“You couldn’t say his father didn’t try to get along with people for all that he really couldn’t”: A Response to Lou Levov

Lou Levov, the Swede’s father, is hard to like and hard to dislike all at once. The first time we see him he is a father “for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between”. He is a breed of Jewish fathers who want their sons to strive for more than they have given them; he is “a compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs”, a limited man with “limitless energy”. He created a major business out of pushing around a glove cart; a move that required both canny knowledge of people’s business minds and pure luck. He is an admirable man until you find out that the canny knowledge he has makes him feel entitled to give orders to everyone. His son, his daughter-in-law, his granddaughter, his wife, his son’s neighbor’s wife… nearly every person Lou Levov meets gets his spiel about Newark changing as a city, and the goyim ruining themselves, and politicians being corrupt, and society collapsing around the twin bombs of pornography and laziness.

The thing that most provokes irritation with Lou is his response to Merry’s actions. “I told you,” he says, “‘…something is haywire with that child’. And you looked at me like I was nuts. All of you. Only I wasn’t nuts. I was right. With a vengeance I was right!”

How can a father possibly say that to his traumatized son? “I told you”. “I was right”. And the Swede, as is his nature, simply sits there and takes it. He fought with his father once, to marry Dawn; he had to “collide with that skull, the skull of a brawler” and force him to accept an Irish Catholic woman as his wife. Now he’s done, and Lou Levov has free reign to lecture and scold. We lose all sympathy and admiration for Lou Levov right there. He is not worthy of his son, and through his fighting through the tragedy he has only painted another layer of the black bizarre on the Swede’s solid stone house.

I’m not saying that Lou Levov is at all a bad father; on the contrary, he will do anything for his sons to succeed, and he tries his hardest to be a father to the people he thinks need his help. But as is the case with most of those kinds of characters, the people he feels need his help hardly want it. They hate him for his offer. And this is shown quite plainly in the last few pages of the book. Lou Levov, for the entirety of a dinner party, has been trying to help Bill Orcutt’s wife Jessie to eat, and to stop drinking. Eventually he ends up feeding her, cooing to her as if she is a baby or a dog: “Jessie good girl, Jessie very good girl”. And she stabs him in the face with a fork.

Lou Levov is unable to speak. “His face was vacant of everything except the struggle not to weep”, Roth writes; there is nothing left in him but a lack of ability, a lack of capacity. He has, in his life, ”neglected no one in his crusade against disorder” only to be destroyed by the disorder just like his son was. Lou Levov realizes at that moment, leaning against the kitchen table with blood on his face, that although you think you can protect your family “you cannot protect even yourself”. All that is left in him is fear, fear and astonishment, at the fact that his life’s work– this building of a shield around his family not necessarily for love or compassion but for strength and a feeling of rightness, a need to be looked upon as stable– it has been for nothing.

Lou is the last of the Levov family to crack. Dawn has gotten plastic surgery and a new lover; Merry has become a reclusive Jain; the Swede’s mother has been sweetly sad for years; and the Swede has recently vomited in Merry’s underpass apartment, adding to the filth and losing all hope of redemption for her and for himself. The last one standing was Lou, that unbreakable fortress of correctness, of order; the man who believed in ’right way and wrong way, and this is the right way’– he has finally succumbed to the rampant disorder that is the life of the Levovs. “The breach had been pounded in their fortification”, Roth writes in the second-to-last paragraph, “and now that it was opened it would not be closed again.”

And now– finally, ironically, horribly– Lou evokes some sympathy.