Mid-term American Pastoral

Perhaps this American Pastoral is returning at just the right moment: in an America where, after two years of despotic rule and sinister self-enrichment, of grim malice and grim cruelty as a style of government, the morality of the Midterms now triumphs – in a general cleansing to restore America’s lost virginity, before the world and before itself, with young priests and seminarians and perhaps imams and even pastors (a ‘pastoral’ affair, indeed), with the former Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, railing against ‘the rotten moral core’ created by Trump within his party; and the good (but is he really good?) young Texan senator Talarico preaching ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’.

Philip Roth would have relished these ‘religious’ midterms – he who already regarded Bush Junior (now hailed as a statesman and a likeable watercolour-painting grandad) as ‘the devil’, and had only just caught a glimpse of Trump the First; who knows what he would have said of Trump the Second. In short, the new translation and reissue of American Pastoral is here, and one certainly wonders to whom such a monumental novel – perhaps the most famous, not least because of its instantly ‘iconoclastic’ title – might speak today. It is a novel by the New Jersey-based writer, the story of Levov, nicknamed ‘the Swede’ due to his incongruous physical features: a Jew too handsome to be true, a sporting champion and heir to a glove factory who wanted to become more American than the Americans themselves, who marries a beauty queen, who does everything necessary to fit into the system, and the system does not thank him but responds with collapse and misfortune. Specifically, with a terrorist daughter, Merry, who ruins everything with a bomb at the post office during the turbulent 1960s (which, in America – where everything happens sooner – foreshadowed our own Years of Lead).

The book, first published in 1997 and now available in Matteo Codignola’s fresh new translation, forms part of the comprehensive revamp of Roth by Adelphi – the third instalment in a high-end rebranding campaign that is going from strength to strength whilst fashion designers are floundering and the luxury sector is sinking. The autumn/winter Roth collection will be presented simultaneously in 15 Feltrinelli bookshops across Italy on Tuesday; I, for my part, will be making a modest appearance with my copy of Roth at the one in Brescia, where I have my roots (quote) and which for years I jokingly referred to as the ‘Newark of Italy’ – though I have never actually been to Newark, Roth’s hometown and the setting for Pastoral, a post-industrial city from which one flees towards the great metropolis.

However, last Christmas I finally made the long-delayed pilgrimage to the real Newark. This long-delayed pilgrimage (made easier by a direct flight from Newark to Fiumicino) made it clear to me that the comparison could not have been more daft; certainly, there is the proximity to Milan, certainly the industry and post-industrial landscape, but otherwise it has nothing in common with my hard-working yet enjoyable city, with its historic centre, Roman forum, lovely restaurants and chic shops; Roth’s ‘little capital’, on the other hand, despite being just forty minutes from Manhattan, is today perhaps even more distressing and depressing than it was back then, with its wooden shacks and blackened brick buildings, nothing but mobile phone shops, a fentanyl-fuelled malaise, the towering Prudential insurance blocks and the headquarters of the audiobook company Audible (part of the Amazon group).

As ugly people are sometimes resentful too, the people of Newark have not been particularly generous towards their most illustrious fellow citizen: the city library is not named after him; he is merely honoured by a crossroads – crossed by a main road – leading towards his ancestral home in a desolate suburb of identical little houses, before reaching ‘Philip Roth Plaza’.

But of course I went straight to Weequahic High, the secondary school in Newark where both Roth and his fictional hero, ‘the Swede’, had studied; a massive concrete block with tall spires where, in those days, open days were being held beneath the snow for many prospective students who almost certainly knew nothing of the school’s illustrious alumni, both real and imaginary (the ‘Who’s Who’ listed famous dentists, rather). One could catch a glimpse of the snow-covered sports field where The Swede had triumphed. The imaginary one and/or the real one, because Roth seems to have created a purely fictional character, whilst at a certain point a real Swede also turned up: a certain Seymour Masin, the son of Russian Jews with an Aryan appearance, who was born on 7 June 1920, also in Newark, formerly a sports champion and later a spirits salesman. As always with Roth, life and counter-life intersected (later, the son wrote a biography of the real—or fake—Swede, that is, the spirits salesman), whilst the only Swedes who were supposed to do something—those at the Nobel Prize in Stockholm—could not be persuaded, and, as is well known, Roth suffered as a result.

