American Pastoral is the 18th in Philip Roth’s catalog of 27 novels he wrote before declaring his retirement in 2012. The novel’s opening chapters are narrated from the point of view of the elderly Nathan Zuckerman, who, as a successful Jewish-American writer from New Jersey, is a typical Roth stand-in and a recurring character in his books. Within the first 100 pages, however, Zuckerman’s voice is sidelined in favor of an omniscient, third-person narrator. The rest of the novel is dedicated to the life that Zuckerman imagines his childhood neighbor and idol, Seymour Levov, to have lived.

As a sleight of hand, the narrative structure of American Pastoral is effective. The action is recounted in hindsight, and progresses in mostly linear fashion over a span of five or so years. Roth also threads this progress with earlier episodes in the Levov’s lives. The complex frame-tale-cum-flashback set of conceits is handled with ease.

For all that is compelling about Seymour and his wife, Dawn, they are never as convincing as Zuckerman; they remain archetypes. It is as if Roth knew that he couldn’t expect the reader to suspend disbelief, and therefore designated Seymour and Dawn as meta-fictional creations of Zuckerman from the beginning. Both are flat surfaces onto which Roth projects his dramatic impulses.

In a book filled with bravura passages, the best and most honest ones appear in Zuckerman’s narration. Here is one climax of a much longer rumination: “The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong, and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That is how we know we're alive: we're wrong.” It bears affirming that Roth is a writer of intelligence and fine technique, as well as a master comedian who possesses something of Woody Allen’s disarming immediacy.

The book’s central conflict is a violent event that creates emotional, moral, familial, and legal tectonic ripples. Its impenetrable horror is the engine that drives the narrative. Seymour’s radicalized daughter, Merry, protests the Vietnam War by blowing up a post office, along with a local doctor. The bomb upends what has so far been Seymour’s happy and upwardly mobile life, and the book consists largely in aggrieved circling of the fact of the explosion. The parents continue to search for a framing of events that will lend the bomb intelligibility and meaning, but they fail, over and over, to integrate it into their conception of their lives. They wonder what she could possibly have been reacting against. Where did we (as parents, and as a country) go wrong?

A pastoral can be defined as a work of literature portraying an idealized version of country life, so the work’s title could easily be taken ironically. But Roth, as its guiding intelligence, seems reluctant to give up the pastoral ideal. Levov and others return endlessly to the question of culpability but can find none in their own past conduct. They know themselves to be law-abiding, hard-working, kind, and above all (in their own estimation) reasonable people.

Yet if the girl were simply insane, the narrative would be meaningless. Where is the interest in an act of random violence? The answer at which I, as a reader, arrived (even if Levov did not) was that American Pastoral must be a tragic recognition of the limitations of both America’s post-war milieu and its vivid backlash. If Merry seems to be part of the sixties revolution and its rejection of American consumerism and imperialism, her crime (and Roth’s treatment of it) function as an indictment of the utopianism, militarism, irreverence and utter childishness of some elements of the hippie subculture. Levov and his novel find repose in one type of conservative ideal: a pastoral life in which common sense prevails over idology and where bourgeois morality takes precedence over hip antinomianism.

As Levov’s philandering, non-Jewish neighbor remarks during the long dinner scene that serves as the book’s coda: “Today, to be what they call ‘repressed’ is a source of shame to people—and not to be repressed used to be.” As Seymour’s usually comic father responds in a pages-long, plaintive rant that follows: “I sometimes think that more has changed since 1945 than in all the years of history there have ever been. I don't know what to make of the end of so many things.” It is a few pages after this note of uncertainty toward endings that the book arrives at its own, by which point it has posed many somber questions about American society but little in the way of answers—beyond a backward glance.