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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in American Pastoral, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Heroes, Legends, and Myth-Making
Family, Responsibility, and Duty
The Irrationality of Suffering
The Unknowability of Others
American Ideals
Summary
Analysis
During the war years, when the narrator (Nathan Zuckerman) was in grade school, “the Swede” was a local legend in his Newark neighborhood. The Swede, whose full name is Seymour Irving Levov, was one of the few fair-skinned Jewish students at the predominantly Jewish local high school. He was a football, basketball, and baseball star. Although “physical aggression” wasn’t something the neighborhood usually celebrated, when the Swede took the field, everyone rallied to cheer him on. Importantly, the Swede allowed them to “forget the war.”
Narrator Nathan Zuckerman’s adoring description of his high school idol, Seymour “the Swede” Levov, introduces myth-making as one of the novel’s main concerns. After establishing this flawless, idealized vision of the Swede that Nathan has mythologized into being, the remainder of the novel will focus on getting to the bottom of who the Swede really is separate from the legends people have constructed around him.
Themes
Adults and kids alike adored the Swede. Adults addressed him respectfully as “The Swede.” And how, Nathan asks, did the Swede respond to this immense adoration? He assumed an outward stoicism and accepted the “responsibility” of being “a symbol of hope” without “a drop of wit or irony.”
Nathan’s observation that the Swede assumed an outward stoicism in response to his community’s adoration of him introduces another of the book’s focuses: the mysterious nature of other people, who remain largely unknowable to us because of the various walls and facades they put up to hide their true thoughts and feelings. Although the Swede assumed a serious and level-headed exterior, Nathan suspects there may have been more to the Swede than meets the eye.
Themes
Nathan was classmates with Jerry Levov, the Swede’s younger brother, and would often go over to the Levov family’s single-family home to play ping pong with Jerry, a forceful player who always beat Nathan. Nathan is never brave enough to enter the Swede’s bedroom, but he would often stand in the doorframe and gaze inside. He recalls noting on the bookshelves a series of books by John R. Tunis, notably The Kid from Tompkinsville, a book about an orphan of humble means who goes on to become a baseball star with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The book, observes Nathan, may well have been called The Lamb from Tompkinsville, or The Lamb from Tompkinsville Led to Slaughter.
The mention of the Tunis book adds another layer of myth-making to Nathan’s legend of the Swede. His description of the Swede as “The Lamb from Tompkinsville Led to Slaughter” creates an ominous tone and suggests that something tragic befell the Swede at some point in his life, despite the charmed life he had as a youth, at least according to his adoring fans. The inclusion of a book about baseball, the quintessential American pastime, symbolically links the Swede’s story with American culture and values.
Themes
The book’s climax happens at the bottom of the fourteenth inning with the Kid running straight into the center-field wall to make the game-saving catch to send the Dodgers to the World Series—a move that “leaves him ‘writhing in agony on the green turf of deep right center.’” The Kid is then removed from the field on a stretcher. Nathan was deeply moved by the scene as a 10-year-old. He describes the novel now as “the boys’ Book of Job” in its unflinching portrayal of the “cruelty” and “injustice” of life. At the time, he couldn’t tell whether the ending scene suggested the catch had killed the Kid, or whether its ambiguous ending suggested he might make a comeback. Or perhaps the book is merely “about a sweet star savagely and unjustly punished,” whose only sin was being so “innocent” and upstanding.
Nathan Zuckerman describes Tunis’s story as a modern-day Book of Job, a biblical story that examines the seemingly unjust suffering that a devout man named Job experiences despite his unwavering faith in God. In setting up this link between the Tunis story and the Swede’s life, then, the narration implies that the Swede, too, will experience a degree of suffering he seems not to deserve. Traditional interpretations of the Book of Job use the story to show how suffering often surpasses human understanding—that is, only God can explain why good and bad things happen in the world. Roth’s novel will approach this question from a secular perspective.
