906 Roth, Philip
However, the Swede and Dawn parent a daugh-
ter, Merry Levov—her name already invoking a
sense of irony—who rejects not only her father’s
capitalist enterprise but also her mother’s beauty
and their comfortable way of living in what appears
to Levov to be “Johnny Appleseed country.” In order
to protest the Vietnam War, but also her family’s
apparent perpetuation of the war’s anticommunist
project generally, Merry Levov bombs the post office
in Old Rimrock, with devastating effects.
The monstrous intents of Merry—and the effect
her act has on her idealistic father—are perhaps best
conveyed by the Swede’s brother Jerry, a character
who appears to wander in from the margins in order
to narrate for Zuckerman his brother’s struggle with
parenthood. As Jerry recalls:
Seymour wasn’t built like me. He had a big,
generous nature and with that they really
raked him over the coals, all the impossible
ones. Unsatisfiable father, unsatisfiable wives,
and the little murderer herself, the monster
daughter. The monster Merry. The solid
thing he once was.For Jerry, it is Swede’s simultaneous generosity and
idealism—his belief in the American dream—that
has allowed others to destroy him. Whereas we
typically think about parents having the upper hand
when dealing with their children, it is Merry in this
novel who has the most power: She is the most
manipulative—the monster daughter, the monster
Merry, the murderer—who brings her father to his
knees.
What is perhaps so powerful about the Swede’s
character, however, is that his very generosity and
idealism are what drive him to pursue his daughter
in order to protect her after she goes into hiding.
Despite all of her hatred for her father, where he
has come from and what he stands for, he seeks her
out; despite their ideological difference and anti-
thetical values, he seeks her out. Zuckerman tries
to understand this parental relationship in narrating
the Swede’s story. Regarding the Swede, he under-
stands that “everything that gave meaning to his
accomplishments had been American. Everything
he loved was here.” Regarding Merry, on the other
hand, Zuckerman reports: “For her, being an Ameri-
can was loathing America, but loving America was
something he could not let go of any more than he
could have let go of loving his father and his mother,
any more than he could have let go of his decency.
How could she ‘hate’ this country, when she had no
conception of this country? How could a child of his
be so blind as to revile the ‘rotten system’ that had
given her own family every opportunity to succeed?”
What is particularly striking about this passage
is that here even Zuckerman—a third party, an
outsider trying to understand what went wrong in
Levov’s life—zeroes in on perhaps the most com-
pelling confusion of Levov’s life: that the conception
of his daughter Merry, the new life engendered to
appreciate all he has achieved in the world, leads
only to hatred and death resulting from his daugh-
ter’s failure to conceive all that is right and decent
about the United States.
Ultimately, Zuckerman goes too far in imag-
ining why Merry could possibly blow up her life
along with her father’s. A writer first and foremost,
Zuckerman imagines a scenario when even Levov’s
good intentions go awry, leading him to seduce
Merry as he would his own beautiful wife. But this
is Zuckerman’s fantasy, not Levov’s; it is, if anything,
one last effort to try to understand how the child of
an American all-star and his Miss New Jersey could
reject—as we all do—so much of what our parents
value most.
Aimee PozorskivIoLence in American Pastoral
American Pastoral tells the story of Seymour Levov, a
blue-eyed, steep-jawed athlete who allowed his Jew-
ish neighborhood to enter into “a fantasy about itself
and the world, the fantasy of sports fans everywhere”
and, ultimately, a fantasy where “they could forget
the war.” As described by one of Roth’s most con-
stant narrators, Nathan Zuckerman, Seymour “The
Swede” Levov was embraced as “a symbol of hope
by so many”—not only because of his high school
stardom during World War II, but also because of
his later successes. However, as with every story
Zuckerman tells, there is a catch. Levov’s catch has
to do with his daughter’s involvement in the antiwar
movement and the questions posed to Levov by her