Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America (review)

Debra Shostak’s edited collection Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America offers a nuanced and sophisticated treatment of three major post-1990 Roth novels that have drawn considerable critical acclaim. A versatile and shrewd critic, Shostak expertly leads a group of accomplished scholars in exploring the problematic of history these works foreground in tandem with their obsessive concern with America. It is no coincidence that since Derek Parker Royal founded the Philip Roth Society in 2002, critical attention to the author’s canon has significantly peaked. In producing volumes of scholarship on Roth, critics seem no less driven than their author who seeks continually to outdo himself in terms of production. Interestingly, Shostak’s Philip Roth is co-eval with a clutch of important monographs on the novelist published in the summer of 2011, including Pia Masiero’s Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books (Cambria), Ira Nadel’s Critical Companion to Philip Roth (Facts on File), Aimee Pozorski’s Roth and Trauma (Continuum), and David Gooblar’s The Major Phases of Philip Roth (Continuum). In their broad approach to Philip Roth, Shostak and her contributors bring the readers fresh insights into, and a renewed understanding of, the social crises plaguing contemporary America—an era which, if it witnessed fault lines widening under the socio-political rubric of the nation, also testified to its resilience and self-correcting mechanisms at work.

Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America begins with a lucid and cogent Introduction to the six-decade long career of the novelist. By situating him in the larger socio-cultural and intellectual matrix, Shostak presents the reader a ringside view of the novelist’s major themes, tropes, and preoccupations. Such reconnoitering of Roth’s fictional terrain prepares the way for Shostak to undertake later close assessments of the contributors’ critical essays in sections exclusively devoted to each of these novels. Positing that these novels together share a preoccupation with America as “place, culture, political environment, and idea,” Shostak also detects in their deep structure an “epistemological project” that in avoiding excessive identification with realist or postmodernist modes of depicting reality bears out how history impacts the self (3). In effecting a dialogue between American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain (2000), two noted novels of Roth’s American Trilogy, on the one hand, with The Plot Against America (2004), on the other, Shostak strategically juxtaposes real historical events with a counterfactual history and thereby spotlights the novelist’s perception of America’s dreams and nightmares. Crucially, she identifies “antipastoral critiques of American innocence” threading through these works (13).

Divided into three parts, Shostak’s collection provides a perspective on each novel discussed and also summarizes the findings of the critics featured there, identifying the central issues that inform their analyses and providing inclusive assessments of the novel in light of those readings. Part I consists of three chapters devoted to discussions of Roth’s American Pastoral. Refreshingly original, these essays address how the novel develops a certain vision of history, though their readings refract different positions on what the text means in relation to this history. In his essay David Brauner argues that, far from being a reconsideration of the sixties, as many critics have noted, the novel in fact privileges many decades beginning with the American forties to the nineties, and, in so doing, presents history itself as a quintessentially abstract concept, idea, and ideology. For Brauner, American Pastoral is a characteristically ambiguous and complex novel that focuses as much on the problems of historiography as it does on a particular historical period. Given his understated, near ambivalent, rejection of the view that different characters allegorize varying facets of history and also of Aliki Varvogli’s reading of Merry as “a symbol for the forces of history” (108), Brauner’s argument invites further reflection on Roth’s lines from American Pastoral: “the daughter and the decade blast[ed...