SEYMOUR LEVOV, the hero of Philip Roth's magnificent new navel American Pastoral (Cape, £15.99 in UK), is from Newark, New Jersey. He is a handsome blonde Jew, a successful glove factory owner and romantic whose entire life has been determined by the celebrity he once enjoyed as a high school sporting hero.
Nicknamed "The Swede", he is aware of his mythic status but has always regarded it as a responsibility rather than as an excuse far swaggering. Fair minded boss, tolerant son, devoted husband to Miss New Jersey 1949 and fond father, he is nice to the paint of blandness. No wonder Roth familiar Nathan Zuckerman can, in old age, decide of his farmer hero, "this guy is the embodiment of nothing". But just as quickly he concedes, "I was wrong. Never more mistaken about anything in my life."
As ever Zuckerman, the famous novelist and Roth alter ego, is our narrator. Having spent so much of his boyhood in awe of this guy Seymour, "our Kennedy", the older brother of a school mate of his, Zuckerman is disappointed when he meets "The Swede" in later life and engages in a conversation which seems to contain nothing except platitudes. "When, momentarily, I stopped speaking, I sensed that my wards, rather than falling into the net of the other person's awareness, got linked with nothing in his brain, went in there and vanished."
From the opening pages of this big, powerful elegy, Roth presents Zuckerman as a man who has finally learnt to look beyond himself. The result is a haunting, haunted masterpiece. It is as if Roth's undisputed gifts have been liberated, the energy and rich invention of his prose are here brilliantly matched by a thoughtful eloquence and awareness of change.
Since the publication of his first navel Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Roth has written clever, witty navels, invariably concerned with the trials of being Jewish and of being male, particularly a Jewish American male invariably at the mercy of his sexuality. Partnoy's Complaint (1969) definitively explored the frenzied world of the American Jewish male dominated by his oppressively loving parents, with hilarious results. It also seemed to exhaust a joke, variations of which Roth has often returned to.
As the years have passed the tough young Jewish male has yielded to the tough not so young Jewish male, and mare recently has made way far the late middle aged, menopausal Jewish male. But even at his most self obsessed Roth has never lost his fluency and his flair. There have been also been moments of greatness, such as The Counterlife (1986) while Patrimony (1990), his account of his father's slow death is a candid, very physical account of the end of a life. Operation Shylack (1992) and Sabbath's Theater (1995) are navels you either love or hate, and I hated them far their loudness and excess and far the fact they seem to confirm; that Roth would remain the smart Jewish kid with too much talent, too big an interest in himself, too much mouth to write the book which would justify the claims made far him.
All of which adds to the sheer power of American Pastoral, the best book - the most beautiful book - Roth has ever written. In many ways it is a lament, mourning America and the collapse of the American Dream as much as the sorrows of "The Swede", a "well meaning, well behaved, well ordered" innocent whose life's crime has been wanting everything to be the way he imagined it to be in his dreams.
Zuckerman, having experienced a slice of mortality, has acquired a knowledge and perception few might have predicted. Observing Seymour, he thinks, "That smile again. The vulnerability in that smile was the surprising element - the vulnerability of our record breaking muscleman faced with all the crudeness it takes to stay alive." The Swede contacts Zuckerman because he wants his advice about a tribute he is trying to write about his father, who finally died at 96. "Not everyone knew how much he suffered because of the shacks that befell his loved ones," says Seymour.
THE shacks, have, of course, befallen Seymour. And it takes Seymour's sharp, shouting brother - who once made a coat out of the skins of 175 hamsters far a girl he was interested in - to supply Zuckerman with the harsh facts. The narrator then recreates Seymour's life. Aside from the grace and vigour of Roth's rhythmic prose, as well as the breadth of the story which examines the way lives unfold and people get mangled, his use of historical events as a backdrop is subtle. Never before has his characterisation been as sharp, from the exasperated Jerry to the domineering, uneducated father; and of course the bewildered Swede grieving the loss of his anti warprotesting, bomber daughter.
The dialogue is sharp, very Jewish, very New Jersey, very funny. It is as if Roth has listened as intently to the voices around him as well as inside him, just as he has obviously thought long and hard about this book. Even a casual overheard comment, such as a farmer class Romeo bemoaning: "You notice something? The guys on the whole don't look too bad, a lot of them work out, but the girls, you know... no, a forty fifth reunion is not the best place to came looking far ass" expresses the brutal essence of a group of men reluctant to be old.
During the reunion supper, Zuckerman is continually confronted by unavoidable facts. While listening to the ranting of a farmer classmate, he suggests, "So you don't have to look much further than Ira and me to see why we go through life with a generalised sense that everybody is wrong except us."
That class reunion and a remarkable account of a tense dinner party which resounds with previously unspoken truths are central to the novel. Zuckerman sets out to recreate Seymour's story with humanity, understanding and characteristic flashes of exasperated humour. Never before has the making of gloves been described as lovingly as Roth has done here with an exactness worthy of Updike, and a depth of feeling Updike might find himself en vying.
That mythical beast, the Great American Navel - so oft predicted and speculated about - has begun to resemble the dada. Perhaps it has already been and gone and we missed it? Yet three years from the end of the century, here is a real contender, a mature masterwork of immense intelligence, compassion, art and wisdom shaped by regret. And who would have thought it would be written by Philip Roth?
