American Pastoral

by Philip Roth
1997

Blue-eyed, blond student athlete Swede Levov, son of a Jewish glove maker in Newark, has built his life around the virtues of hard work and assimilation.  Without expressly repudiating his father’s culture (he inherits and excels at the elder Levov’s trade), he marries a Catholic former Miss New Jersey who raises cows, moves to a grand home in the countryside, and lives in a manner that upsets the natural order of things as little as possible; he placates Catholic and Jewish fears alike; he gives off-putting people the benefit of the doubt; he relies on the quiet strength acquired by not using one’s physical strength.  He and his wife Dawn have a stuttering daughter, Merry, who is doted upon and who at adolescence becomes enraged at America’s involvement in Vietnam and falls into the grossest ignorant, maniacal anti-Capitalist vitriol at every turn.  She throws the Swede’s life into bitter, recriminating chaos when she bombs a post office in town and becomes a fugitive; he spends most of the book wondering how such a thing could have happened, poring over minor incidents in Merry’s childhood and how much he is to blame.  His wife takes refuge in a sanitarium; he is tortured, psychically, by a vicious young woman who may or may not be an ally of Merry’s; he wonders about the health of his marriage and what his father thinks.

Over 423 pages, this overly verbose novel alternates between flashes of genius – musings on how we can ever really know another human, or what the consequences may be of the actions we take, to which we ascribe no particular importance but which may redound heavily on others’ lives and psyches – and numbing, indulgent repetition – the Swede scours the shards of his life, over and over, asking the same unanswerable questions, to no effect.  The book begins with a first-person narrator who knew the Swede as a child, and who attends his forty-fifth high school reunion, meets up with some old crushes, and fades utterly from the narrative shortly afterwards; his existence, I suppose, was merely so Roth could tackle the subject of going home again, and to exorcise some thoughts on his Boomer cohorts.  Who knows.  There is some very high drama in a dinner party at the end of the book, in which emotions run high – the guilt, the resentments of spouses and neighbors, the accusations and confessions of adultery, jealously, class and culture resentment, panic, and secrets all roil in the Swede as he considers some new information about his daughter – and it would have made a very powerful novella, but this tome is just too much.  It’s exhausting, not galvanizing.

three stars

The Hunter

by Richard Stark
1962

Parker, a brutish, gorilla of a man and a small-time crook, reluctantly takes on a job with an ex-syndicate man named Mal, who betrays Parker by convincing his wife to shoot him and leave him for dead.  A year later, out of prison and penniless, Parker tracks his wife and Mal down, then goes after the syndicate itself to get his share of the money back.

I found this book thoroughly unpleasant, with no sympathetic characters and only laughably stupid straw men for Parker to prove his toughness against.  The book’s been praised to the skies by everyone from Elmore Leonard to the New York Times, but I just don’t understand the appeal, unless the reader just enjoys the adolescent fantasy that he’s the moronic Parker.  The prose is sparse and at times ridiculous: “women in passing cars looked at him and felt vibrations in their nylons.”  The juvenile slyness of this phrase aside, it assumes all intelligent, professional women are entranced by a wife-beating idiot in grubby clothes and shoes with holes in them.  And Parker is indeed an idiot.  I found the description of his making of a fake driver’s license (he just kind of draws one and crumples it up) to be unintentionally hilarious; he starts hitting a woman who gave him perfectly good information without stopping to think about why the information isn’t useful at that specific moment; his enemies are, to a man, brainless straw men who allow him (hulking, brutal, unsmiling Parker, remember) to approach them and ask them for change before taking a gun out of his lunchbox to get the drop on them!  Yes, this really happens.  Several times.  To tough syndicate gun men who are in fact prepared and waiting for him.  The entire second half of the book, Parker vs. syndicate, is utterly absurd, from the way Parker deals with the men to his ridiculous threats against them (“pay me or I’ll start telling my friends to start robbing your shipments!” – a non-problem, surely, that they’d have encountered many times before and dealt with).  Really, the whole thing is just ludicrous, and Parker is utterly unappealing.   Did I mention that he was planning to cross Mal before he himself got crossed?  Yeah.  Uh, go, Parker?

one star

[movie note: It's worth noting that the movie, Payback, starring Mel Gibson, is orders of magnitude better than the book. The film dispenses with the unintentionally hilarious, out of touch scenes; turns Porter/Parker into less of a stupid woman-beating thug and into a guy just as tough, but who can at least feel desire, sadness, and regret; makes Mal's betrayal of Parker a true outrage rather than what Parker was going to do to him first if he didn't; gives his wife a real motive for betraying him rather than, uh, just because she's dumb I guess?; and keeps Stark's good noir dialogue. Really, watching the movie just made me realize how stupid and unappealing the book is.]