Transactions with Disorder: American Pastoral and To the Lighthouse

Abstract

Readings of American Pastoral commonly center on the failures or limitations of the American dream, on the multi-generational immigrant experience of upward mobility and ethnic assimilation, and/or on the political and cultural convulsions of the 1960s. To set the book beside To the Lighthouse is to place it within a broader transnational context and subsume Roth the historian of twentieth-century America to Roth the metahistorian and metaphysician reflecting on forces of destruction inimical to civilized order and operative across time. The aim of this essay is twofold: to situate American Pastoral more firmly within the revolutionary context of the 1960s and at the same time, through Woolf, to consider its historicism as it extends beyond the story of the Levovs and America to a disorder latent in things and capable of erupting at any time.