AMERICAN PASTORAL : BY Philip Roth

ho would have thought Nathan Zuckerman would fall in love with normality, with the all-American life? With the old idea of the melting pot as order and progress, a pacified history in which resentment and misunderstanding fade away across the generations? With Thanksgiving as a form of ethnic truce, where the Jews and the Irish hang out together as if no one had ever crucified anyone? This is, after all, the garrulous, manic hero of five Philip Roth novels, and the subtle fictional critic of Mr. Roth's autobiography, ''The Facts.'' His alter id, as you might say, the man whose business is to get out of control and give offense. ''I am your permission,'' Zuckerman tells Mr. Roth in that book, reproving him for lapsing into the tame decencies of the uninvented life, ''your indiscretion, the key to disclosure.'' ''The distortion called fidelity is not your metier,'' Zuckerman insists. And Mr. Roth himself says he is pleased to have escaped the constrictions of the Jamesian tact and elegance he once admired, liberating his talent for what he calls ''extremist fiction.''

Yet here is Zuckerman attending a class reunion of veterans from Weequahic High in Newark, checking out the prostates and remarriages and high-powered jobs and the dead fathers; having dinner in New York with a former star athlete from the same school, a nice guy called Seymour Levov, alias the Swede, and wondering at the fellow's sheer likable ordinariness. ''Swede Levov's life, for all I knew, had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore just great, right in the American grain.'' The little clause (''for all I knew'') gives the game away. Of course Zuckerman is wrong about this -- there wouldn't be a novel here if he weren't, let alone a Philip Roth novel. ''I was wrong,'' Zuckerman says handsomely. ''Never more mistaken about anyone in my life.'' But what's interesting about the book is that Zuckerman could have thought, even for an instant, that he was right; and that we can't, in the end, know how right or wrong he is, since he is making everything up, dreaming ''a realistic chronicle,'' as he says, quoting the old Johnny Mercer song (''Dream when the day is through''), and taking off into history as he imagines it. It's true that the imagining is grounded in the most meticulous reconstructions of old times and places -- the Levov family glove factory, the spreading acres of west New Jersey, a Miss America competition in Atlantic City, the beat-up neighborhoods of what used to be the city of Newark -- and it gets easier and easier to forget that Zuckerman's industry and imagination are providing all this. He gives us plenty of clues, though, before he vanishes for good on page 89, off into fiction, in the middle of a dance with an old schoolmate named Joy Helpern. ''You get them wrong before you meet them,'' Zuckerman says of ''people'' in general, ''while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again.'' How could the writer of fiction be exempt from this contagion? Zuckerman/Roth would reply that there is no exemption; only the need, whether you're a novelist or not, to keep imagining other people, and the hope that guesses may give life to the dead and the fallen and the lost.

Zuckerman attributes his attachment to the romance of ordinariness to a cancer scare of his own, but he offers a subtler diagnosis in ''The Facts.'' ''The whole point about your fiction (and in America, not only yours),'' he tells Mr. Roth, ''is that the imagination is always in transit between the good boy and the bad boy -- that's the tension that leads to revelation.'' Swede Levov is the good boy for whom life is just great -- except that he's not. He is the good boy whose life turns to disaster -- as if that's what good boys were for, and only the bad boys go free. Or he is the good boy whom Zuckerman can imagine and mourn for only in this way.

Swede is alive when the story opens, dead soon after. Zuckerman picks up a few details of his life at the reunion, notably from Swede's ferocious brother, a bullying cardiac surgeon in Miami. The rest is his dreamed chronicle. In and out of Zuckerman's mind the story hinges on Swede's 16-year-old daughter, Merry, an only, pampered child, who has fallen in with a section of the Weathermen and blown up a rural post office, killing a doctor who happened to be mailing his bills. The time is 1968. Merry goes into hiding, is raped and becomes destitute, gets involved in further bombings in Oregon, winds up back in Newark, stick-thin, filthy, a veil over her face, having become a Jain, dedicated to such extremes of nonviolence that she can scarcely bring herself to eat because of the murder of plant life involved. The novel stages an encounter between Swede and his derelict-looking daughter, and the scene manages to be both shocking and discreet.

