“We are none of us enough”: Chaos as a Rule

When the Swede calls his brother Jerry to relay the events of his last meeting with Merry, in which he learned about the rape and the traveling and the newfound Jainism, Jerry does what seems unthinkable: he scolds him. He tells the Swede that he should have either dragged Merry home or left her there to rot, and he doesn’t accept that neither of those choices are at all acceptable to the Swede– how could he have taken that thing back home to his wife and his parents and forced her to stay? And how could he leave the daughter he loved in a pool of her own filth, on a cold floor in a small, dark apartment next to an underpass? The Swede tries to defend himself and fails; he breaks down over the phone, sobbing to his brother: “If what you are telling me is what I was… wasn’t, wasn’t enough, then, then… I’m telling you– I’m telling you that what anybody is is not enough.”

Jerry responds with another long rant, but the important thing is in the first couple sentences: “We are none of us enough!” he shouts. He seems almost gleeful at the idea of his invincible older brother being destroyed by the reality he’s fought to ignore his entire life. Almost ecstatic. And the Swede just takes it, thinking inwardly that Jerry doesn’t know what he’s saying. The idea that Jerry has is that everything is connected– that it was possible to foresee Merry’s actions, and that it was possible to stop her, possible to bring her back.  The Swede knows this isn’t true because he recognizes that Jerry’s first thought– that we are none of us enough for people– is a right one. He knows that “Jerry thinks he can escape the bewilderment by ranting, shouting, but everything he shouts is wrong… causes, clear answers, who there is to blame. Reasons. But there are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are…. Jerry tries to rationalize it but you can’t. This is all something else, something he knows absolutely nothing about. No one does. It is not rational. It is chaos. It is chaos from start to finish.”

Chaos from start to finish. While not necessarily the main theme of American Pastoral as relates to American society (it’s more universal, which is why this isn’t in the ‘American Themes’ section), the idea of chaos as a fact of life is a powerful and poignant truth that pervades the Swede’s story. While reading, we get an uncomfortable sense of premonition; not so much as foreshadowing for the book, but as foreshadowing for our own lives. How can anyone possibly know if their child will grow up to bomb a general store? How can anyone prevent their wife from having an affair? How can anyone predict whether or not their life will fall to pieces?

Chaos. Entropy. The second law of thermodynamics and the idea that in an isolated system, every reaction will increase the entropy of the system. The lack of order in the system. It seems to apply less to science in books and more to the science of life itself; the science of relationships and children and jobs and riots and prejudice and love and bombs. Roth makes it clear that everything we do in life has the possibility of going wrong. Everything we do increases the chaos of our lives– and, sometimes, if we are as unlucky and unfortunate as the Swede and his family, it can overtake us completely.

Eventually, Roth tells us, life will go to pieces, and there is no way to prepare for it. It is a rule of life, and it applies to absolutely everyone– no exceptions. The Swede is a prime example of that… how could anyone but his jealous and vindictive brother ever wish him harm? How could anyone say that Dawn deserved the trauma of her daughter killing a man? Four men? ”And what is wrong with their life?” Roth asks at the end of the book. “What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” Well, nothing. That’s the point. We can’t blame them for anything, and we can’t blame ourselves for anything. We have no choice. We cannot control the chaos. The Swede found that out the hard way– we cannot control chaos. We cannot instill order. Chaos is a rule. All we can do is hope to recover.