AP Worthy?

This blog entry is dedicated answering the question of "Is American Pastoral an AP level book?"

So, is it worthy? I think so. Here are a few reasons why.

1. Multiple, complex themes

Throughout the course of the novel so far, I have noticed many themes. Some I have already discussed include time, community, aging and nostalgia. One huge theme that should have been more apparent (as it is alluded to in the title of the book) is traditionalism / the pursuit of the American dream VS. anarchy / rejection of the American Dream. Swede's family was once immigrants, and he takes great pride in the fact that he is running a business built from scratch by his relatives and making enough money to give his children all the opportunities the world has to offer. What good does this do, however, when his daughter rejects the hand that feeds her?

 In the eyes of his ancestors, he has done everything right; he works hard, married well and is highly valued in society. He has finally overcome his "outsider" status as a Jewish man and become completely integrated in American society. Yet Merry sees this not as a hard-earned accomplishment but as a submission to "the man."

The generational gap between Merry and Swede is most obvious in their views of America. Swede views being a typical American as a goal, something to strive for. Clearly, he still carries a bit of the mindset of an immigrant, struggling to assimilate in a society that promises equal opportunity yet so rarely delivers on it. 

Merry believes that America is an unjust and amoral corporate nightmare sucking the lifeblood out of its citizens and turning them into slaves to the dollar. Clearly, her privileged upbringing allows her to see America as a get-rich-quick, war-mongering hellhole in all its cynical glory while never having to resort to the hope of the immigrant. 

This fundamental clash in ideals is why, as much as Swede loves his daughter, they will never truly understand and accept each other. 

2. Unusual structure

It's not exactly uncommon to see books broken into sections. Usually, however, there is a fairly apparent reason as to why the author chose to break up the book in that way. I cannot fully analyze the structure because I am only finished with two out of three sections of the book. It was difficult, however, for me to comprehend the transition between the first and second section because both were talking about the same scenario in third-person perspective. This leads into my third point,

3. Ambiguous narration

To sum up an idea I previously had in an entry: Is this still Zuckerman's (a first person narrator for the first section of the book) retelling of Swede's past? Or is this a different, third person narrator? I would assume the switch in sections and prompt dismissal of Zuckerman's character would mean that this is another narrator speaking. It is difficult to say, however, because Zuckerman's imagining of Swede's relationship with his daughter captured some very private moments that I assumed to be speculation but are further developed in the third person narrative. 

Either Zuckerman, who was barely friends with Swede when they went to school together, is omniscient or he is super good at guessing. Or he's just telling a story (Because he is a writer) and none of this is what actually happened.

I like reading the book alone, but I think having further analysis and more people to bounce ideas off of would be very helpful in understanding deeper meaning in this book. The complexity of this novel makes it more than appropriate for an AP class. 

Gloves, Capitalism and Other Things That Remind Me Of My Fugitive Daughter

This reading section took me through a large part of American Pastoral's second part, entitled The Fall. 

The beginning of this section doesn't strike the reader as anything particularly different from the end of the last section called Paradise Remembered, which was basically Zuckerman taking facts that Swede's brother Jerry told him and spinning them into a crazily detailed tale of how beloved Merry Levov became the infamous Rimrock Bomber, and her father's subsequent questioning of his behavior around her. 

It soon becomes noticeable, however, that Nathan Zuckerman is no longer present in the story. We are living out events as they truly happened; we are able to understand the truth as Swede sees it and nobody else. The mysteries of our silent hero seem SO CLOSE to being revealed.

But what if Zuckerman is still narrating? Perhaps the switch between the two sections was supposed to be a more clear-cut transition, letting the reader know that the story has completely switched out of the frame of Zuckerman's reality. But perhaps not. The events in Zuckerman's narration from before match up with some intimate details of the relationship between father and daughter that would certainly not have been known to him, like the time she strangely kissed him on the lips as they were coming back from a day at the beach, or the time they watched the self-immolation of the monks on the evening news, or even her love for his glove factory. Is he that good of a storyteller? Is he a mind reader or something? Probably not. 

