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Chapter 2
Themes
and Colors
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
Nathan is shocked when Jerry approaches him from across the room. Jerry is shocked to see Nathan there, too. “I was sure you’d find the sentimentality repellent,” he jokes. When Nathan asks Jerry why he came, Jerry explains that he was in the area. They joke about their respective modesty (or lack thereof) and about how time has changed them. Jerry, a doctor, remarks that being a surgeon “turns you into someone who’s never wrong.” Nathan says being a writer has quite the opposite effect: it “turns you into somebody who’s always wrong.”
Jerry and Nathan are continuing their joking banter when they observe how one’s job makes him “someone who’s never wrong,” while the other’s makes him “somebody who’s always wrong,” but Nathan’s remark also circles back to an anxiety that has plagued him since the novel’s opening pages: the fundamental human trait of being wrong about everything and everyone in life. Nathan is suggesting here that all the careful scrutiny of others and of himself that his career as a writer has compelled him to do hasn’t made him any wiser—it has only made him see how much he gets wrong about people and about life.
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Jerry asks about Nathan’s life, and Nathan confirms that he lives alone in New England and hardly talks to anyone. Jerry asks if Nathan is having sex with anyone, and he’s disbelieving when Nathan responds no. Nathan explains that writing is all he has to “keep the shit at bay.” He explains that “the shit” is his anxiety about getting other people wrong—how everyone misunderstands one another.
Jerry’s crude questions about Nathan’s sex life casts him as a dirty old man—a recurring archetype in Roth’s body of work, to be sure. In this context, though, Jerry’s crudeness also functions to set him up as the Swede’s opposite: where the Swede is (according to Nathan, at least) an upright, moral person who adheres to convention, Jerry is more the hot-headed, hedonistic type.
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Nathan changes the subject, noting that he saw the Swede a couple months ago. Jerry is surprised—the Swede hadn’t mentioned it. Then he informs Nathan, much to Nathan’s shock, that the Swede in fact died just last Wednesday of cancer. Nathan asks if the Swede knew he would die when Nathan met with him, and Jerry says he probably did. Jerry reflects on his brother, praising him as “the best you’re going to get in this country, by a long shot.” He describes his late brother as “very stoical,” and someone who was entirely “conventional” and had done no wrong.
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Jerry continues, describing his father, Lou, as “[o]verbearing.” He recalls how Lou moved his desk into the middle of the factory so he could watch his workers. Jerry himself had steered clear of his father’s authoritarian rule and rejected the offer to take over the business, but the Swede “wasn’t built like [Jerry].” He was “too generous” and too eager to please. And so, the Swede was saddled with an “[u]nsatisfiable father, unsatisfiable wives, and the little murderer herself, the monster daughter. The monster Merry.” The Swede got through life constantly striving to charm everyone, Jerry recalls, and then “[h]is life was blown up by that bomb.”
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Nathan, confused, asks what Jerry is talking about—Merry? A bomb? Jerry explains that the Swede’s daughter, Meredith “Merry” Levov, was the “‘Rimrock Bomber’” who blew up the local post office, killing a local doctor who just happened to be there to drop off a letter on his way to work that morning. Jerry speaks derisively of Merry’s apparent act of anti-war terrorism—how she “brought the war home to Lyndon Johnson by blowing up the post office in the general store.” This was back in 1968, when such “wild behavior” among youths “was still new,” explains Jerry. Jerry explains how the Swede was powerless to stop his radical daughter. He’d tried to raise her right, reasoning with her instead of ruling over her as parents used to. He was “a liberal sweetheart of a father.”
Jerry characterizes Merry’s act as an act against the Swede himself: his success, his “own good luck.” Before Merry’s crime, the Swede had never had to ask why things were the way they were in the world. After that, everything changed. The Swede was “tough” and built to take hardship, but Jerry saw him break—“only once.” Two years ago, the Swede had taken the family—“the second superbly selfish Mrs. Levov” and their sons—to Florida to see Jerry. The Swede wandered away at some point, and Jerry found him sobbing alone in his car. He said, “I miss my daughter,” and explained that Merry had died. Jerry knows that the Swede knew where Merry was all these years—she’d gone into hiding after the bombing. Jerry can’t believe the Swede continued to visit his daughter—“the killer”—and treat her as his child all these years.