Themes
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Nathan recalls that Keer Avenue, where the Levovs’ house was, as “where the rich Jews lived,” or at least the Jewish families who were wealthier than other families in the neighborhood. The residents who lived there, the post-immigrant generation, formed a community and “took its inspiration more from the mainstream of American life than from the Polish shtetl their Yiddish-speaking parents had re-created […].” Nathan’s parents, born in New Jersey, were no more American than Lou and Sylvia Levov, and no more cultured or mannered. Mrs. Levov was a devoted mother and wife who was considerate of everyone’s feelings. Mr. Levov was a hardworking Jewish father who grew up poor and saw everything in life as “an unshakeable duty.” Fathers like this raised “striving” sons determined to succeed.
Much of the Swede’s popularity hinges on what his success represents to his community of immigrants and their descendants. To immigrants to America, their children, and their children’s children, the Swede is proof that the American Dream is attainable to anyone with enough ambition and work ethic. His fair complexion, however problematically, symbolizes his total assimilation into the American (White, Protestant) mainstream despite his working-class, Jewish background. Roth’s fiction regularly features the stereotype of the Jewish father who hails from a working-class background, clings tightly to tradition, and values duty and responsibility above all else.
Themes
Whereas Nathan’s father was a chiropodist, Lou Levov, the Swede’s father, got rich in the leather business, manufacturing ladies’ gloves. The Swede’s grandfather had come to Newark from “the old country” in the late 1800s and worked alongside the “roughest” of Newark’s immigrant community fleshing sheepskins at one of the big tanneries of the time. Lou Levov went to work there himself at age 14, in order to support the family of nine. He became skilled at dyeing buckskin and at sorting and grading skins. The dreary, stinking facilities of the tannery—“this was Lou Levov’s high school and college.” From there, he went on to found a small handbag business with two of his brothers.
Lou Levov’s humble beginning helps readers to appreciate just why the Swede came to be so adored throughout his community. He is living proof that in America, hard work and conviction really does pay off. Lou Levov worked long hours in the stinking, miserable tannery—“this was Lou Levov’s high school and college”—so that his children, grandchildren, and future generations could live better lives. The formal education and financial success the Swede achieves as an adult are the fruits of Lou’s labor and a testament to his devotion to his family.
Themes
Lou Levov struck out on his own and founded Newark Maid Leatherware a few years later. He’d buy defective leather goods and sell them out of a pushcart. Then he hired Italian immigrants to do piecework for him, making gloves out of skins he supplied them. The business wasn’t making great money until the onset of World War II, when the Women’s Army Corps placed an order for dress gloves.
Lou Levov’s rags-to-riches story is a testament to his own hard work and ambition. Hiding in the background of the story of Lou’s rise to the top are those whose hard work didn’t reap such dazzling rewards, though, like the Italian immigrants he hired to do piecework. Although Lou has undoubtedly worked hard for what he has in life, it’s important to see that his faith in the American Dream and his reverence for American ideals in general is fundamentally tied to his own good fortune—if he’d worked hard but failed anyway, his outlook might be a bit more cynical.
Themes
The Bamberger account was a later and even greater success, which came from a chance encounter between Lou and Louis Bamberger at a dinner for city commissioner Meyer Ellenstein. A higher-up at Bam’s came to congratulate Lou Levov on the Swede’s basketball playing. Lou, realizing the potential opportunity, pushed for an introduction to Bamberger, the founder of Newark’s biggest department store, and convinced Bamberger to stock Newark Maid’s gloves.
This passage further establishes Lou as an astute, ambitious businessman. At the same time, it subtly nods to the role luck played in Newark Maid’s success—ultimately, Lou sealed the deal with Bamberger because he was in the right place at the right time, not because of his business sense alone. This calls into question the conventional understanding of the American Dream, which holds that anyone who works hard can succeed.
Themes
By the war’s end, Newark Maid had established itself as one of the biggest names in ladies’ gloves in the region. After Newark Maid opened a factory in Puerto Rico in 1958, the Swede became president of the company, commuting to Central Avenue from his home in the wealthy, rural town of Old Rimrock—“a long way from the tannery floor where Grandfather Levov had begun in America […].”