Well, whoever is telling this story, whether it's fact or fiction, characterizes Swede slowly but excellently. The chapter opens on Swede giving a guided tour of his glove factory to a woman named Rita Cohen who is writing her graduates thesis at Wharton on the Newark leather industry. He describes the process in detail, talking for pages and pages about the EXQUISITE craftsmanship that goes into each and every glove; how his workers were trained from the ground up to become artisans, masters of the trade. 

Rita is impressed with his love for glove-making, calling him truly passionate. Swede basically feels as if he has been shot through the heart. He is still listing off different tips and tricks to Rita as they wander back to his office, but the list in his mind is replaced with rapid fire thoughts about Merry, and whether or not she is safe, and his wife Dawn's mourning and the hell he cannot escape. 

It is only when they return to his room that Rita admits she isn't actually a Wharton student and that she knows where Merry is. This sets him off on a wild-goose chase, as newly hostile Rita requests larger and larger favors of Swede. He complies, of course, desperate to see his daughter once more. It all ends up with the two of them in a hotel room as Swede holds a briefcase filled with money and Rita begs to have sex with him. He ends up running away, and by the time he calls the FBI with new information on his daughter's whereabouts, Rita has left with the cash. 

These chapters characterize Swede as a man who is desperate for closure. Years pass randomly in the book, and time seems to lose all meaning in the grips of such a catastrophe. The general store is rebuilt, under new ownership, and Old Rimrock slowly begins to forget about the accident, yet to Swede the tragedy is still fresh. He wants his daughter's affection so badly that he keeps his factory in Newark so that she will not see him as another capitalist exploiter. He stays up late at nights talking to an apparition of Angela Davis, speaking of himself as if he were a changed man, a man worthy of the love of his radical daughter, and pretending to accept her praise of Merry's philosophy. He tries so hard to push his quiet capitalistic dream to the side for the impossible: a chance to see her again. It kills him to do it, to separate himself into a man who loves his work and a man who loves his daughter. But he sees his big brick house on a hill, where Merry was once one, and three, and five, and in his mind she is still one and three and five and playing on the swings and he and Dawn are watching her happily. Any possible return to this American Pastoral is worth the suffering that makes up his everyday life.

A Merry Little Bomb

I just finished the first of three parts of the novel. This section was entitled "Paradise Remembered." The last journal entry I did was focused on the heroic figure of Swede, a beacon of hope for all the other Jewish kids growing up in Newark, who is both wholly Jewish and All-American. His character is explored further in this section, as well as the character of the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman.

Zuckerman meets Swede for lunch in a small Italian joint in New York City. He picked up on a note of sensitivity in the letter Swede wrote to him, and is eager to unravel his opaque persona. Swede, however, reminisces on the old Newark before it became the crime-ridden ghost town it currently is, his father, the glove-making business he inherited from his father, and his three accomplished young sons, who clearly take after their father. Feeling bored, Zuckerman tries to provoke Swede into diving a little deeper, only to be met with casual responses and gentle sidetracks back to his favorite topic: his family. 

Zuckerman would have considered the lunch a complete waste of time had it not been for Swede's announcement that he just undergone a surgery for prostate cancer. This strikes a chord with Zuckerman, for he had been keeping the secret of his debilitating battle with the same cancer from everyone he knows. While he chooses not to share this fact with Swede, he wonders how this blemish on an otherwise perfect life affected him. Did this confrontation with impending mortality change Swede in some strange, underlying manner? It doesn't matter if it did or not to Zuckerman. He expected to be writing a tribute to the deceased Mr. Levov, while also gaining insight into Swede. The lunch, however, was boring, leaving him nothing to work off of and shattering his image of the all-American hometown hero. Swede seemed to him to be a shallow vessel that looked good, worked hard and treated people well, but with nothing existing beneath the surface pleasantries.

Over the next few chapters, Zuckerman's opinion of Swede begins to change. The next scene focuses on Zuckerman's class reunion in 1995. Through the chapter, ideas of community, nostalgia, aging and time intertwine with each other. A class reunion setting seems to invite nostalgia. Zuckerman spends pages and pages detailing his experiences with childhood friends, remembering every idiosyncracy. The community built at their high school is still intact, as other students call their class 'the smartest group of people [they] ever worked with.' The event is not one for outsiders, as a second wife of Zuckerman's friend is bothered by all of the in-jokes that seem to be shared with the entire graduating class. He explains that, well, he can't explain it, that's just the way that it is and the way that it always had been.