He did, however, win every other prize there was to win, including the Pulitzer Prize for Pastorale (in 1998, beating Don DeLillo’s Underworld in the final). The award—an eerie smoked-glass prism—is now on display in the room dedicated to the writer at the Newark library, among catatonic homeless people lying about recharging their mobile phones at the power sockets, while in another room a painting depicts Charles F. Cummings, a local historian and ‘Assistant Director of Special Collections at the Library’, who was above all ‘our man in Newark’ for Roth, always ready to drive the writer around for his obsessive research for his books, and in particular for Pastoral. So, first of all, the glove factory run by the Levovs, the protagonist’s family, with his father working himself to the bone in that trade, courting the department store bosses in scenes very much in the style of Mad Men, and finally, at a dinner party, plucking up the courage to confront the department store magnate and succeeding ‘with an initial order of six thousand pairs’ (the magnate gives in mainly because of the sporting successes of his son, Svedese).

This is prosperity. This is America. Dozens of pages are devoted to gloves and their manufacture as the family’s lifeline business, with descriptions of the leathers and the reconstruction of a world in which ‘it was normal for a lady to own 20–25 pairs’; once again, it feels as though we’re in Mad Men, with the Jewish mall heiress Rachel Menken, the ill-fated love interest of that very Rothian character, Don Draper. One may wonder how today’s audiences—already not keen readers—will engage with a ten-page section on the concepts and craftsmanship behind kid leather. Yet the meticulous description of trades and industries remains a supreme delight of novels, akin to the hundred lysergic pages on papermaking in Balzac’s Lost Illusions.

With Cummings, they had found the ideal building for the Levovs’ factory, whilst in Gloversville – literally ‘the glove town’ in the state of New York (now a defunct district, with production relocated to Asia) – during their research, an elderly surviving craftsman had created a pair of very special gloves for Roth, which he kept forever as a cherished memento. The glove business had enabled the Swede to leave, to break free, to carve out his place outside the Jewish ghetto and at the heart – in his view – of America, on a picture-postcard estate – “spanning forty hectares along the side road that winds westwards, in the depopulated hills beyond Morristown, that is, in the very rural but equally affluent Old Rimrock, at a more than respectable distance from the tannery where his grandfather had taken his first steps in America, separating the real leather from the fleshy, rubbery layer which, through prolonged soaking in lime, had become a monstrosity twice as thick as before,” writes Roth. There, too, there were gruelling searches with the librarian to find the fictional Rimrock for the Swede and his Dawn, formerly Miss New Jersey, and his dream of greatness, ready to be shattered.

It was precisely for the character of Dawn – who is a bit like Betty Draper (she too was ‘Miss Something’) – that Roth had befriended the actor Ron Silver (narrator of several of his audiobooks, including Portnoy’s Lament and, later, Pastoral), who had given him the telephone number of his girlfriend, Tawny Godin Little, Miss America 1976. Little, in turn, put him in touch with the more appropriate Miss America 1951 – accuracy first and foremost – a certain Yolande Betbeze Fox, who agreed to visit him at his New York flat, bringing with her her scrapbook from the time of the pageant, as Blake Bailey recounts in his seminal biography. Roth was enchanted: “Fox, an opera singer, was witty, sharp-witted and still stunning in her sixties; the first Miss America to refuse to pose in a swimsuit, she had subsequently devoted herself to progressive causes and studied philosophy. ‘In 1950,’ she told him with a smile when he kissed her on the cheek to say goodbye, ‘you wouldn’t have stood a chance with me’ (but here Trump could have been of use, having for a time owned Miss Universe, the rival pageant created precisely because Betbeze had refused to pose for the swimwear sponsor).

The original cover of Pastorale (including the Italian Einaudi edition) featured an old, scorched photograph. Cummings had found it too; it depicted a group of happy-looking young people sipping Coca-Cola in front of a shop; it was from 1938 – a different era and a different generation – but it nonetheless symbolised a period of calm before the storm. In 1996, Roth was visiting Mendham – again in New Jersey, again accompanied by the ever-present Cummings, who considered the area perfect for the idyllic ‘Old Rimrock’ – when Roth spotted that photograph, an image of American innocence, on the wall of the shop in the tiny village of Brookside, and asked the owner if he could borrow it. Subsequently, as was his custom, Roth collaborated with his preferred graphic designer, the legendary Milton Glaser, and after several brainstorming sessions the pair decided to burn the photograph, so to speak, alluding to the bomb attack that his daughter would carry out against the post office in Old Rimrock.

The locations are noteworthy: we are in the Somerset Hills (with Mendham marking its northern boundary), which were already dotted with industrialists’ country estates by the late nineteenth century, and are still home to pharmaceutical magnates today: the pastoral countryside where the Swede goes to live in order to become American is the very same area where Trump has his summer retreat in Bedminster, amongst racecourses and colonial-style houses.

