The American Berserk

I thoroughly enjoyed American Pastoral. You know, I used to think that I was such a literary elitist, but lately I've ended up with a good feeling about basically every book I've finished, so maybe I'm losing my taste factor. Either that or I'm a fucking badass at choosing good books to read.

Anyway. Back to Roth. It's always a bit difficult for me to read one of those "I-am-a-novel-about-America" novels, especially when "American" is even in the freaking TITLE, but I do think Roth did a nice job avoiding Great American Novelist Syndrome by focusing in tightly on a single character. Some people might say that it was a novel about the dissolution of an American family, but you don't really get insight into any of the characters' heads besides Swede Levov. You don't even really get that much insight into the peculiar American discomforts of the narrator (unlike, say, The Great Gatsby, where you can discover truths about both Nick and Gatsby through Nick's narration, Nathan Zuckerman politely makes way for Swede Levov after the first less-than-one-hundred pages of the novel, never to reappear and shatter the spell he's cast over the readers, leaving us dangling at the end of a fiction within a fiction, knowing nothing except that, as Roth so deliberately puts it, "what was not supposed to happen had happened and what was supposed to happen had not happened."

I also thought the ending reeked strongly of Flannery O'Connor, in that concept of senseless violence that brings to the character a possibly devastation revelation. I suppose the difference is that Flannery O'Connor's displays of senseless violence are always linked strongly to religious truth, whereas I'm still not sure what Roth's exact take on religious truth is (if I'd read more of Roth, I'd probably have a better idea), but whatever it is, it isn't life-affirming. The other very Flannery part of the novel is the naming - I mean, come on, Merry? Dawn? - which, I suppose, draws attention to the fact that it is a fiction of a fiction, a self-consciously created world that never presumes to be "real."

I wonder, though, if the idea that life is nonsensical, that there is no such thing as order, that the American Pastoral is, in fact, the American Berserk, isn't some kind of a desire for order in itself. It is almost too easy to simply say that we, as a human race, don't deserve or wield any control over our lives in any way. And in the end, doesn't one come to envy Merry just a little bit, in her supreme conviction, in her ability to claim for herself a unilateral mission? Yes, she is destroying herself, but so are the others, and where they are destroying themselves steeped in generations of self-doubt and despair, she is drowning herself in the pure, if blind, waters of belief that what she is doing is right. And, furthermore, that what she is doing can somehow save the world from itself.

Literature that can make me think like that must be good. Charles, you have some big shoes to fill.