But the novel revolves not so much around this scene as around what Merry has done, the deaths she has caused, and the absurd, irresistible question of how this respectable Jewish athlete and his Irish, former-Miss-New-Jersey wife could have given birth to this once angry, now dislocated, apparently reasoning, weirdly unthinking girl. The question can't be answered, of course, but causalities keep shaping themselves in the mind. Is it because the parents are so respectable, so decent and so liberal, as much against the war in Vietnam as their daughter, that the girl has to turn out this way? Is there an American allegory here, immigrant generations rising to prosperity only to fall into violence and despair? Or have the parents done everything they can and should have, and is it Merry the changeling who reminds us that the inexplicable exists? ''And what is wrong with their life?'' the novel ends. ''What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?''

This is an answer to Zuckerman's own merciless portrait of the (female) intellectual who laughs with delight at the sight of historical disorder, ''enjoying enormously the assailability, the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things.'' But the answer itself still seeks to moralize the wreck of a world, as if Zuckerman had never heard of Job, as if the Levovs' virtue ought really, after all, to have been a protection for them, rather than an invitation to damage.

''American Pastoral'' is a little slow -- as befits its crumbling subject, but unmistakably slow all the same -- and I must say I miss Zuckerman's manic energies. But the mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable, and you have only to pause over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated, to see that Mr. Roth didn't entirely abandon Henry James after all. A sentence beginning ''Only after strudel and coffee,'' for instance, lasts almost a full page and evokes a whole shaky generation, without once losing its rhythm or its comic and melancholy logic, until it arrives, with a flick of the conjuror's hand, at a revelation none of us can have been waiting for.

Because both novels are hefty and self-consciously American, trying to rethink national history, because both deal in painstaking and slightly mind-numbing realism, because both begin in New Jersey and end in hell, ''American Pastoral'' invites comparison with John Updike's ''In the Beauty of the Lilies.'' The chief difference is that Mr. Updike's novel ends in a secular apocalypse, the last act in the story of the death of a Christian God, while Mr. Roth's ends in the imagination of ruin, the death of a Jew's dream of ordinariness. The difference is not extreme, although both stories are.

Michael Wood is the author of ''The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction.'' He teaches at Princeton University

History of the Fourth

"WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS..."

Thomas Jefferson's Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence (Library of Congress)

"Taxation without representation!" That was the battle cry of the 13 colonies in America that were forced to pay taxes to England's King George III with no representation in Parliament. As dissatisfaction grew, British troops were sent in to quell any signs of rebellion, and repeated attempts by the colonists to resolve the crisis without war proved fruitless.

On June 11, 1776, the colonies' Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia formed a committee with the express purpose of drafting a document that would formally sever their ties with Great Britain. The committee included Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston. The document was crafted by Jefferson, who was considered the strongest and most eloquent writer. (Nevertheless, a total of 86 changes were made to his draft.) The final version was officially adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4.

The following day, copies of the Declaration of Independence were distributed and, on July 6, The Pennsylvania Evening Postbecame the first newspaper to print the extraordinary document.

The Declaration of Independence has since become our nation's most cherished symbol of liberty.

Bonfires and Illuminations

On July 8, 1776, the first public readings of the Declaration were held in Philadelphia's Independence Square to the ringing of bells and band music. One year later, on July 4, 1777, Philadelphia marked Independence Day by adjourning Congress and celebrating with bonfires, bells and fireworks.

The custom eventually spread to other towns, both large and small, where the day was marked with processions, oratory, picnics, contests, games, military displays and fireworks. Observations throughout the nation became even more common at the end of the War of 1812 with Great Britain.

On June 24, 1826, Thomas Jefferson sent a letter to Roger C. Weightman, declining an invitation to come to Washington, D.C., to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It was the last letter that Jefferson, who was gravely ill, ever wrote. In it, Jefferson says of the document:

"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be ... the signal of arousing men to burst the chains ... and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form, which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. ... For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them."

Congress established Independence Day as a holiday in 1870, and in 1938 Congress reaffirmed it as a holiday, but with full pay for federal employees. Today, communities across the nation mark this major midsummer holiday with parades, fireworks, picnics and the playing of the "Star Spangled Banner" and marches by John Philip Sousa.

This weekend we celebrate our nation's 234th birthday. But it's not a celebration for everybody, especially for many of the Indian tribes who lived on this land long before the Founding Fathers got here. So how is the Fourth of July handled on sovereign Indian lands? Weekend America's Krissy Clark visited some First Nations to find out:

Charles Hudson is a member of the Mandan-Hidatsa tribe, born on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. But by the time he came along, in 1959, much of the reservation was under 300 feet of Missouri River water, thanks to a giant dam built by the federal government, which relocated most of the people in his tribe.

