Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 155descriptions of both Levov and Appleseed.^64 Indeed, both Thoreau
and Emerson’s romanticization of the “natural,” “simple” life are
redolent of the kind of pastoral conceit that the novel so conspicu-
ously takes apart.
Posnock also highlights the parallels that Levov presents with
Emerson and cites the latter’s and Thoreau’s “ideologies of pasto-
ral and possessive individualism” as one of the main targets that
comes under ironic fire both in American Pastoral and in I Married
a Communist.^65 However, Roth’s critique of the pastoral in the
former novel is something deserving of further analysis. Although
Posnock does scrutinize the subjects of utopianism and purity
evoked in the stoically ideological Ira Ringold (the protagonist of
I Married a Communist ), who, like Thoreau, isolates himself in a
rural shack (in the former’s case, to commit himself thoroughly to
the Communist cause), he does not elaborate on the ideological
fundamentalism of his counterpart, Levov. So it is to the subject of
the ideological connotations embedded in Levov’s tragic pastoral
dream that I turn next, a subject that will also re-evoke the topic of
materiality that is explored above in the discussion of The Human
Stain. 66
With the benign, jovial figure of Johnny Appleseed being an
omnipresent fixture of his consciousness, Levov settles down in a
small, rural town on a “hundred-acre farm on a back road in the
sparsely habitated hills beyond Morristown, in wealthy, rural Old
Rimrock, New Jersey” (p. 14). For Levov, this move from Jewish sub-
urbia, with its security and family insularity, to the predominately
white, protestant town of Old Rimrock, completes his acquisition of
the American dream—his attainment of the American pastoral life.
In one memorable scene, Zuckerman presents an almost farcical—if
not outright derisive—moment in which all Levov’s dreams have
finally become “fully realized”:
[He would] turn and stride all the way back [home], past the white pas-
ture fences he loved, the rolling hay fields he loved, the corn fields, the
turnip fields, the barns, the horses, the cows, the ponds, the streams,
the springs, the falls, the watercress, the scouring rushes, the meadows,
the acres and acres of woods he loved with all of a new country dweller’s
puppy love for nature, until he reached the century-old maple trees he