Storytelling

It takes quite a while before you remember that the Swede’s entire story is made up.

I’m not saying that American Pastoral feels like nonfiction, although the attention to detail Roth gives to every single character, setting, or background makes me think that he could make anything seem real– no, I’m talking about the fact that everything we hear about Merry’s downfall and the Swede’s life before and after that are products of the narrator’s mind. Nathan Zuckerman says, “I dreamed a realistic chronicle. I began gazing into his life… and inexplicably, which is to say lo and behold, I found him in Deal, New Jersey, at the seaside cottage, the summer his daughter was eleven…” and the story starts there. There, on page eighty-nine, the Swede’s story begins, and the entire thing is a dream, an effort produced by Zuckerman’s compulsive need to understand. It is fake. And we fall for it. By the end of the book, we are convinced that the Swede was the focus all along, and we have forgotten that Nathan Zuckerman existed. Roth does nothing to stop this from happening– there are no breaks from the dream back to reality, there are no “but I’ve heard it said that the Swede did _____ instead; anyway, then he…”s. There isn’t even a signal, really, that the narrative is going to change. Nothing but the easily-missed “I dreamed” at the beginning of the Swede’s story.

This brings up an interesting question: is a story any less important or emotional when you know it’s a lie? I’m inclined to say no, absolutely not– but only because by the end of American Pastoral I was indescribably and irrevocably attached to the Swede and his terrible American life. The book touches you, but in an odd and unfair kind of way– it lurks in the back of your head for days until you realize it’s there, and then it hits you full force: you feel for these people. The entire thing is a hoax, a fiction within a fiction, but you don’t really get mad at Zuckerman for telling it that way because it still works. You’re as connected to the Swede as Zuckerman himself was when he was an idol-worshipping little high-schooler in New Jersey. But you have to admit that the story could have been written in any number of ways– the characters with different interactions, the fate of Merry completely changed, the history of the Swede and Dawn’s relationship altered– and it would have been just as poignant and just as thematic.

Anyway, if a well-written lie has the same effect as a truth– or maybe even more of an effect– what does that mean for storytelling? Where do the boundaries lie? Roth winds up showing us that there really aren’t any, and that that’s okay– in fact, it’s a blessing. A story means what the author wants it to mean, and when the author has the freedom and ability to shape a true story, or even to just make one up, the result is exactly what he or she wanted it to be, and it affects the reader in exactly the way he or she wanted it to. It’s not the story that matters, then; it’s the purpose. The drive to send a message to humanity and the crafting of the conduit for that message and then, eventually, the story, a truth unto itself, purpose and theme and meaning personified. The Swede’s story affects me, touches me, because Nathan Zuckerman (or Philip Roth) wanted it to. That’s a pretty incredible thing.