The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Philip Roth · a novel in three parts · Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1997 · scored on Roth’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Family tragedy as social novel of postwar America, framed as a novelist’s confessed invention; elegy, domestic chronicle and satire in one narration
Mythos
The Fall, from a paradise remembered to a paradise lost; the Swede as Adam in a garden of his own choosing and as Job, a righteous man undone for no fault he can find; the American myth of innocence, in Johnny Appleseed, joined to the immigrant’s myth of arrival
Phase
From the Swede’s boyhood in wartime Newark through the riot of 1967 and the bomb of 1968 to one dinner party at Old Rimrock in the summer of 1973, during the Watergate hearings; imagined from the mid-1990s
Presentation
Fiction; three parts, “Paradise Remembered”, “The Fall” and “Paradise Lost”; first person, Nathan Zuckerman, until a high-school reunion, then a close third person inside Seymour Levov, which Zuckerman declares his own imagining and from which he does not return
Register
From the long cumulative paragraph of the opening and the Swede’s halting decency to Lou Levov’s aggrieved monologue, Jerry’s savagery, Merry’s stutter set down on the page, the exposition of glove-making and the broad satire of the dinner guests
Scale
One family across three generations, a glove factory and a city, and the decade of riot, war and Watergate as it reaches a house in a New Jersey village
Governing Proposition
A novelist learns at a high-school reunion that the hero of his Newark boyhood, the Swede, a Jewish glove manufacturer’s son who looked like a Viking and married Miss New Jersey, has died, and that in 1968 the Swede’s daughter set off a bomb; he sets himself aside and imagines the Swede’s life from within, through the bomb and the years after it, to the summer evening in 1973 when a dinner party at the Levov farm breaks what is left of the family’s order. The wager of the novel is that a life built on decency, work and assimilation, the postwar American pastoral, has no defence against history or against the unknowable inwardness of the people nearest it, and that a chronicle confessed as invention can show this better than any record.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“The Swede.” The novel opens on a nickname set down as a sentence of its own, and builds out of it a neighbourhood’s worship of one boy. He is Seymour Levov, of Weequahic High School in Newark, a Jewish boy who looks like a Viking, on whom a neighbourhood in wartime set its pride. The voice that remembers him is Nathan Zuckerman’s, a novelist who grew up in the same streets and worshipped him with the rest. The paragraphs are long, cumulative and conversational, one sentence pressing on the next, and the adoration rises through them until the boy stands in the memory of the neighbourhood as its god.
The god grows into a decent man. He goes into his father’s business, Newark Maid, a glove factory; he marries Dawn, a former Miss New Jersey, of Irish Catholic origin; he buys a stone house and a farm at Old Rimrock, among the Protestant gentry of the New Jersey countryside, and admires Johnny Appleseed, the innocent American planter. The father’s trade becomes the son’s, and in the son the immigrant’s ascent is complete. This is the pastoral of the title: decency, work and assimilation, a life done right.
The book is in three parts, “Paradise Remembered”, “The Fall” and “Paradise Lost”, and the titles name the myth it means to build. It is told from the mid-1990s. The life it imagines runs from the Swede’s boyhood in the 1940s through the bomb of 1968 to a single dinner party at the Levov farm in the summer of 1973, during the Watergate hearings. The opening is elegy, for a boy and for a city in the war years, and everything that follows is the undoing of what the elegy remembers.
Movement II
Zuckerman meets the Swede again, aging, at a dinner in Manhattan. The Swede talks of nothing but his three sons. Zuckerman, who has had surgery for cancer, sits through the evening and takes his old hero for a man without an inner life, a pleasant surface all the way down. The dinner is dull, and its dullness is the book’s first problem: the god of the neighbourhood has become, to the novelist across the table, a blank.
Then comes the forty-fifth reunion of Weequahic High School’s class of 1950. There Zuckerman meets Jerry Levov, the Swede’s brother, savage and fluent, and Jerry tells him two things. The Swede has died. And in 1968 the Swede’s daughter, Merry, set off a bomb. The man who at dinner seemed to have nothing inside him had been carrying this all along, and had said nothing of it.
At the reunion Zuckerman dances, and drifts from himself into the chronicle. He declares that what follows is his own imagining: he will invent the Swede from within, against the blankness he met at dinner. From that point the narration passes into a close third person inside the Swede, and Zuckerman does not return as a speaking presence before the end. The seam between fact and invention is left visible, and the rest of the book is offered as a guess, the novelist’s confessed attempt to get another man right.
