American Anti-Pastoral

Brookside, New Jersey and the Garden State of Philip Roth

By Thomas Gustafson

SERIES: CERES: Rutgers Studies in History

Rutgers University Press

One of the best-known novels taking place in New Jersey, Philip Roth’s 1997 American Pastoral uses the fictional hamlet of Old Rimrock, NJ as a microcosm for a nation in crisis during the cultural upheavals of the 1960s-70s. Critics have called Old Rimrock mythic, but it is based on a very real place: the small Morris county town of Brookside, New Jersey.

American Anti-Pastoral reads the events in Roth’s novel in relation to the history of Brookside and its region. While Roth’s protagonist Seymour “Swede” Levov initially views Old Rimrock as an idyllic paradise within the Garden State, its real-world counterpart has a more complex past in its origins as a small industrial village, as well as a site for the politics of exclusionary zoning and a 1960s anti-war protest at its celebrated 4th of July parade. Literary historian and Brookside native Thomas Gustafson casts Roth’s canonical novel in a fresh light as he studies both Old Rimrock in comparison to Brookside and the novel in relationship to NJ literature, making a case for it as the Great New Jersey novel. For Roth fans and history buffs alike, American Anti-Pastoral peels back the myths about the bucolic Garden State countryside to reveal deep fissures along the fault-lines of race and religion in American democracy.

Thomas Gustafson’s American Anti-Pastoral, a study of Philip Roth’s literature through the prism of Brookside, New Jersey, is a well-written, intriguing, and accessible work of literary criticism. It is both an excellent contribution to 'Roth Studies' and at the same time something much more than that, a literary excursus into the relationship between place, myth-making, and literary creativity. Michael C. Kimmage, author of In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy

THOMAS GUSTAFSON is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776-1865. Born and raised in Brookside, he now calls Echo Park in Los Angeles his home.

List of Illustrations
Abbreviations

Prologue

Part I Dismal Harmony

1 The Office of Letters and the Bomb: Brookside and Old Rimrock
2 Fourth of July Parade
3 Indigenous American Berserk
4 Fig Leaf: The Voice of the Pastoral
5 Walled Garden

Part II Babel

6 All Babel Breaks Loose
7 Inside the Territory: Myth and History
8 Harmony: Bill Orcutt’s WASP History Tour
9 Dissonance: Bucky Robinson’s Jewish History Tour
10 Counterfactual: Beatrice and George Jenkins Sr.’s Black History Tour of Morristown
11 On the Dead-End Dirt Road: The Quiet Babel of Stoney Hill Road and Where Goodbye Newark Meets Goodbye Orchard
12 Brookside Bards: Steven Cramer’s Poetry of Protest and Christopher Merrill’s Poetry of Place

Part III Pentecost Remembered and Lost

13 Brookside against the Current
14 NIMBY: Protecting Green Space with Green Money
15 The Price of Harmony
16 The Table of Otherhood and Communion
17 The Community Club and Its Dissidents
18 American Pastoral and Revolutions of the Word
Epilogue: “The Great New Jersey Novel”: American Pastoral and the Garden State of Letters

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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