"The Creative Process of Writing is a Liberating and Therapeutic Experience"
www.virtualwritingcoach.com
June, 2008
In This Issue:
1. Preview
2. Publisher's Note
3. Philip Roth's Descriptive Commentary
4. Helpful Hints
1. Preview
The Writer's Connection explores the creative process of writing and the interplay between thoughts, feelings, and actions.
We are an interactive community of authors and readers who share ideas to enhance our knowledge, skills, and experiences in
writing fiction in any genre, but our emphasis remains mystery and suspense thrillers.
Published monthly, the Newsletter offers writing tips for authors, coaching suggestions, editing, and marketing information.
Topics are presented from the perspective of Keith Barton and represent only his ideas on producing your first manuscript,
and are provided to the general public. Because we are an interactive community of writers, other viewpoints are welcomed and may be
printed in future monthly newsletters with permission from Keith Barton.
2. Publisher's Note
June, 2008
Dear Writer's Connection Subscriber,
This month's newsletter features: Philip Roth's Descriptive Commentary
3. Philip Roth's Descriptive Commentary
Philip Roth's Pulitzer-prize winning 1997 book,
American Pastoral, is a masterpiece at descriptive
commentary that gives a sense of place and form to the historical period, people, and places. Swede Levov,
the protagonist, whose Jewish family immigrated to New Jersey in the early 1900s, is portrayed as the upcoming
heir to his family's glove business. The omniscient observer is his boyhood friend, Nathan Zuckerman, who later
becomes a writer.
The story begins with the aftermath
of World War II and the pranks played by boys in their coming of age reminiscent of Steven King's
short story,
Stand By Me. Swede becomes rich after a stellar athletic career and inherits his
father's glove business. Swede marries a former Miss New Jersey and the idyllic couple begin their
odyssey from normalcy to madness. The backdrop is the manufacturing prosperity of the post-war boom
in the Northeast where GIs completed their college degrees courtesy of their enlistments.
Roth's writing is similar in style to James Michener's in his rich detail and run-on sentences.
To skip the
long-flowing narratives is to miss the essence of Roth's telling of the story. The reader senses the
visceral battle between: greed and charity, hero and villain, right and wrong -- which is a universal
story of everyman and everywoman. When Swede's daughter, Merry, becomes involved in anti-war
demonstrations in the turbulent 60s, the family is torn apart, but taken with a young girl, Rita Cohen,
working on her MBA at Wharton who reminds them of their lost daughter, Merry.
The 22-year-old woman, Rita Cohen is a psychological profile of a borderline personality disordered
woman who tempts Swede to make love to her before she will tell him where his daughter, Merry, is
hiding. The coarseness of Roth's language is symptomatic of the times of free love and speech.
Amidst the bombings of malls, Federal buildings, and the Pentagon, Swede vows to find his daughter
who is somehow entangled in the bombings and has killed four people.
The family patriarch inherited their leather tannery from his father in the early 1900s when the
craft was imported from Italy. As an example of Roth's unique and compelling attention to detail, is
the following visual narrative describing the cutting floor of the tannery factory in Newark, New
Jersey in the 1950s. As the son, Swede Levov is assuming control of the tannery operation from his
father:
The cutting room, up high and full of light, had been his favorite
spot in the factory since he was just a kid and the old European
cutters came to work identically dressed in three-piece suits,
starched white shirts, ties, suspenders, and cuff links.
Each cutter would carefully remove the suit coat and hang it in
the closet, but no one in the Swede's memory had ever removed his
tie before donning a fresh white apron and getting down to the first
skin, unrolling it from the dampened muslin cloth and beginning the
work of stretching. (p 125).
The story intricately weaves past and present as the dynamics are played out between Swede's
beauty-queen wife, Dawn, and the hapless, rotund 16-year old daughter, Merry, who leaves home and
becomes engaged in a commune of anti-war demonstrators and flees the country twice before returning to
New Jersey to confront Swede's father, Lou.
For Roth, sane and insane become inseparable opponents in the battle of right and wrong, absolutes and
maybes, guilty and innocent. The American dream that hard work and fairness wins in the end, is shattered
in
American Pastoral, where everything about the Levov family is anything but pastoral.
Helpful Hints:
- Pick any part of your family life and find the gray areas that defy absolutes. How were these
"edges" influential in your later life?
- Roth's premise in this book is that "everything is not as it seems". In our political world of
absolutes, think about how context affects outcome. What is different about the Vietnam War that sets
it apart from our current war in Iraq?
- Compare Roth's book with Ken Kesey's, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; compare Merry and
McMurphy as to where sanity and insanity become indistinguishable.
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About Keith Barton, Ph.D.
Dr. Barton received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of Texas at Austin and has been a practicing therapist
for over thirty years. He is currently enrolled in MentorCoach and is accepting new clients.
He has been an adjunct professor at the University of South Carolina, consultant to Fortune 500 companies in executive
development, founded and managed Texas Community Living Ventures, Inc., in 1986 for providing group home services to
persons with mental retardation, and has been running a clinical practice in Northwest Houston since 1990.
He writes part-time with the goal of completing one novel a year. His desire to coach others derives from his passionate
interest in helping others become attuned to their creative powers of storytelling.
Dr. Barton has training in coaching, cognitive and family therapy and health psychology. He has published articles, made
presentations and conducted workshops about:
Anxiety and achievement
Stress management
Self-esteem
Communication skills
Marital/relationship enrichment
Wellness issues
The relationship between psychology and spirituality