Movement III
The chronicle begins with work. The Levov fortune is gloves, and the book knows how a glove is cut and sewn. Lou Levov, the father, speaks for it in a rapid, aggrieved monologue that does not stop for answers. Later a young woman named Rita Cohen is given a whole lesson in the making of a glove, and the lesson is a feat of exact knowledge made into narrative: the craft on which the family’s decency rests, set out at the length a craft requires.
The factory stands in a city that rises and then falls. Newark in the war years is the city of the opening’s elegy; Newark in 1967 is a city in riot. Through the riot the factory’s Black forelady, Vicky, stays. The family’s decency is real, and it is local: it holds a shop floor together in a city that is coming apart.
Old Rimrock is the other half of the pastoral. The stone house, the farm, the village with its post office in a general store: the Swede has chosen a garden and moved his family into it. The neighbours are the Orcutts, Bill and Jessie, the Protestant gentry of the place. The national myth of innocence and the immigrant’s myth of arrival are joined in one house, and the house is waiting for what will break it.
Movement IV
Merry is the Swede’s daughter, and she stutters; the stutter is set down on the page, a broken speech against her father’s fluent decency. When she is eleven he kisses her in the car, and the book returns to the kiss as a question it does not answer. The war in Vietnam comes into the house on television, and into Merry. In 1968 a bomb goes off at the post office in the general store in Old Rimrock, and Merry is gone. Sheila Salzman, her speech therapist, hid her after the bombing, and the Swede has a brief affair with Sheila.
Rita Cohen speaks for the radical left of the 1960s, in its cant. She is drawn in caricature, and the caricature is the book’s, not only the Swede’s. The Swede turns the same questions over and over: what he did, what he failed to do, what in his life made his child. The rumination is the Swede’s anguish, and it is the book’s method: the same causes, the riot, the war, the kiss, the house, offered and refused.
In 1973 he finds her. He climbs the stairs in a Newark slum and finds his daughter veiled, emaciated and living in filth, a Jain who will not harm a microbe, who has killed four people. Nothing in her explains her. The book’s hinge is a closed room with a person inside it whom her father cannot reach, and the reader is kept outside with him. The “indigenous American berserk” has not come from outside the pastoral: it was born in the house.
Movement V
The last part is one evening, a dinner party at the Levov farm in the summer of 1973, with the Watergate hearings on television. The past enters it in long retrospect, so that the years since the bomb press on a present the Swede cannot leave. The guests are drawn broadly, a satire of manners at a country table, and Lou Levov, the grandfather, is in full voice, raging among other things at Deep Throat and at what the country has come to.
In the kitchen the Swede sees Dawn and Bill Orcutt together, and understands. At the table Jessie Orcutt, drunk, raises a fork to Lou Levov’s eye. The violence of the decade, which has come to the Levovs as news and as a bomb, now comes to the dinner table as a fork in a drunk woman’s hand, and the counterpastoral is complete in a drawing room.
The book does not end with an outcome. It ends in the middle of the party, on a question: “What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” Whether the question is satire or lament, whether it convicts the Levovs or acquits them, the book leaves open, as it leaves open why Merry did what she did. Zuckerman does not return to say what he made of the life he imagined. The frame stays open, and the guess stands.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and it bites at three places, hardest at the first. The frame is long: Zuckerman’s boyhood hero worship, the dinner at which the Swede talks of nothing but his three sons, and the reunion take most of the first part before the chronicle begins, and they are required, since the Swede’s blankness at dinner is the problem the whole imagining tries to solve. The lesson in how a glove is cut and sewn looks removable and is not: it is the pastoral of work, the craft on which the family’s decency rests. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is repetition. The Swede’s anguished questions recur across the second and third parts with diminishing return, Lou Levov’s tirades run past their point, and the dinner party restates guilts already established. Perhaps a tenth of the book could go without the knowledge changing.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a life built on decency, assimilation and work, the postwar American pastoral, has no defence against history or against the unknowable inwardness of the people closest to it, and the “indigenous American berserk” is not an invasion from outside the pastoral but grows inside the house. The Swede does everything right, and his daughter kills four people. The book will not let this resolve into a political lesson: the riot of 1967, Vietnam, Watergate and the bomb are causes the Swede tries and fails to connect. Under it runs a second disclosure, that we know others only by getting them wrong. Held off the top because Merry is seen only from outside, by design but at a cost; the radical left of the 1960s is drawn in caricature, above all in Rita Cohen; and much is argued aloud, by Jerry and by Zuckerman.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Roth’s register is not the sublime one, and elevation comes as terror and as elegy rather than as transport. The heights are real and they recur. The Swede climbs the stairs in a Newark slum in 1973 and finds his daughter veiled, emaciated and living in filth, a Jain who will not harm a microbe and has killed four people: a scene as terrible as any in the American fiction of its decade. The opening’s elegy for the Swede as the neighbourhood’s god rises through its own adoration. The glove lesson reaches a grandeur of craft. The fork that Jessie Orcutt, drunk, raises to Lou Levov’s eye at the dinner party is a shock of violence in a drawing room. Held here because the dominant mode is rumination and argument, which runs level for long stretches, and because the close is satire as much as height.