Tribal leadership fought the project for years, but failed. When the tribe's chairman finally went to Washington, D.C., to give up the land, he had to take off his glasses to weep. A picture of the moment made the front page of the Washington Post. Flooding of the reservation started soon after. "Both my mother and my father had to leave the town that they grew up in, where their families and ancestors had all lived," Hudson says. 

This was not the first nor the last conflict Charles and his tribe had with American institutions. Sometimes it was little things, like when Charles was going to the local public high school.

"The length you could wear your hair was heavily regulated. Boys could not wear hair past their collar, and that was obviously a direct violation of their cultural norms," Hudson says. "But my goodness, that's nothing compared to the radical oppressions that my mother's generation and her father's generation were going through." 

"Kill the Indian to save the man" -- that oppressive motto led to restrictions on his tribe's native language and native customs. The federal government forced Indian children to go to churches and boarding schools where they were re-educated and stripped of their cultural traditions.

So it makes sense that, growing up, the Fourth of July would be a dark day for Hudson, a sad tribute to the country that tried and tried again to exterminate its native people and their culture. But it wasn't -- for Hudson, the Fourth meant "summertime, family, fireworks. You can't wait for the fireworks. As a kid you look forward to that celebration."

Hudson was not alone. Across the Fort Berthold Reservation-- what was left of it-- people partied on the Fourth of July. Sno Cones and barbecues, weaved together with older, indigenous traditions like powwows that would last deep into the night.

At the center of the festivities was the drum. "The beat of the drum means everything in the powwow," Hudson says. "It signifies the heart beat of a people. There are different types of dances, ceremonies, give-aways, acknowledgements."

So why were they celebrating?

"You know, this is the classic case of making something positive out of really desperate situations," says Matthew Dennis, a professor of U.S. history who studies the way Americans celebrate national holidays. He says we can learn a lot about ourselves as a country by looking at how the Fourth is celebrated on reservations like Fort Berthold.

"It is those who have struggled the most, and who've been forced to be the most creative, that have the most to teach us," Dennis says. "Forgiveness without forgetting, incredible creativity and resilience."

To understand what Dennis means, we need to go back to the late 19th and early 20th century, when reservations like Fort Berthold were under severe federal rule. At one point, the reservation's white superintendent issued a declaration that read like this: "Dancing, exchanging of presents, traveling from one dance to another, and dancing feasts are not to be carried to excess."

The superintendent decreed that permission for all traditional dances must be obtained in writing -- but, Dennis says, there was a kicker: He didn't object to gatherings that were on the Fourth of July.

The Fourth of July, after all, was the time to teach Indians how to become good Americans. Some Indian children were even reassigned new birthdays to coincide with the Fourth.

So the Mandan and Hidatsa people who lived at Fort Berthold decided that if the Fourth of July was one of the few occasions when they could celebrate their native customs, then why not celebrate the Fourth of July? By the early 1900s, the Fourth had become a big day on the reservation, Dennis says, starting at dawn and lasting well in to the evening with traditional dances and ceremonies.

"All kinds of singing and dancing, exchanging of gifts," he says. "They would visit friends, initiate people into societies and do all the sorts of things that they were ordinarily prevented from doing, under the cover of this patriotic celebration."

These turn-of-the-century festivities sound very familiar to Charles Hudson, the Mandan-Hidatsa Indian who grew up on Fort Berthold in the 1960s.

"That's very cool," he says, when he hears Dennis's description of these old Independence Day celebrations. "If a visitor was to go visit Fort Berthold today, a visitor would see something very similar to that."

And not just on the Fort Berthold Reservation. For more than a century, the Fourth of July has been a big day across Indian country. The Quapaw in Oklahoma, the Ojibwe in Minnesota and the Northern Cheyenne in Montana are just a few of the tribes that have established big rodeos and powwows on the Fourth -- celebrating the day, but making it their own.

Of course, not all tribes or all Indian people have embraced the holiday in the same way. The Onondaga of upstate New York decided a few years ago to stop observing the Fourth of July altogether. Right after America declared independence in 1776, George Washington ordered Onondaga villages to be destroyed -- they were in the way of the new country.

The film "Smoke Signals" by writer Sherman Alexie of the Spokane and Coeur D'Alene tribes captured the bitterness the day can bring in a scene between a father and son who are driving home on the Core D'Alene reservation one Fourth of July: "Happy Independence Day, Victor," the father says to his son with more than a hint of sarcasm. "Are you feeling independent?"

