The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson 907involvement. When Merry Levov bombs the local
post office to protest the Vietnam War, Levov’s life
is shattered, and Zuckerman tries to make sense of
the pieces.
On the surface, then, American Pastoral appears
as a novel nostalgic for some unnamable moment
“before the Vietnam war”: a time before the Viet-
nam era brought home to America the reality of
violence experienced in other parts of the world.
However, Zuckerman argues something darker: He
appears to claim that democracy descended on 18th-
century America like a flaming sword. Merry’s bomb
is not a disruption of a previously untroubled Eden
but, rather, a fresh outbreak of a peculiarly American
discomfort: How to live freely with others.
At first glance, the novel seems to uphold Merry,
and her radicalism, as ungrateful. Early on, we learn
that Merideth Levov, Seymour’s daughter, was The
Rimrock Bomber. She is, according to her uncle
Jerry, “A charming child . . . who brought the war
home to Lyndon Johnson by blowing up the post
office in the general store.” Her own father resents
Merry for bringing the war not to the White House
but to the family home: Levov thought, “it was
not the specific war that she’d had in mind, but it
was a war, nonetheless, that she brought home to
America—home into her very own house.”
Merry’s objection to the war, however, is exactly
the opposite of this. Merry complains that the
United States has been exporting its values, willy-
nilly, around the world, imposing them by violence
if need be. She thinks of the Vietnam War as a
proxy war against the Soviet Union: Supporting the
collapsing South Vietnamese government was, in
her view, an unjust act of a Johnny Appleseed out
to spread the seeds of democracy without regard
for the consequences. That Levov sees himself as
a modern-day Appleseed only clinches the way
national myth, cold war geopolitics, and family
dynamics coalesce in this family.
Whereas Levov cannot separate himself from
his country—and therefore sees in the “conception”
everything of value it has offered him (high school
popularity, his dream wife, a nice house, a thriving
business)—Merry sees the “rotten system” for what
is it: a violent project to spread U.S. values around
the world. The only sense we have that Levov might
have second thoughts about the victims of Vietnam
whom Merry stands to defend, in fact, comes from
Zuckerman engaging in speculation—another fan-
tasy about where Levov could possibly stand, trapped
as he is between his love for America and his love for
a daughter trying to destroy it, and him as well.
Merry’s key insight into democracy is that it
frequently arrives through antidemocratic means,
or even that it unleashes a propensity to violence
among its citizens (hence the Bill of Rights’s protec-
tions for minority freedoms). She recoils from this
insight in horror, whereas her idealistic grandfathers
and father cannot see it at all. Merry says President
Johnson is a war criminal, that he is “not going to
stop the war, Grandpa, because you tell him to.” In
the end, however, it was not World War II that the
Swede helped the people in their New Jersey com-
munity forget, and it is not Vietnam that Merry
brings home to them, but the War of Independence
that was the starting point for all of the violence
unleashed in the name of upholding an impos-
sible ideal. The Vietnam War, in this way, although
central to the plot of American Pastoral, is not the
crisis that disrupts the American Eden. It is not,
contrary to appearances, the fall that Levov should
be worried about. Rather, it points up in new ways
how America was “always” fallen—how it began on
a false premise—and provocatively suggests that
all of the violence and wars since have been a way
of returning to that founding moment: a return to
understand what it meant, precisely, and to uncover
the perpetual violence that lies beneath the surface.
Aimee PozorskirowLaNDSoN, mary The
Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration
of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682)
Originally titled The Sovereignty and Goodness of
God, Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restora-
tion of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, this work was first
published in 1682 and has appeared under several
titles. An autobiographical account, Mrs. Rowland-
son’s text falls into the category of early American
literature called captivity narratives, which relate the
captivity and release of someone (usually a woman)
at the hands of American Indians.