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Myth is partly built, and the part titles claim it: a Fall, from a paradise remembered to a paradise lost. The structure bears it. The Swede is an Adam in a garden of his own choosing, a stone house and a farm in Old Rimrock, and a Job, a righteous man undone for no fault he can find. American myth bears weight too: a Jewish boy who looks like a Viking marries Miss New Jersey and admires Johnny Appleseed, the innocent American planter, so that the national myth of innocence and the immigrant’s myth of arrival become one myth, and the bomb breaks both. The particular stays particular: gloves, Weequahic, a post office in a general store. It clears the gate because the Fall is carried by the three parts and the Swede bears Adam and Job in what he does and suffers, not only in what is said of him; it goes no higher because much of the myth is named rather than enacted, in the titles and in Zuckerman’s commentary, and because Merry, the destroying daughter, is too opaque to bear her half of it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is plain: the Jewish-American novel of Bellow and Malamud, Fitzgerald’s American dreamer, Dreiser’s social novel, Milton in the titles, and Roth’s own Zuckerman books, in which the writer’s self-preoccupation had been the subject for twenty years. The turn is in what Roth does with Zuckerman. The narrator who had been the centre sets himself aside, admits that what follows is his invention, and dissolves into a close third person inside a man he barely knew, never to return: the novelist’s comedy of the self turned into a tragic chronicle of another life and of a nation’s decade. The stake was real, for the author of Sabbath’s Theater, two years before, to stake a novel on a decent, unreflective hero and an elegiac register. Held below the gate because the instrument, the realist social novel, is a proven path, and the swerve lies in Roth’s career more than in the novel’s departure from the tradition it inherits.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The Swede is seen first from outside, as a hero and then as a bore, and only then from within, so that the inner life Zuckerman invents is offered as a guess against the blankness he met at dinner: the form is the book’s claim that we know others only by imagining them wrongly. At the reunion, where Zuckerman dances and drifts from himself into the chronicle, the passage from fact to invention is a visible seam. The three parts carry the Fall. The last part’s single evening, broken open by retrospect, presses the past on a present the Swede cannot leave, and the book ends in the middle of the party, on a question, not an outcome. Held below the top because the frame, once dropped, is never closed, and because the long retrospects of the second part could stand in another order.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over twenty-nine years. The readings multiply and do not cancel: an elegy for postwar America; a conservative indictment of the 1960s, a reading pressed by Roth’s critics and contested by his defenders; a novel of Jewish assimilation and its price; a study of fatherhood and of the bond of father and daughter, around the kiss the Swede gives his eleven-year-old daughter in the car; a reflection on the pastoral as an American genre; a metafiction of Zuckerman’s unreliable imagining. Its questions remain open: why Merry does what she does; whether the Swede is a tragic hero or a willed innocent; whether the chronicle tells more of Zuckerman than of the Swede; whether the last pages are satire or lament. Held below the top because twenty-nine years is a short test, and a share of the yield is the political quarrel rather than the book.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is the American novel of the late twentieth century. The force: the book restored the large social novel of American history to a central place in literary fiction at a time when its rivals were the systems novel and the minimalists, and it joined the chronicle of a decade to a frame that admits its invention without becoming play. The force is real, but it renews the realist social novel rather than reorganising possibility, and reach outstrips it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for 1998; a place among the five leading titles of the New York Times Book Review’s 2006 survey of the best American fiction of the previous twenty-five years, and on Time’s 2005 list of the hundred best English-language novels since 1923; the opening of the late phase of Roth’s work; and a redirection of later novels that is asserted more than documented.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is weighed over twenty-nine years, on what is shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout. Presence has been wide and continuous: the prize, the survey, the teaching of the book as one of the defining American novels of its decade, Ewan McGregor’s film of 2016, and renewed reading at Roth’s death in 2018. Its surface is fixed in part to its subjects, the riot, Vietnam, the Weathermen and Watergate, but those are its matter, and the conditions that produced it have passed while the book has been read as more pertinent, not less, in each later season of political violence. The presence is wide but not the widest, and the span is short: that holds it below Blood Meridian and White Noise, twelve years older, and far below what has lasted for centuries.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on Roth’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the long paragraph and the voice. The opening, which begins “The Swede.”, builds a neighbourhood’s worship of one boy out of one cumulative, conversational sentence after another, and the book sustains that pressure across its length. Roth’s ear keeps a gallery of voices apart: Lou Levov’s rapid, aggrieved monologue, Jerry’s surgical savagery on the telephone, the Swede’s halting decency, Merry’s stutter set down on the page, Rita Cohen’s cant. The exposition of glove-making is a feat of exact knowledge made into narrative. Charges hold it below the top: the ruminative paragraph repeats itself in the Swede’s long anguish; the rhetoric of Zuckerman and of Jerry inflates; women, Dawn above all, are seen narrowly and largely through the men’s eyes; and the satire of the last part’s guests is broad.