That line made Michelle Singer, a member of the Navajo tribe, laugh out loud when she saw it in the theater, but she has mixed feelings about Independence Day. One the one hand, when she is at Independence Day barbecues with her little brother, "he and I would certainly joke about the irony of this being Independence Day, and yet when you think about it's the beginning of the dominance of Euro culture, if you will."

On the other hand, her grandfather was a Navajo "code talker" during World War II, and she relishes the chance that the Fourth provides -- to honor him and his fellow veterans. Native Americans enlist in the military at far higher rates than any other group of Americans.

So it all felt a little surreal for Singer when she found herself, a few years ago, watching the fireworks gala at the nation's capital, from the top of the federal building that houses the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- the same agency that once handed down "kill the Indian to save the man" policies to her ancestors.

Singer was there because she had a job on the staff of a U.S. senator. But even after being in Washington for a few years, she says she was surprised by how moved she was by all the pomp and circumstance that night.

"I could hear the Washington Philharmonic play, and see this wonderful fireworks extravaganza going on in our nation's capital just above my head, with that beautiful panoramic view that you see down the Mall," she remembers. "It was very moving."

But was there any part of her that felt guilty? Like she was betraying herself or her culture by enjoying this Fourth of July spectacle?

"Yeah, there's a little of that self-imposed guilt," she laughs. "Like, 'I shouldn't really be enjoying this all too much. If anything, I should have some resentment.'"

But more than guilt, Singer says she felt humbled. Native Americans didn't even become citizens until 1924. And now, here she was.

"We came from homes where our parents didn't have a college education, and here we were in our nation's capital, working in some pretty influential positions, and yet we were just these Indian kids," she says.

The birth of this country came with caveats. But in the glow of those fireworks, it seemed to Singer that, somehow, both her countries -- her sovereign tribe and the place that issued her passport -- might one day figure things out.

How We Adopted the Fourth of July

Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesNewly minted American citizens at a ceremony recently in Chantilly, Va.

Perhaps because America is a nation of immigrants, immigration has always been a fraught political issue. How immigrants define themselves and how the laws determine who is welcome and who is not have played out in various ways throughout American history.

Yet immigrants are among the most eager to proclaim their love of country. We asked some writers and historians, how do different generations see the Fourth of July, and how do those views change over time?

 

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No Going Home

Joshua Halberstam teaches at Bronx Community College of City University. He is the author of “A Seat at the Table: A Novel of Forbidden Choices.”

On the Fourth of July, our house was conspicuous.  It was the only one on our Brooklyn block that featured a huge American flag we suspended from the upstairs window and let drape across the façade. The house was conspicuous the rest of the year too. This was the home of that ultra-Orthodox Hasidic family.

‘Never take this country for granted,’ my father repeated to me.

The unfurling of the flag became one more tradition in our life, already steeped in traditions.  But for my father who arrived from Poland, and my mother from Czechoslovakia, this was an annual celebration their forefathers could hardly imagine. Here, for the first time in Jewish history, was a country in which you could truly adopt new, national rituals without relinquishing your own.

My parents were immigrants unlike most other American immigrants. The elderly Italian couple across the street regularly traveled back to their old neighborhood in Palermo where their relatives still lived.  The Puerto Rican family around the corner engaged in a  constant exchange of visitors with their cousins in San Juan, and the old Irish fellow who worked in the grocery store waxed poetic about the beauty of his village in Limerick where he hoped to return after retiring.

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A New Welcome

Kica Matos was the executive director of the Junta for Progressive Action, a Latino community group in New Haven, and deputy mayor of the city, where she helped implement the Elm City ID card. She runs the U.S. Reconciliation & Human Rights Programmeat The Atlantic Philanthropies.

“A la tierra que fueres, haz lo que vieres.” (“Wherever you go, do as you see.”) This Mexican proverb best describes how immigrants in my home city of New Haven, celebrate the Fourth of July.

Now, as a result of the city’s embrace of newcomers, immigrants openly celebrate the Fourth.

I first heard the proverb from Maria L., a long-time friend and immigrant rights’ advocate, as she recalled her early days in New Haven, when she and other immigrant residents were too afraid to venture into public spaces for fear of being deported. Even on a holiday as popular and symbolic as Independence Day, immigrants without papers largely stayed home.

