In examining two books from the cold war, Philip Roth's American Pastoral (London: Vintage Books, 1998) and E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel (London: Penguin Books, 2006), it is very interesting to note the comparison and contrast between the different characters within the novels' pages. Most interesting is the contrast between those characters of an older generation who grew up before the advent of the Cold War, compared to those younger characters who were born in the midst of the Cold War period, and how these characters cope, and in some cases fail to cope with the experiences occurring in America during this period.
What both Philip Roth and E.L. Doctorow show in the characters of an older generation is a reminiscing for a past viewed as much simpler than the present, a ‘turn-your-back and pretend nothing is going on' mentality to what is happening around them during the Cold War, and a certain acknowledgement that nothing they can do will ever change what is occurring in America. However, with the younger generation born and brought up during the Cold War, both authors depict their characters as men and women of action, ideals, and complex inner feelings as they struggle to come to terms with what their country is doing and becoming.
As someone from these two novels who represents the older generation, American Pastoral's Swede copes with these new experiences by reminiscing for the past and taking a neutral, ‘hands off' approach to the present. The Swede was born into a pre World War II generation, and missed out on serving in the Pacific during the war as a teenage marine by a matter of mere months. He was from a generation who were proud of America and all it stood for, and hence were proud to call themselves Americans. Being a male and the eldest sibling in a small Jewish family, the Swede was groomed for success, given responsibility at an early age and expected by his father, Lou Levov, to take over the family glove making business in Newark. For the Swede the America he knew as a child was changing before his eyes, and the concept of the Cold War and war against Vietnam were alien to him.
However, things were different for the Swede's daughter Merry. Merry, a female and an only child, was born into the era of the Cold War. For Merry, the experiences of living during the Cold War and the War in Vietnam would have been all she would ever have known, even though she was growing up in the relative comfort of Old Rimrock. Merry did not know the Swede's sense of American patriotism as she was growing up, because her experience of the Cold War period did not foster this in her.
The Swede also takes a completely passive view of the changes going on in his country and the changes occurring in his daughter. This passiveness is almost a result of a disbelief in what is happening and what could happen. He does not believe that in the country he loves, anything untoward could adversely affect or happen to his one and only daughter. When Merry goes to New York and begins hanging out with student radicals and anti-war protestors, the Swede does not stop her from going but rather tries to place her in the care of adult friends who are also sympathetic to the protest movement.
Even when he finds Merry, five years after the bombing of the Old Rimrock post office and convenience store, he cannot even bring himself to drag her away from her squalid existence as a Jain in a Newark hovel. The Swede's complacency and passive nature concerning the experience is summed up by his younger brother Jerry who yells at him in a telephone conversation where the Swede confesses to him that he has finally found his daughter. "What did you think was going to happen ... get off your ass and do something ..." (p. 273-274) Even in political arguments between the Swede's father, Lou Levov, and his daughter Merry, the Swede does not take sides. Instead he acts merely as a "moderator for these two dynamos, a role he preferred to being the adversary of either." (p. 291) The same indifference can also be seen in other characters of the Swede's generation. The Swede's wife, Dawn, would rather have a perfectly happy daughter who does not rock the boat than one who is politically fired up and angst ridden about what is going on in her time.
In contrast to her father and the older generation, the way Merry copes or fails to cope with the experiences brought about by the Cold War is to confront what she does not agree with head on. Merry has no qualms about entering into heated discussions and arguments with her father, grandfather or anyone else that will listen over various topics brought to the fore by the Cold War. Merry confronts these issues to the point where she bombs the local post office and general store at Old Rimrock in protest at the American Government, and then proceeds to go into hiding for the next five years, building and planting more bombs with which to attack the establishment.