Score: 8.7 / 10
One law governs the whole: the dream of an orderly American life meets a disorder that rises from inside it, and no one can be known. Take the two most distant elements, the opening’s adolescent adoration of the Swede in wartime Newark and the fork raised to Lou Levov’s eye at the dinner party of 1973. They obey the same law: the hero worship is the first pastoral, the fork the counterpastoral in a drawing room, and each is a failure to see a person as they are. The law covers the glove factory, the riot, the bomb, the affair between Dawn and Bill Orcutt that the Swede glimpses in the kitchen, and his own brief affair with Sheila Salzman, Merry’s speech therapist, who hid her after the bombing. Charged: the frame’s law, that all this is Zuckerman’s invention, lapses once the chronicle starts, and the satire of the dinner guests shifts the register further than the law needs.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Many orders, held in one family across three generations, and the family joins them. Consciousness, in the Swede’s long anguish and in Zuckerman’s own, after his surgery for cancer. The family: the father, the sons, the marriage, the daughter. Labour, in Newark Maid, the glove factory, its craft and its Black forelady, Vicky, who stays through the riot. The city, Newark in its rise and its fall. Class and ethnicity: the Jewish immigrant’s ascent, Dawn’s Irish Catholic origin, the Protestant gentry of Old Rimrock in the Orcutts. The state and history: the war, the riot, Vietnam, Watergate. The sacred, in Dawn’s Catholicism and Merry’s Jainism. Sex, in the kiss, the affairs and Lou’s fury at Deep Throat. They are integrated, not listed. Held below the top because the natural order is thin, the world beyond New Jersey enters only as news, and Merry’s inner life, the hinge of the action, is withheld.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment and The Inner Law at 8.8, then The Made at 8.7, with The Archetypal Deep, The Living Form and The Encompassed level with it. A disclosure that holds, that a life of decency, work and assimilation has no defence against history or against the inwardness of those nearest it, and that the berserk grows inside the house; one law, the orderly life undone from within and no one known, governing everything from a boy’s worship of a hero to a fork raised at a dinner party; and a command of the long cumulative paragraph and of a gallery of voices held apart, with an exposition of a trade made into narrative.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Sublime at 8.2. The first is held by repetition: the Swede’s anguished questions recur with diminishing return, Lou Levov’s tirades run past their point, and the dinner party restates guilts already established, perhaps a tenth of the whole; the second because its heights, terror and elegy, recur in a mode of rumination and argument that runs level for long stretches. Next above them, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4: a real turn in Roth’s own work, carried in the realist social novel, a proven path; and a renewal of that novel rather than a reorganisation of possibility, its reach outstripping its force.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Inner Law at 8.8, The Made at 8.7, The Living Form at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Imperishable meets it exactly at 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition and The Swerve, each at 8.4, fall a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.7. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.6, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, in 1997, and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for 1998. It is the first of the three novels narrated by Nathan Zuckerman that were later grouped as Roth’s American trilogy, with I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000); the trilogy is not the unit, and the later novels are neither scored nor credited here. It is scored as one novel in three parts, “Paradise Remembered”, “The Fall” and “Paradise Lost”, in Roth’s English as first published. Ewan McGregor’s film of 2016, in which he also played the Swede, is not part of the work. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Roth’s English, the original, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening words, the three part titles, one phrase of the narration and the closing question. Facts that could not be verified, among them the number and division of the chapters, the page count, the month of publication and the record of the book’s critical literature, are not given. Citations are by part.