In Newark, there are other traces of Trump: New Jersey is the home of the Kushners, the family of the President’s son-in-law, and it was in Newark that one of the most ‘Sopranos’-esque moments – another dynasty that brought prestige to New Jersey – of the Kushner-Trump saga took place. There, in the imposing federal courthouse with its tall Soviet-neoclassical colonnades, Charles Kushner – Trump’s future father-in-law – was sentenced in 2005 to two years’ imprisonment for tax evasion and witness intimidation. The case was brought by Chris Christie, then a federal prosecutor, who described it as one of the most repugnant crimes ever prosecuted. In particular, in a scene that would have appealed to both Tony Soprano and Philip Roth, Kushner had hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, then had their lovemaking filmed and sent the video to his sister during their son’s engagement party, as a warning not to testify. Kushner served his sentence in a facility also in Newark. Trump pardoned him in 2020 and subsequently appointed him ambassador to France. The Jewish property developer – formerly a convict and now an ambassador – was born in Elizabeth, the town where Dawn, Miss New Jersey in the novel, hails from.

Today, the cover of the new Adelphi edition no longer features the scorched photograph, but rather a long-haired girl seen in profile, in a shot by William Eggleston, and who knows how many new readers Roth will win over amongst millennials and Generation Z with this sumptuous saga straddling Jewish and American myth, at a time when books about cats, trauma, and easy-to-digest romance novels are all the rage, and American and Jewish myths aren’t exactly on the same wavelength. Will the first one still resonate? Will a Swede who wants to become American be credible? Or would many today prefer the opposite? As for the second question, Pastoral, like all of Roth’s work, could in fact function as a manual on anti-Semitism or at least ‘self-loathing’ – internalised anti-Semitism (without falling foul of the new draft laws) – here with the story of the Jew who has strayed too far from his people, from the ghetto, from the gloves, in an attempt to become good – too good – and is therefore duly punished, to the refrain of ‘what’s wrong with doing everything right’ (and escaping shame, which is perhaps the supreme Rothian sentiment).

In today’s context, the firebrand daughter Meredith/Merry Levov would likely be an anti-Zionist pro-Palestinian activist, protesting against the high cost of living and smashing shop windows (although she would have to take the train all the way to Manhattan, as there is not much shopping in Newark—perhaps not even a Decathlon; after all, it is not exactly Brescia). Alternatively, since she is Jewish (albeit not strictly, given her ‘gentile’ mother), she might not be accepted among the most vocal pro-Palestine protesters, and the narrative would conclude there; she would then attend Mipel in Milan with a small pop-up collection of inclusive, sustainable, and iconic gloves, continuing the dynasty, taking advantage of Renzi’s flat tax, and the Swede would have been spared the entire drama.

The model for the lost girl Merry Levov was Kathy Boudin, the daughter of a left-wing lawyer whose clients had included Fidel Castro, who survived the 1970 explosion at the Greenwich Village flat where her group was making bombs. It was important to Roth that she was a girl and not a boy, because boys were conscripted, whilst girls ‘could harbour pure rage’. “I managed to take the period of American history that had the greatest impact on me,” he explained to a creative writing class at Columbia, “and to construct a narrative that encompassed everything I knew about it.” For Roth, those years, between the 1960s and 1970s, were “unique; they had it all: the terror of war, the fear of the sexual revolution, and resistance to authority”.

Other distinctive features of Pastorale: it is Roth’s least scandalous book, the one with the least sex, the least mad. The least self-absorbed, the one in which there is the least of Roth (and therefore considered too mainstream by die-hard Rothians, such as the owners of Trippa who have removed the famous vitel tonné from the menu), even though the narrator is one of his favourite alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman. ‘An ode to decorum and bourgeois conventions’ was written in the cover letter to booksellers. Roth, who oversaw every stage of the publishing process, flew into a rage and had it changed, threatening to return the advance and halt sales. It was altered to the more profitable ‘the masterpiece of an American master’.

In Newark, the librarian Cummings had also shown the writer round on his ‘Philip Roth Day’, a ‘mayor for a day’-style celebration in 2005, which included the unveiling of a plaque at his birthplace and the naming of a crossroads in his honour, and had even accompanied him to Aix-en-Provence in 1999, when the French city had dedicated its festival to Roth and a small photographic exhibition on his hometown had been organised. There is also a bust of him somewhere in Newark, although I have not managed to locate it. Of the librarian, of course, not of Roth.