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Readings of American Pastoral commonly center on the failures or limitations of the American dream, on the multi-generational immigrant experience of upward mobility and ethnic assimilation, and/or on the political and cultural convulsions of the 1960s. To set the book beside To the Lighthouse is to place it within a broader transnational context and subsume Roth the historian of twentieth-century America to Roth the metahistorian and metaphysician reflecting on forces of destruction inimical to civilized order and operative across time. The aim of this essay is twofold: to situate American Pastoral more firmly within the revolutionary context of the 1960s and at the same time, through Woolf, to consider its historicism as it extends beyond the story of the Levovs and America to a disorder latent in things and capable of erupting at any time.

Hawthorne and Dostoyevsky are united not only by the common subject of crime and punishment but also by their preoccupation the operation of what both regarded as “moral law.” In the absence of traditional religious belief, moral law was the writers’ conduit to universal order and to God. Yet what moral law was—real or socially conditioned, naturalistic or supernatural—was a mystery to them and became more so as they explored how the mind operated. The essay focuses on three texts— Crime and Punishment , The Scarlet Letter , and The Marble Faun —but it is not a traditional critical reading; it is a reflection on the vision of the writers as they trace their subject from the conscious and unconscious determinants of crime through its psychological effects to its endpoint in punishment and whatever renewal may or may not lie beyond.