Why the long, rambling, psycho-analytic excursions? Why the repetition of action - page-long analysis - action, with each "action" often no more than a word or two, some line of dialog? Why the sudden, histrionic scenes of violence and cruelty and grotesque suffering, like Swede in the hotel room with Rita or vomiting into his daughter's face, especially when they jar so with the rest of the novel?
Pastoral has its flaws, but it is a great novel. Gripping, and not just because it's the first non-Nabokov I've read in months. Important to remember that every analytic digression is written from the perspective of either the Swede or Zuckerman, never Roth. Maybe that's just Roth's way of disguising his own bad habit - frame the whole thing through Zuckerman and blame him for any failings - but I think it has a point. We are more immediately caught up in the minds of our protagonists. Their thought processes are made explicit to us long before the characters themselves could put them into words. Roth is his characters' loquacious interpreter. I wish I had him by me, day to day, to do the same.
An Amazon reviewer points out that Merry is, at best, a hysterical parody of 60s activism, which is not to say that no one existed like her, fully sociopathic, fully a murderer ex nihilo. But she's a symbol, not a person, what the 60s looked like to an older America. The book's not about the 60s. It's a record of the death of everything that was good about pre-60s America. It's an allegory and an elegy, and it achieves this soberly, without too much sentimentality. Perhaps that's why Roth works so hard on the Moby Dick-realism, the intricate details of life, say, in a glove factory. The meticulous care Roth takes with details allows him to escape sentimentality.
The Swede is a bit formulaic. He starts off entirely one dimensional. Then we learn of his rich inner life. The course of the book is his introduction to the willfully unreasonable, the deliberately bizarre and perverse and berserk, in American culture. This goes on quite a while, this acquiring of a third dimension. Mr. Levov (aka Our Halcyon Past) is so decent that it requires over 400 pages to tear down his last illusions. "The Education of Seymour Levov." But his agony is meaningfully rendered. A parent's agony. Saves the book from grim didacticism.
Roth has his programme, and he hammers away at it relentlessly. Decline and Fall of the American Footballer, with the Weathermen as the Vandals and the Black Panthers as the Goths. High school seniors could locate his thesis with ease, since it recurs, again and again, ad nauseam, either concise or rambling, blah tortuous tedium. Here it is, on page 418, amidst an ending that finally manages to become wearisome because it's more or less exactly what you envisioned 200 pages ago: "The daughter had made her father see. And perhaps this was all she had ever wanted to do. She had given him sight, the sight to see clear through that that which will never be regularized, to see what you can't see and don't see and won't see until three is added to one to get four [murders]."
Quotes
"How could he have gone around dopily believing he was making her happy when there was no justification for his feelings, when they were absurd, when, year in, year out, she was seething with hatred for their house? How he had loved the providing." (193)
"You get them wrong before you meet them, 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. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception." (35)
