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absent in even in the accounts of populism’s defenders for Roth explores a combination
of agency, contingency and constraint in American society unexamined by democratic
theorists.
Each of the figures in the American trilogy is an example of the most celebrated
feature of American culture. From Crevcouer and Tocqueville onward, America has even
been defined in terms of opportunities for mobility and change. The “American Dream”
takes many forms--economic, religious , ethnic, racial, and geographical—and Roth’s
characters experience each. Ira Ringold (I Married a Communist), a self educated manual
laborer, rejects religion and joins the Communist Party, becomes a popular radio
performer and an influential media political figure. He marries a gentile movie star
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,
buys an eighteenth century house in the country and a Thoreauian cabin in the woods.
Ringold’s public persona is “Iron Rinn” who is celebrated for his one person
performances of Abraham Lincoln with whom he bears a striking resemblance. Seymour
Levov (An American Pastoral) transforms his father’s local business into an international
enterprise, marries “Miss New Jersey” of 1949 and buys a 160 year old house in the
country reportedly once used by George Washington during the revolution. He had been
dreaming about the house since he was sixteen, now it was his and “he couldn’t get over
it.” As a child, his fair complexion earned him the nickname, “Swede” and his athletic
skills as a youth are legendary. Coleman Silk, whose father read nightly from his
cherished copies of the Bible and Shakespeare, decides to “pass” as a white person. His
decision, made shortly after his father’s death, was based on the desire “to be whatever he
wants…free on a scale unimaginable to his father. As free as his father was unfree…Free
to go ahead and be stupendous. Free to enact the boundless, self-defining drama of the
Convention