: “American Pastoral” in the Age of Late Boomerism
By Jake Goldstein
It can be difficult, as young Americans, to empathize with the psychology of our parents’ generation. We seemingly live in two different worlds, and ours, by all accounts, is the real one: cynical and digital, disillusioned and nihilistic, sad and broke, an inherited mess made bleak by the countless transgressions of our older, wiser counterparts. We have a bone to pick, and it seems only reasonable given the present state of things. The globe is warming, the news is fake, we don’t get paid enough, and we’ll never own a home. When the climate apocalypse inevitably comes, we will die in the same small apartments we received our first meager pay stubs in; washing away in the Flood, we will take with us only our few worldly possessions and our final rent-checks, made out to Jeff, 62, who’s owned this block since the ‘80s and whose coked-out failure of a son blasts “The Eminem Show” late into the weeknight.
Jeff will pass away comfortably before it comes, our hard-earned money having compounded fruitfully into a nice bed in the retirement home. When he leaves us behind, his legacy will be our misery. Jeff and the cohort of boomers he represents are out-of-touch, insensitive, and suspiciously patriotic; they paid their way minimum-wage through college, got a union job with a pension and health insurance, married their high-school sweethearts. They lost cousins or appendages in Vietnam and went on to God Bless Iraq, voted Reagan and now rep Biden, and for some reason worship either Rachel Maddow or God.
They are the clogs in the arteries of progress, and the world is moving faster than they are dying. What does a world without them look like? By now surely we’d have Medicare for All or at least a better job market. We’d be smoking legal weed and eating avocado toast in all fifty states, our budgets better balanced having wiped clean our student loans. We’d have retirement accounts, partners, maybe even kids. And the world would not be ending anytime soon.
Something like the above is our popular conception of the ur-boomer, and now the Times’ exceptionally asinine coverage on the matter has sparked a long-overdue discourse that—in my reading of the boomer take du jour— “threatens” “to tear” “this country’s” “fabric” “apart.” Obviously it doesn’t, but the boomer-managerial-class’s obsession with taking a couple of ironic malcontent tweets unnervingly seriously—in general, their recurring inability to comprehend what the fuck is going on—is worth getting to the bottom of. Considering the fact that we apparently don’t even seem to speak the same language anymore, it may be helpful to make a Rosetta Stone of one of their favorite novels, Phillip Roth’s 1998 walk-off, “American Pastoral.”
“American Pastoral” is about the rise and fall of The Swede, a.k.a. Seymour Levov, a perfunctorily Jewish-American man born in Newark, New Jersey during the final hours of the Great Depression. As the title suggests, he is a rightful symbol of the American ideal: he plays two sports, enlists in the Marines (he’s just months too young to complete boot-camp before the nukes drop), marries Miss New Jersey, and inherits the glove-making factory of his immigrant father, a man who believes in American craftsmanship. For a while he is a good boss who goes on to raise a good kid named Merry during the first wave of the Baby Boom. All is well for The Swede until it very suddenly isn’t: competition drives his factory out to Puerto Rico and then his daughter bombs their suburb’s post office, ending the life of its kindhearted proprietor and ravaging the Swede’s idyllic life. Like the SDS and Weathermen student terrorists that inspired her, Merry has given the U.S. a taste of its own Vietnam, “bringing the war home” just as a fledgling globalism starts kicking the jobs out.
Point being, “American Pastoral” is the story of a national identity’s gradual decline. Over the course of the Swede’s lifetime, the hard-working Puritan ideals America was built on are dissolved, leaving behind an aimless populace who stand for nothing. I didn’t really love the book all that much, but there can be no doubt that its thematic representation of this cultural shift is flawless; for that I concede it its Pulitzer. Above all, the novel’s beauty is in its unabashed subtlety. Its argument that this decline was palpable and real, but, above all, blameless. The Swede didn’t ask for any of the horrible events that befall his life; he was a good man that showed up every day at work alongside his well-paid employees to sell quality American gloves at a reasonable price. When the competition drives his factory to Puerto Rico, he is sad; but the fact is that he has no other choice. It is either that or go out of business.
And then there is Merry, who is not really all that wrong in calling him a disgusting capitalist pig. To be rich in America is a privilege, perhaps the greatest in the world, and one that, she argues, depends on firebombing Vietnam and Cambodia, deposing Nicaragua and Argentina, and invading Cuba and Panama if and when their interests are piqued by ideas that the moral arbiters of the Earth declare unfree. What is one pressure-cooked New Jerseyan to tens of thousands of napalmed Vietnamese alone? Nothing, she argues, and when we look at the facts it is not so difficult to sympathize. This is not to mention the stunning inequality she sees at home, whether it be that of race, gender, or class; like many of the insufferable, stubborn idealists that walk among us, her objections are aggravatingly correct.