Today, she says, things are much different: as a result of the city’s embrace of newcomers and its implementation of immigrant friendly policies over the last few years, immigrants like her are able to celebrate the Fourth of July openly. In 2007, the city began to issue identification cards, which allow immigrants to open bank accounts and to use libraries and other public resources.

 

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A Foreign Holiday

Thomas Glave, a professor of English at Binghamton University, is the author of “The Torturer’s Wife” and “Whose Song? and Other Stories.”

 “The American holiday,” that was how some of my Jamaican family in the U.S. and in Jamaica referred to the Fourth of July. Many years later, as a black child of immigrants from a so-called Third World country and one born and raised in the U.S., I would confront some of the profound ironies at the center of American “independence” (independence for whom? would loom as a later question).

American ‘independence’ would take on deeper meaning for all of us.

But yes, July Fourth was their holiday, the Americans’, of whichever color. In our American life, we observed it, as some of them did, with a backyard barbecue (in the years after my parents were able to afford a house in the Bronx), hot dogs and hamburgers.

These were “American” treats which many Jamaicans in the 1970s, years before the appearance of fast-food chains in the Caribbean, did not yet consume in notable quantities. American goodies that spoke of the limitless bounty America was known to provide: “The Land of Opportunity!” my mother (but not my father) enthusiastically called it.

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American Enough

David A. Hollinger is a professor of American history at the University of California, Berkeley, and president of the Organization of American Historians. He is the author of several books, including “Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism.”

If the Fourth of July remained as ideologically important as it once was, the response of immigrants to this holiday might tell us something about the extent to which we are becoming a post-ethnic society. But for much of the American public, Independence Day has become just an occasion for another three-day weekend, offering little incentive to register degrees of solidarity with the civic nation that is the focus of the celebration.

The Fourth is a good opportunity to proclaim the right to choose our cultural affiliation as we please.

Being indifferent to the Fourth of July may even be an indicator of the process of assimilation. Immigrants are notoriously patriotic, living in a country they have chosen rather than inherited through the accident of birth. Recent immigrants taking Independence Day as casually as people with many generations of American ancestry may simply be a sign that they are becoming more like the rest of the population.

Immigrants might feel comfortable about their American identity without bothering to display it on July Fourth, just as they may feel comfortable with this or that ethnic identity without attending closely to the ancestral group’s festivals.

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A Complicated Appreciation

 

Hiroshi Motomura is the Susan Westerberg Prager Professor of Law at the U.C.L.A. School of Law. He is the author of a book,“Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States,” and is writing a companion volume, “Immigration Outside the Law.”

My family came to America when I was 3 years old. Some of my earliest memories of our first years in this country take me back to the fireworks at the Marina Green in San Francisco. For the several years that we lived in an apartment on Bush Street, my father would take me up the hill to Alta Plaza Park to see the show.

My father’s Independence Day was always tempered by his doubt that he would ever truly belong.

I don’t know exactly what my father thought about on those evenings, but I am pretty sure that he considered the Fourth to be a special day for complicated reasons that many immigrant families share and probably always will.

The Fourth of July was my father’s way of marking some sense of belonging to a new land, and of sharing that feeling with his child. So it was a day of appreciation and celebration. But I also know that his Fourth of July must have been a day of unease and hesitation. Being an immigrant in America and starting a new life here meant everything to him, and yet his Independence Day was always tempered by his doubt that he would ever truly belong. Like many immigrants throughout American history, he must have taken some comfort in hoping that his children would.

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Patriotism and Ambivalence

Rogelio Saenz is a professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. He is the author of “Latinas/os in the United States:Changing the Face of América.”

We are in the midst of major demographic transformations in this country. Latinos, now the nation’s largest minority group, make up about one of every six people in the United States. This reconfiguration has raised concerns about how Latinos are integrating into traditional American society. Since there’s great variation in this population, it’s not surprising that there are as many responses to the Fourth of July.

Some Latinos feel that they are not seen as real Americans.

Patriotic Latinos fire up the grill, cook fajitas and other delicacies, attend parades, and set off fireworks or attend firework displays.  Though they embrace an American identity, many also continue to celebrate and observe the independence day of their home countries, such as el 16 de septiembre, Mexican Independence Day.

Other Latinos are ambivalent about the celebration of the Fourth of July.  Some individuals fear losing the identity of their country of origin.  Others also feel alienation from the United States.