Domestic terror: 1970s radicalism in Philip Roth’s An American Pastoral and Susan Choi’s An American Woman

Abstract

A generation after the Vietnam War ended, Philip Roth and Susan Choi published novels that place the radical protesters of that era in the context of American history. Each examines the legacy of violence in the US; Roth’s American Pastoral (first published 1997) evokes the Revolutionary War and John Brown’s anti-slavery insurrection, while Choi’s American Woman (first published 2003) notes the violence of the Gold Rush and the settlement of California. Each lays particular emphasis on the legacy of World War II and its influence on the generation of radical youth born in its immediate aftermath. Roth sees Merry Levov’s career as a bomber in terms of her largely ignored family history, which includes grandparents shaped by the knowledge that their European cousins were being killed in German camps, her father’s combat service in the South Pacific, and the brutalities of the immigrant experience. Choi sets Wendy Yoshimura’s bomb-making in the context of her father’s repressed experience of the war years, when the US interned him because of his Japanese parentage and later prosecuted him for failing to honour a draft notice sent to him in the camp. Both novels see the violence of the Vietnam era, the war itself and the radical protests, as very much in the mainstream of American history, in which a nation that officially begins with a revolutionary war erupts into civil war less than a century later.