American Themes I: Our Kennedy

“The brutality of the destruction of this indestructible man. Whatever Happened to Swede Levov. Surely not what befell the Kid from Tomkinsville. Even as boys we must have known that it couldn’t have been as easy for him as it looked, that a part of it was a mystique, but who could have imagined that his life would come apart in this horrible way? A sliver off the comet of the American chaos had come loose and spun all the way out to Old Rimrock and him. His great looks, his larger-than-lifeness, his glory, our sense of his having been exempted from all self-doubt by his heroic role– that all these manly properties had precipitated a political murder made me think of the compelling story of not John R. Tunis’s sacrificial Tomkinsville Kid but of Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, only a decade the Swede’s senior and another priviledged son of fortune, another man of glamour exuding American meaning, assasinated while still in his mid-forties just five years before the Swede’s daughter violently protested the Kennedy-Johnson war and blew up her father’s life. I thought, But of course. He is our Kennedy.” (p. 83)

American Pastoral is perhaps most obviously a book about the idea of the American Hero and the form such a hero always seems to take– the brave, self-sacrificing, and modest superstar; the town darling, the school’s champion athlete; the man you look up to for so long and whose attention you crave so painfully that a wink from him could send you into convulsions of joy and agony, deep agony because you know you will never be as good, as true, as chest-thumpingly American– and it is about his complete and absolute destruction when he is thrust from the idealized American pastoral into the “indigenous American berserk” that seethes under the surface of shimmering office buildings and solid suburban homes.

The annihilation of heroes is something that America experiences often and that Americans hate to see. ”The brutality of the destruction of this indestructible man”, as Roth writes, is the fear of the nation– not necessarily because we feel personally for the heroes themselves, but because America is a country that identifies itself by its leaders. It has always been this way– from John Smith in Jamestown to Barack Obama today, America has identified itself by fitting neatly into the outlines of the brave, the self-sacrificing, the modest and the strong and the admirable. Every period in American history has a couple of these demigods, and America has shaped itself accordingly to their strengths. With Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone we become frontiersmen, strong and hardy and braving the unknown. Abraham Lincoln made us fair and right; Martin Luther King, Jr. extended that into a basic acceptance and open-mindedness that in reality seems ironic at best. Our American Heroes, then, often smack of the extraordinary and the godly.

Our Hero has branched off, though, from the truly supernatural to the merely perfect, and this is where Philip Roth’s Swede Levov comes in. He is our regular hero, a man who is suburban and successful, the self-made man who grew from high-school athletic and social stardom (the quarterback/prom king type) to a man with a beautiful wife, intelligent and well-mannered children, a high-paying job, and a house (not too large, not too small) with just the right number of perfectly-trained pets.

Although this kind of American Hero may seem less sensational than those previously mentioned, it is important to note that the loss of Swede Levov to Roth’s main character is twice as crippling as that of, for example, JFK. That is because the destruction of the Swede hits closer to home. He is your high-school idol, the acquaintance from math class you want to be your best friend, the star player of the ____ball team and the focus of your envy and your idolization. You know him. You know the Swede, and when Roth makes you lose him you do what all Americans do at the loss of a hero– you weep for weeks and remember forever because there it goes, a part of ourselves– the better part of ourselves– gone.