160 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
reasons for Newark’s sudden social problems also reflects what
Macherey describes in theoretical terms as consciousness strewn with
“absent cause[s].”^69 It is this complacency that indirectly causes the
major tragic events of the novel, catalyzing Merry’s disillusionment
and fanaticism—qualities that eventually lead her toward political
extremism and terrorism.
The silencing of sociopolitical inequality and class disparity
causes another great “tragic” event of the novel—the Newark race
riots. Coming in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War and the
Civil Rights struggle, the riots are a symptom of the turbulent
political and social change that is sweeping America. As men-
tioned earlier, Lyons describes this political turmoil as a phenom-
enon that bursts the “beautiful and fragile bubble” of the pastoral
“dream world” that the privileged majority embraced at the end
of the Second World War.^70 She stresses that the complacency and
short-sightedness of the “mainstream” culture simply leaves mid-
dle-class Americans (such as Levov) “unable to provide adequate
responses” to instances of violent protest, such as Merry’s politi-
cal terrorism, or, indeed, the Newark riots.^71 H o w e v e r , I c o n t e n d
that this assertion overplays the specter of violence and its cultural
and social “response” while overlooking the degree to which Roth
adumbrates the kind of complacent sociopolitical practices that
play an important role in provoking this violence in the first place.
Lyons and others neglect the fact that Levov’s ignorance—what
could be labeled “silence” vis- à -vis (historical) material inequality
and other forms of exploitation—is an attendant factor of the neo-
liberal and neo-imperialist ideologies that create the serious social
problems depicted in the novel. This complacency of Levov’s has
been addressed in the critical literature. Shostak, for example,
comments on the fact that the “apolilitcal Seymour desires only to
fulfil quietly the aspiration imbibed from mainstream American
culture,” which involves an “escape [from] politics into the idyll
of the American landscape.”^72 However, there is more that can
be said on the way Roth utilizes narrative silence and lacunae to
reveal how this apoliticism is actually an active impediment to
social equality and interethnic conciliation, and one that can lead
to violent and chaotic consequences.