Opening a factory in Puerto Rico, presumably because it’s cheaper to do business there, means depriving Americans of jobs—and, by extension, taking away the opportunity for less-fortunate Americans to live out their own American Dream and achieve upward mobility as generations of the Levovs have done. Although the Levovs will praise America and decry the so-called moral decay the country undergoes in the decades after World War II, the novel subtly points to how the Levovs themselves have contributed to the supposed decay, as it does here with its passing mention of the Puerto Rico factory.
Themes
The day after his high school graduation in 1945, the Swede joined the Marine Corps. He persevered through the infamous antisemitism of the Corps to eventually become a drill instructor on Parris Island in South Carolina. Just before he was set to be discharged, he became engaged to an Irish Catholic woman. Lou Levov reportedly made the trip out to the base and didn’t return until the engagement had been called off. Following his service with the Marines, the Swede returned home and enrolled at Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey. He went on to work at his father’s company. He then married the 1949 Miss New Jersey, Dawn Dwyer of Elizabeth, New Jersey.
The implication here is that Lou Levov forced the Swede to call off his engagement specifically because his fiancée was Catholic, whereas the Levovs are Jewish. Lou’s disapproval of interreligious marriage reflects the limits of his assimilation into American culture. Despite his respect for some American ideals, like its respect for self-improvement and hard work, he clings to more traditional values when it comes to religious identity. The Swede might have submitted to his father’s will the first time around, but he goes against Lou’s will to marry Dawn. Although the Swede’s honors his family’s legacy by taking over Newark Maid, there are limits to how far he will let his family dictate the trajectory of his life—just as there are limits to how fully Lou can control his family’s legacy.
Themes
In 1985, Nathan visits New York and goes to a Mets game with some friends. He sees the Swede there, with his young son, and a look of amazement washes across Nathan’s face. He approaches the Swede and tells him he played baseball with the Swede’s younger brother at Weequahic. The Swede laughs and calls Nathan by his old nickname, “Skip.” They chat amiably for a bit, and then Nathan returns to his friends. A woman he’s with remarks that from the look on Nathan’s face when he recognized the Swede, you’d think he’d have seen Zeus.
Even as a grown man, Nathan fawns over the Swede. This points to how significantly myths and legends can shape one’s sense of reality and one’s understanding of the people and ideas at the center of those laudatory accounts.
Themes
A couple weeks before Memorial Day, 1995, Nathan receives a letter from the Swede, recalling their encounter at Shea Stadium years ago. Then he gets to the point: his father (Lou) died last year at age 96. The Swede wants to write a tribute to him to share among family and friends, and he wants to talk about the man and his life with someone. Nathan agrees to the meeting—it’s the Swede, after all.
The Swede’s request for Nathan (in this book and others, the author character Nathan Zuckerman is a stand-in for real author Philip Roth) to pen a tribute to his late father speaks to his sense of duty to his family and their legacy.
Themes
Nathan considers the second reason he agrees to a meeting with the Swede: “the substratum.” He wants to know what lies beneath the Swede’s charming, successful exterior. In the letter, the Swede mentioned that his father had “suffered because of the shocks that befell his loved ones,” and Nathan wonders whether the Swede was in fact talking about his own shocks. But Nathan was wrong about that.
The notion of a person’s “substratum,” the self a person conceals beneath the persona they project to the outside world, is one Nathan will return to throughout the novel. It’s his fierce desire to really know the Swede—or at least to know what the myths have gotten wrong about him—that motivates Nathan to write the manuscript that accounts for most of American Pastoral’s subsequent chapters. The idea that the Swede’s father—or perhaps the Swede himself—has “suffered” as a result of “shocks” suggests that perhaps the Levovs’ life isn’t as perfect as it appears on the surface.
