TWO AMERICAN LITERARY ICONS AT IT AGAIN : ROTH'S FROTHY TALE OF TURBULENT TIMES.

Byline: Michiko Kakutani The New York Times

Title: ``American Pastoral''

Author: Philip Roth

Data: 423 pages, Houghton Mifflin Co.; $26

Back in 1960, Philip Roth gave a speech in which he argued that American life was becoming so surreal, so stupefying, so maddening, that it had ceased to be a manageable subject for novelists. He argued that real life, the life out of newspaper headlines, was outdoing the imagination of novelists, and that fiction writers were in fact abandoning the effort to grapple with ``the grander social and political phenomena of our times'' and were turning instead ``to the construction of wholly imaginary worlds, and to a celebration of the self.''

These remarks - made even before John Kennedy's assassination and the social upheavals of the '60s magnified the surreal quotient of American life - help illuminate what Tom Wolfe identified (with considerable self-serving hyperbole) in the late '80s as a retreat from realism. They also help explain the direction that Roth's own fiction has taken during the last three and a half decades, his long obsession with alter egos and mirror games and the transactions between life and art.

In his latest novel, ``American Pastoral,'' however, Roth does away with - or nearly does away with - these narcissistic pyrotechnics to tackle the very subjects he once spurned as unmanageable: namely, what happened to America between World War II and Vietnam, between the complacencies of the '50s and the confusions of the '60s, '70s and '80s. With the story of Seymour (Swede) Levov, Roth has chronicled the rise and fall of one man's fortunes and in doing so created a resonant parable of American innocence and disillusion.

The resulting book is one of Roth's most powerful novels ever, a big, rough-hewn work built on a grand design, a book that is as moving, generous and ambitious as his last novel, ``Sabbath's Theater,'' was sour, solipsistic and narrow.

As Roth has observed himself, his books tend to ``zigzag'' between the two poles of his imagination: between the willfully decorous (``Letting Go,'' ``The Ghost Writer'') and the willfully outrageous (``Portnoy's Complaint,'' ``Our Gang''), the Jamesian and the Rabelaisian. It's eminently clear that ``American Pastoral'' belongs to the first category, and it's also clear that its polite, dutiful hero, Levov, is the opposite number of such flamboyant egotists as Mickey Sabbath.

At the same time, Roth has taken these two contradictory impulses in himself, and used them to limn two contradictory impulses in American history: the first, embodied by Levov, representing that optimistic strain of Emersonian self-reliance, predicated upon a belief in hard work and progress; the second, embodied by the Swede's fanatical daughter, Merry, representing the darker side of American individualism, what Roth calls ``the fury, the violence, and the desperation'' of ``the indigenous American berserk.''

Whereas the collision of the prudent and the transgressive, the normal and the Dionysian, has been the source of uproarious comedy in earlier Roth novels, that same collision in ``Pastoral'' generates a familial - and generational - showdown with tragic consequences, one that also becomes a kind of metaphor for America's tumultuous lurch into the second half of the 20th century.

We do not get the details of Seymour's story directly from Roth, but through the prism of Roth's favorite hero and mouthpiece, Nathan Zuckerman, the infamous star of the ``Zuckerman'' trilogy, who, we're told, now lives in seclusion in the New England countryside, his body and spirit ravaged by surgery and cancer.

Nathan, it seems, idolized Seymour in high school. The Swede's success on the athletic field, his goyish good looks, his sweetness of spirit, all combined to make him an all-American hero, a golden boy seemingly blessed with endless good fortune. After high school, he became a Marine, married Miss New Jersey of 1949, took over his father's glove business and bought a big old house in the New Jersey countryside.

It turns out, however, that Seymour has become a broken man, all his bright hopes shattered by his daughter, Merry, who in 1968 at the height of anti-Vietnam War protests, set off a bomb that killed a man. In Nathan's telling (or reimagining) of Seymour's story, Merry emerges as both a self-righteous Fury, oddly reminiscent of the implacable Lucy Nelson in ``When She Was Good,'' and an exaggerated version of Portnoy and Sabbath, the rebellious child programmed to reject all that her parents' generation holds dear.

As depicted by Roth (er, Nathan), Seymour comes across as a regular guy - a kind, forbearing man who unexpectedly finds himself chewed up and spit out by the noisy machinery of history. Such a character ordinarily might seem a little bland, even boring, but Roth describes him with such authority and insight that he's able to make the Swede's decency as palpable - and yes, compelling - as the manic craziness of his earlier creations. Seymour, we realize, is the quintessential innocent, a man whose life has broken into a Before and After, a man who finds himself trapped between the moral certainties of his father and the angry denunciations of his daughter.

Certainly the vexing relationship between fathers and children, and the mind-boggling disparity between one's expectations of the world and its grim reality are perennial issues for Roth's heroes, but in ``Pastoral,'' they are turned from purely personal dilemmas into broader social ones. We are made to contemplate the demise of the immigrant dream cherished by men such as Seymour's father, the souring of the generational struggle during the '60s and the connections between assimilation and rootlessness and anomie.

Roth's ultimate point: that events are not rational, that people are not knowable, that life is not coherent.

In the end, the saga of the Levov family is one of those stories out of the headlines that make the reader's head reel, one of those stories Roth once characterized as a threat to the novelist's powers of invention. It is his achievement in these pages that he has not only tackled and imaginatively harnessed such a daunting subject but has also used it to create a fiercely affecting work of art.

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Photo: (1--2) Philip Roth

``American Pastoral''