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In that moment, Jerry recalls, he told the Swede that if Merry truly is dead, then it’s the best thing that had happened to the Swede in years. It’s time to move on from her, Jerry told the Swede, and to see her as the “monster” she became, who was “way out of bounds” and did not “play” the game that Swede, his family, and civilized society played. Twenty-five years of mourning Merry is more than enough.
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In the present, Jerry tells Nathan that the Swede’s “fatal attraction” was to “responsibility.” His whole life, he did things the way they were supposed to be done. He could have gotten a deal to play professional baseball, but instead he went to work at Newark Maid, suffering through months of working in the tannery, then learning to operate the sewing machine.
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The Swede could have married anyone he wished, and instead he married Dawn Dwyer. They were a beautiful couple. “She’s post-Catholic, he’s post-Jewish, together they’re going to go out there to Old Rimrock and raise little post-toasties,” Jerry jokes wryly. Jerry explains that “Miss Dwyer” was never satisfied with anything. The Swede set her up in the cattle business, then the nursery tree business, and then he took her to Switzerland for a facelift from the world’s best plastic surgeon. None of it was enough. Merry stuttered, Jerry notes. He describes the bombing as Merry “pay[ing] everybody back” for her stutter. But the Swede did everything he could to help Merry, taking her to the best doctors, clinics, and therapists he could find.
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Over the next several months, Nathan will write about the Swede, spending hours each day fixating on all the minute details of his life. He will go to the old Newark Maid factory, to the old house on Keer Avenue, to Merry’s old high school in Old Rimrock, and to all the other places the story took place. He will want to send Jerry his manuscript, but he’ll think better of it, fearing that Jerry will accuse Nathan of having “misrepresented” his family. In the end, though, who can know if Nathan’s Swede or Jerry’s Swede come close to capturing who the man really was.
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Just then, a grey-haired woman approaches Jerry and Nathan, interrupting Jerry’s monologue. The woman asks Nathan to guess who she “was,” then she gives in and reveals her name: Joy Helpern. Nathan, she remembers, took her on a class hayride back in high school. Nathan remembers it—Joy hadn’t let him be quite as physical as he’d wanted. As Joy and Nathan chat, Nathan’s thoughts drift back to the Swede, and about their meeting a couple months ago at Vincent’s. He wonders about the Swede’s motives—about how he’d wanted to tell the tragedy of his life to Nathan, the pro writer, but had chickened out or thought better of it in the end. Nathan thinks about the broader significance of “the destruction” of the Swede’s perfect life and good fortune. “He is our Kennedy,” thinks Nathan.
Joy and Nathan continue to reminisce about old times, then things get more serious. Joy admits her family had been poor—they lived above the sewing shop after her father died of a heart attack. She hadn’t wanted Nathan to become her boyfriend because she didn’t ever want him to take her home and see how her family lived. Nathan thanks her for telling him this now, and Joy starts to cry.
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Nathan thinks about Joy and how her brother slept in the kitchen. He thinks about another classmate, Schrimmer, who divorced his wife for his much-younger secretary, whose body is great “but to whom he now had to explain every single thing about the past.” Nathan thinks about himself, who has no children and never married. Then he thinks again about the Swede, and the great act of violence that shattered his life of distinctly American “normalcy.” He thinks about what the loss of Merry signified—she, the fourth-generation American, was supposed to be “the perfected image of his father’s father.” Instead, she blasted him into “another America entirely,” sending him into a realm of senseless violence.