Themes
Nathan and the Swede meet at an old Italian restaurant, Vincent’s, in Manhattan’s West Side. Everyone there knows the Swede and asks after his family. The place has hardly changed in all the years it’s been in operation. The Swede brings photos of his three boys to share with Nathan and tells of their respective interests and achievements—his sons are hardworking students and accomplished athletes. One is “community-minded.” Their mother is a good-looking blonde in her 40s. She’s an advertising manager for a county newspaper now (though the Swede is quick to add that she didn’t take the job until the boys were in school, taking her maternal responsibilities seriously).
The Swede’s life, at least as he describes it to Nathan, paints the picture of a man committed to convention and good, old-fashioned American values of family (and patriarchy). The offhand yet pointed remark about his wife only returning to work after the children were in school is almost comical in its virtue signaling—it’s clear that the Swede wants people to see him as a person who adheres to conventional (and, it goes without saying, patriarchal) family values.
Themes
Then the Swede and Nathan get to talking about Newark Maid. The Swede explains that the company hasn’t operated in Newark in years, with it being cheaper to move work overseas. And besides, Newark has gone downhill since the ’67 riots. He goes on a rant about all the thieves—“Black kids”—and all the violence they inflict on the city. He recalls getting stopped by a group of laughing kids one day. One held a gun to his head.
The Swede openly admits to moving Newark Maid’s operations overseas because it was cheaper. He doesn’t grasp (or perhaps he simply doesn’t care about) the self-serving nature of this business move.
Themes
As Nathan and the Swede wait for their dessert, Nathan asks about the Swede’s recent operation for his prostate cancer. The Swede reports that everything went fine, though he’s still a bit underweight. Nathan thinks about the Swede’s letter and wonders whether the Swede has a new appreciation for life or a new anxiety about dying in light of his recent operation, and that that’s what prompted his request for a meeting. Or maybe the Swede’s reason for writing is exactly what he said it was—maybe he genuinely is happy, and there’s really nothing sad or sinister lurking beneath his surface.
It's perhaps a bit odd that the Swede claims his recent operation was successful despite appearing obviously underweight—is his health as stable as he suggests, or is he not being upfront about the reality of his condition? Nathan, for one, is suspicious (or at least curious) about what has motivated the Swede to want to meet with him. He’s not convinced that a desire to honor Lou Levov’s legacy is the full story.
Themes
Trying to guess what “shocks” the Swede might have been referring to his letter, Nathan suddenly asks, “Is Jerry gay?” Nathan recalls how in school, Jerry made a repulsive coat from 175 hamster pelts in a misguided and pathetic effort to woo a fairly unremarkable girl in their class. The question gets a laugh from the Swede, who assures Nathan this is not the case—Jerry has been married four times. The Swede himself has been married twice. Nathan wonders what prompted the divorce from Miss New Jersey. The revelation puzzles him—divorce doesn’t fit with his conception of the Swede.
Nathan, as a human and especially as an author, delights in the psychological complexity of people, and he’s well aware of how little we really know about the people we encounter throughout our lives. He is certain, then, that the Swede’s life can’t be as perfect as it appears at the surface. That’s why he asks if Jerry, the Swede’s younger brother is gay, implying that Jerry’s homosexuality is a shameful family secret.
Themes
Again, Nathan wonders to himself if his suspicions that the Swede is hiding some deep darkness within him might be delusional thinking. Could it be that there’s really nothing more to the Swede than the cheery, superficial exterior he has for years adored? But this turns out not to be so. He “was wrong. Never more mistaken about anyone in my life.”
Nathan’s unwillingness to accept that the Swede might have his own secrets and flaws reflects his unwillingness to part with the mythic Swede of his childhood. His admission that this idealized vision of the Swede turns out to be “wrong” points to the limits of myth-making—while myths can shape a person’s sense of reality, they can’t actually change reality itself. In fact the Swede has always had a “substratum,” a true, flawed life that exists beneath his perfect, mythic exterior—Nathan’s ignorance about that life doesn’t negate its existence.
Themes