After the bombing, Merry disappears without a trace. It is five years later when a disgraced Swede finally tracks her down. Watergate is unfolding on live TV. Merry is living alone in an abandoned warehouse, abject, somewhere deep in the cracks of Newark’s urban blight. She has become a Jain, adhering to an ascetic Eastern religion that preaches non-violence against all things—human, plant, and animal—and the renunciation of “all taking of anything not given.” She is completely detached from the world, living as inconsequentially as one physically can. The Swede thinks: “What had he done to produce a daughter who, after excelling for years at school, refused to think for herself—a daughter who had to be either violently against everything in sight or pathetically for everything, right down to the microorganisms in the air we breathe?” Merry’s response: “You’re the living example of the person who never thinks for himself!”
They are both exactly right. In the book’s last pages, the Swede comes to a final revelation: an understanding that Merry “has given him sight.”
He had seen how improbable it is that we should come from one another and how improbable it is that we do come from one another. Birth, succession, the generations, history—utterly improbable. He had seen that we don’t come from one another, that it only appears that we come from one another.
Even more than the boomer-wrought cultural shift, “American Pastoral” is about subjectivity, our inability to really understand why other people do the things that they do—and worst of all, our inability to do anything about them doing it. Merry did not foment a communist revolution. The Swede did not win back his factory or his wife’s love or any other aspect of that picturesque American life. Merry argues that for this reason we should do as little of everything as possible; none of it changes anything, so why bother? The Swede argues, all the way through the book’s last line, that for this reason we should allow everyone to do whatever they believe is best. He argues for our uniquely American flavor of capitalist liberalism, of capital-F Freedom, that fabled ethic of self-determination. After all, he asks, rather convincingly: “What is wrong with their life? What could be less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”
Whoever writes the next American Pastoral will write it about today. It will be about Trump and the internet and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Merry has become the Swede; the boomers, who once brought the war home, have become the Silents, so named for their unwillingness to speak out against anything at all. And then they gave birth to us, who’ve swapped SDS for DSA, bombs for roses, well-aware that their association of student socialists with explosions and riots will bring a swift Predator-drone end to the slightest hint of a revolutionary spirit. It is, if you ask me, hard to blame them; they tried their hand at chaos, got nothing but Kent State and COINTELPRO in return, and then grew up to make a killing off cheap homes and Reaganomics. What they left behind—carbon emissions, student loans, inequality, and so on—they are too old now to understand the gravity of, not able to see that we are not growing up in the same world they did and that their prosperity largely came at the cost of ours.
But there is a twist to all of this. It’s that the Swede’s story takes place inside a frame. His bulk of the novel is itself a fiction-inside-a-fiction that has been crafted by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s alter ego, a budding old author who idolized the Swede in high school and writes a story about what he thinks his life could have looked like after he finds out he died. While we do glean facts about the Swede—he was indeed that high-school heartthrob, he did marry Miss New Jersey, he did have a daughter who went on to bomb a post office—the finer details of how it all went down are all entirely made up. It’s a myth that combines one guy’s tragic life with 200 years of American folklore.
Which leads me to believe that, even more than the turmoil of the ‘60s and subjectivity, “American Pastoral“ is about myth-making. Specifically, our suffocating, beautiful obsession with it. Are we not the country that turned a frustrated quarrel with distant tax-collectors into the ultimate struggle for God-given freedom? Is it any wonder that these days our biggest export is “culture,” by which we mean Marvel movies and outdated tales about Ellis Island? “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” says bestselling self-help author Joan Didion, but the pull quote isn’t the whole picture. The rest of it is: “We live entirely… by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria—which is our actual experience.”
To flex my expensive close-reading muscles here, narrative is an imposition. I.e., forced, thrust upon, out-of-place. An attempt to “freeze” a timeline that is by definition unable to be slowed down. It’s a futile prospect, and we absolutely love it: one only needs to look as far as our admittedly (I would hope) hyperbolic conception of the boomers, their hilariously distant conception of us, and the barrage of think pieces like this on the matter, charging advertisers for each click. None of this matters, it’s not our “actual experience.” It’s our attempt to make sense of it. I’m not opposed to that, by any means, but it has its limitations.
Our relevant actual experience is, I believe, the daily struggle between “coexisting” with the boomers and having healthcare. It’s all well and good to say it’s their fault we don’t have it, and certainly reasonable to be mad. So is it really too much to ask for them to find some self-awareness? My answer is: probably. Or, to rephrase the question: is it worth the effort to show it to them? If by “effort” I mean owning them on Twitter repeatedly until they drop dead of heart failure or join the DSA, probably not. Remember the Swede: “We don’t come from one another. It only appears that way.” It appears that way because of stories, because of myths—all the grand narratives that explicate our toil but don’t do much to change it. We will never live in the same carefree world that boomers did, and that’s okay; if anything, I’d hope we wouldn’t want to, lest our kids hate their parents as much as we do ours. We are tasked with solving their problems ourselves, just the same way that they did when what I assume was the karmic myopia of their last blissful acid trip told them it was time to swap blotter papers for Reagan ballots and a mortgage.
Jake Goldstein is a junior from San Diego, California, majoring in English with a focus on creative writing, and minoring in sociology. He is the managing editor of West 10th, NYU’s undergraduate literary journal, and enjoys writing fiction—currently a perpetually untitled novel as part of his senior capstone—as well as long-form essays, which are intermittently published on the “Bizzaro-Americana” culture blog mspainthelp.com.