As Nathan dances with Joy to the dated music of their youth, he begins to flesh out the pieces of the Swede’s life—what the Swede wanted to but did not say to Nathan that evening at Vincent’s. Nathan tries to piece together all that happened over the course of 25 years, between “the triumphant days at wartime Weequahic High and the explosion of his daughter’s bomb in 1968 […].” He conceives of this “transition” as “the Swede’s great fall.” He imagines that the Swede must have understood the great tragedy of his life as the consequence of some “transgression,” that it was somehow “his responsibility.” And with this, Nathan leaves the reunion behind and “dream[s] a realistic chronicle” of the Swede’s life.
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Nathan’s chronicle of the Swede begins in Deal, New Jersey, at his cottage on the coast. Driving home with her father that day, 11-year-old Merry says, “Daddy, kiss me the way you k-k-kiss umumumother.” The Swede responds, “N-n-no,” shocking them both. He is horrified to realize that he has done what he has never done before: he’s made fun of her. Amid Dawn, who constantly puts pressure on Merry to improve her speech, and the teachers who stop calling on Merry out of pity, Merry has always been able to rely on her father. In that moment, perhaps in apology, and perhaps thinking he is just reciprocating their “mutual, seemingly harmless playacting,” the Swede “kisse[s] her stammering mouth with the passion that she had been asking for all month long while knowing only obscurely what she was asking for.”
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For a moment, the Swede finds the sensation “frightening.” This is a taboo he has not felt nor even thought about. The kiss isn’t real, nor the imitation of something real. But years later, when he will pore back through his memory to search for some cause to his family’s tragedy, he’ll wonder whether he subconsciously distanced himself from Merry after the kiss and that this was to blame for everything that happened years later. And he would learn to question every aspect of his life he once took for granted, though he never reached any satisfying answers. In retrospect, all his “triumphs” in life became “superficial.” He could no longer attach any “innocence” to his life.
The narration shifts back to Merry’s eleventh year. Back then, she loved Audrey Hepburn. Before that—to the Swede’s dismay—she went through a Catholic phase when she’d accompany Grandma Dwyer to church to pray. After Grandma Dwyer gave her a picture of Jesus to place above her bed, the Swede tried to ignore it. He reached his limit when Grandma Dwyer gave Merry a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, and he sat her down one day and gently asked her if she might at least put these objects away when her grandparents Levov came by, as they were Jewish. Merry agreed, and in time, she tired of Catholicism.
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Now, that passion is for Audrey Hepburn, and Merry has assembled a scrapbook of Audrey Hepburn photos and magazine articles. Merry takes to flouncing around the house pretending to be Audrey Hepburn. She buys the soundtrack to Breakfast at Tiffany’s and sings along to it for hours. She’d manage to sing the lyrics to “Moon River” without stuttering at all, and for this reason nobody says a word about her obsession. They let her continue her imaginary games.
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Merry has everything going for her: she is smart, thin, beautiful, and with wealthy parents. Her stutter is the only thing that holds her back. Dawn takes her to regular sessions with a speech therapist over in Morristown. On Saturdays, she sees a psychiatrist, and the Swede is irate when he discerns Merry’s stutter getting worse with these appointments. The psychiatrist tries to instill in Merry that she is choosing to stutter to manipulate her parents, who expect too much of her. The Swede resents the psychiatrist’s insinuation that Merry hates growing up in the shadow of Dawn, the former Miss New Jersey, and that she resents her mother’s superficial focus on looks.
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The psychiatrist assigns Merry a “stuttering diary,” in which she is supposed to record daily situations that make her stutter. When she leaves the journal behind one day, the Swede is dismayed to find that basically all situations cause Merry to stutter: when people put too much pressure on her, when they put too little pressure on her, around people who know about her stutter, around strangers. She works on “strategies” with her therapist and records them dutifully and in great detail in the diary. The Swede has never seen such fierce, unwavering dedication. But none of it matters. In the safety of the therapist’s office, Merry can speak fluently. But back in her real life, she struggles enormously.
