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Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain are shaped by the Vietnam War,
the actions of the Weathermen, the Hollywood blacklist and the Clinton impeachment
and “culture wars” of the 1990s. Protagonists only appear to suffer middle class anxieties
for, in fact, they are figures who people populist moments: a former boxer, ditch-digger
and small business man, the sons of a manual laborer, a railway waiter and a tanner.
These men come of age in urban neighborhoods. But these locales have much in common
with their rural populist counterparts. Relatively isolated from the rest of society, the
sections of Newark New Jersey described by Roth are a source of complex emotions of
succor, frustration, resentment and loss.
The novelty of these figures, at least in terms of the populist narrative, lie in their
ethnicity (two are Jewish, one African-American) and political belief (one is a
Communist, one a liberal and another an self-styled elitist). Despite these political and
ethnic backgrounds, these men too are not models of tolerance. Their sympathy for others
is at best limited and their views are often hostile. Seymour Levov, certainly the most
gentle of the populists presented by Roth, believes that urban youths murder motorists
and pedestrians and even one another because “killing means nothing to them” (1997, 25-
26). The biographical trajectory of each merges with the crowded populist moments of
post-war America. Each figure fails as a father and husband and as a political actor and is
disgraced and humiliated by the intersection of his private and public life. Most of all,
these are angry men enraged by a sense of powerlessness and prone to violent verbal
outbursts and actions that lead to not only to their own demise but to those around them.
The populist citizens of Roth’s trilogy correspond almost completely to the
characterizations of critics. Yet there is nevertheless a poignancy to their lives that is
Convention