Zuckerman is aware of the communal bonds tying him to his old friends, but with the added years of life experience comes a strange disconnect from those he once knew so well. He develops this by referring to those he knew in their class by both their name and the ages of their children and grandchildren, of which he has none. The differences in their lives give their conversations a new honesty, as when he is talking to an old crush named Joy. She admits that the reason that she did not date him was because she was embarrassed of her family situation, and ends up crying over lost time. The element of time present in both the inevitable aging of himself and his peers and the nostalgia-drenched stories of their time together trap Zuckerman's narrative in some sort of world where time has no effect, somehow grounding him firmly in the future yet switching effortlessly back into the past. 

To summarize, the class reunion was filled with a bunch of people trying to affirm and deny their past selves in various ways, giving the night a weird atmosphere because of the fact that nobody could really tell if it felt like time passed or not. Also, if you didn't grow up in Newark during the forties then you probably should find another way to spend your night because the folks at the reunion don't understand how to explain their pasts to outsiders. 

The story takes a sharp turn when, out of the blue, Swede's younger brother Jerry shows up for the reunion and tells Zuckerman that Swede has just died from prostate cancer. He also reveals a crack in the surface of Swede's pristine life that Zuckerman could not uncover: the existence of a daughter Merry who is a total black sheep in the family. Going against the life of ease that her pristine upbringing brought her, she became a radical antiwar activist and bombed a post office during the height of the Vietnam War, killing a doctor who was dropping off his mail. She subsequently went into hiding, protected by Swede in an act that mystified his family. How could he love such an evil brat? 

Zuckerman now understands the ramifications of the letter Swede sent him. Swede was the American dream: a hard working boy who looked good and acted humbly. Yet, this was almost a burden, as he felt obligated to uphold the title of "Hometown Hero." He had done it all, and yet there was this one flaw in his otherwise perfect life: the unhappiness of his daughter Merry, who suffocated in the pristine environment she was raised in and rebelled against her parent's stoic traditionalism and ends up a murderer. Yet, he can't stop loving her because he sees her flaws not as a reflection of evil, but a personal failure. Where did he go wrong? Why wasn't he the perfect father? He hides this with a new wife and new children to be proud of, but as he receives a fatal diagnosis, the surface of denial he was living off of begins to disintegrate, leading him to question, for the first time ever, the naked cruelty of life.

Beginning of the book

American Pastoral is written from the point of view of Nathan Zuckerman, a Jewish boy who grew up during the World War II era in Newark, New Jersey. The novel, however, does not focus on Zuckerman's life so much as it centers around Seymour "Swede" Levov, another Jewish boy who became known as the best athlete their small high school had ever known. Zuckerman introduces himself about twenty pages into the novel, making it clear that he is a secondary character in the story against the almost godlike Swede.

Zuckerman idolizes Swede, not only because he is a phenomenal athlete but also because he is so different from the rest of his Jewish neighborhood. His success gives Zuckerman an inkling of hope that maybe one day, he will be able to undergo the transformation between a Jewish boy and the only vaguely Jewish, all-American Swede. His presence gives others hope that maybe one day, they would be able to assimilate almost seamlessly into the American mainstream just as he did.

As a boy who succeeded in sports, in the army and in his personal life as a husband and father, he is  remarkably detached from the admiration he receives. Though he was practically a neighborhood celebrity, he seems practically indifferent to the adoration heaped upon him. There is an honesty about him that conflicts with his status as a town hero. It seems to Zuckerman that he is constantly fighting to stay above the narcissism that threatens to consume him. But this just makes him worthy of even more respect. Swede, the boy wonder, is also an honest to god good person.

The story begins as, almost sixty years after the war, Swede contacts Zuckerman and asks him if he would like to write a story about his late father. Zuckerman agrees, hoping to learn more about what is hiding behind Swede's cool and collected persona. Even though his life has seemed like a Hollywood movie, the way he described his father's life seems to belie some sort of trauma. Zuckerman accepts the job, hoping to get more insight into what makes his childhood hero tick.