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And then, Merry becomes suddenly very overweight, declining food at home but eating junk food nonstop outside of the house. At 16, her classmates nickname the large, nearly six-foot-tall Merry “Ho Chi Levov.” Merry has by now adopted a fierce, anti-war position. She snarls, stuttering, every time Lyndon Johnson appears on the TV screen, calling him a “c-c-coward” and “f-f-f-f-filthy fucking collaborator.” The Swede himself has joined a group called New Jersey Businessmen Against the War, but Merry turns him down on his offer to accompany the group down to Washington to speak with their senator. She calls North Vietnam the “Democratic Republic of Vietnam,” much to Dawn’s annoyance. The Swede urges Dawn to let Merry be—she has a political stance, and that’s a good thing. And there’s “compassion” behind it, too.
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It’s around this time that Dawn and Merry start to fight nonstop. Dawn tells Merry that she should be thankful to have “contented middle-class people” for parents, an attitude Merry retorts that she isn’t “brainwashed enough” to have. Dawn goes to bed in tears, not knowing where she went wrong as a mother to have Merry fly off the rails so badly. The Swede assures his wife that Merry is just a teenager—teenagers are like this. She’ll grow up eventually, and things will get better.
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Literary Devices
The Swede tries hard to follow his own advice, talking to Merry and answering her questions and accusations, however enraged they might make him. He asks her about her political involvement and the new friends she’s made—lately, Merry has started traveling to New York City on Saturdays. Merry’s trips to New York unsettle the Swede, and he discusses the subject with Merry carefully but persistently. The Swede suggests that not all parents would let their teenage daughter travel to the city by herself, so it’s the least she can do to tell him what she does there and who she sees. Merry obstinately refuses to answer his questions, or else she offers vague non-answers. She claims that she hangs out with college students there—“people with ideas.”
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When the Swede questions Merry about the “Communist material” she comes home with, Merry suggests she’s just doing what he taught her to do: to “learn,” and to be engaged with her surroundings. The Swede tries to be kind and understanding. After she fails to come home one night and only belatedly calls to share her plans to stay with friends, the Swede reprimands her, but not too harshly. The Swede tells Merry that if she needs somewhere to stay in the city, she can stay with the Barry and Marcia Umanoff, family friends of the Levovs.
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After staying with the Umanoffs one night, Merry returns to Old Rimrock and complains to the Swede about the couple, accusing them of simply performing liberalism as they live “their little comfortable b-b-bourgeois life.” The Swede retorts that the Umanoffs are professors—“serious academics who are against the war.” Merry brushes this off and declares that she doesn’t want to stay with the couple again.
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Later, after Merry fails to show up at the Umanoffs one Saturday night, the Swede tells her she’s grounded. Merry protests the punishment, suggesting that the Swede and Dawn are “spewing [their] fear” onto Merry and trying to make her as afraid of the world and uninterested in change as they are. She questions the Swede’s certainty that his way of seeing the world is the only right way—that it’s wrong of him to call her New York friends “radicals” simply because he doesn’t agree with them. Merry insists that “strong ideas” are the only thing that accomplishes anything. She cites one of her friends, Melissa, who dropped out of Columbia because “stop[ping] the killing is more important to her” than a silly degree.
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Later, the Swede confronts Merry about her friends in the city, Bill and Melissa. He insists she needs to be careful in the city—she could be “raped” there. Merry counters that girls “end up getting raped whether they listen to their daddies or not. Sometimes the daddies do the raping.” She and the Swede continue to argue. She accuses him of only caring about his business. The Swede tries to keep calm, disciplining Merry but also respecting her. He tells Merry he understands that she’s tired of life in Old Rimrock, and he promises her that they can work on her going away to school in the future.
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In a later argument, the Swede suggests that Merry bring her activism home to Old Rimrock. Plenty of people there support the war—she could actually stand to change some minds if she brings her activism to her conservative hometown. Merry brushes this aside as meaningless, suggesting that local activism won’t change anything. This ends up being the last conversation they have about New York. As far as the Swede is aware, Merry doesn’t go to New York again. She continues to be argumentative at home and at school, and one day she blows up the post office, killing Dr. Fred Conlon and destroying the general store.
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