174 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
of free-market capitalism, encapsulating its universal ambitions and
repudiating its shortcomings. He is therefore, if we are to invest our-
selves in the tragic narrative Zuckerman spins for us, what Marx
famously termed “capital personified.”
Of course, it should be reiterated here that such a description of
the character tends toward the reductive and appears to oversimplify
the complexities, contradictions, and unseen, perhaps redeeming,
motivations that also constitute Levov’s character. This can in large
part be attributed to Zuckerman’s manner of storytelling, which
seems all too ready to describe the protagonist in ways that simplify
and distort, so as to make him better correspond to the aesthetic
demands and expectations of the tragic genre. Indeed, the charge
that Zuckerman has been taking such inappropriate liberties with
Levov’s story is one of the main reasons why the latter’s elder brother
Jerry (as alluded to above) dismisses the account as “misjudged”
(p. 75). Nonetheless, any substantial analysis of the novel must still
countenance the consequences of the “tragedy” that Zuckerman
(and in a sense Roth himself) places before us. This is not least
because Levov’s tragedy prompts and provokes some important dis-
cussion on the sociohistorical implications of the American Dream.
In particular, it appears to reveal the myth as a distorted utopian
v i sion t h at c a n e x ac erbate socia l d iv i sion a nd t u r moi l. T h i s i s la rgely
due to the fact that, as Thomas Hallock poetically argues, “buried
politics [... are] at the root of [the American] pastoral tradition,”
with quaint figures such as Appleseed and Henry David Thoreau
suppressing the undesirable specters of ethnic cleansing and indus-
trialized slavery that comprise the true material reality of American
history.^93 However, perhaps the real pathos of Levov’s myopia—
which is simultaneously that of popular American myth—lies in
the fact that, unlike in the majority of tragic stories, the character
never fully comes to realize the fallacy of his vision and learn of
(and thereby from) his mistakes. Roth ends the novel with Levov
being close to death but still ignorant and therefore unrepentant
and burdened by his hamartia. He still believes that his life’s work,
troubled as it was by the tragic occurrence of Merry’s turn to mur-
derous crime, was nonetheless in pursuit of righteous and magnan-
imous principles that brought great benefit to many in his employ.