1 Paper for AEDEAN 2019 Panel on Modern and Contemporary Literature Lluvia de Segovia de Kraker, PhD student at UCM. Making American Reality Credible: Philip Roth’s Affective Realism How is it possible to make American reality credible? Philip Roth illustrates this difficulty by telling how in 1956 the city of Chicago was shaken by the story of the murder of the Grimes sisters, which was covered sensationally by the media at the time. Roth narrates the harrowing details of this case in order to illustrate how “the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination” (Roth 2017: 27). This was not only true in the sixties, when Roth wrote that speech, but also in our contemporary scene, as Roth continued to point out when speaking about Trump, for example. 1 When reality is presented by the media, it seems utterly incredible and very hard to take in for the public. Considering this gap between reality and the reader, it is worth looking into the question of how Roth tackles the problem of realism, and in what way he makes the American contemporary scene seem credible in his fiction. And not only is there credibility in his fiction, but also an element that is lacking in the discourse of journalistic writing: Roth bridges the gap by adding the element of affection. Leonard, Kathy Boudin and the characters of American Pastoral: In order to illustrate this, I will look at a specific scene in Roth’s novel American Pastoral (1997), particularly when in Chapter 6, the main character, called the Swede, finds his runaway terrorist daughter, Merry, at last. I have chosen this scene because of the connection between fiction and the historical events, which serves the purpose to point at how the text renders the ugly, terrible qualities of reality while it also creates empathy by adding the representation of emotions and affection. Gradually, the novel has revealed what the narrator imagines happened with Merry, and how she plants a bomb in her hometown, Little Rimrock, New Jersey. Roth based the young girl’s involvement in an anti-war organization, the explosion and the ensuing flight on a true story that was covered in the news in the seventies: Kathy Boudin, a young woman who was a member of the violent anti-war group called the Weather Underground, and the crimes she perpetrated. Philip Roth had heard first-hand accounts about the explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970, because he knew people who lived close by and it was extensively covered in the news. The explosion killed three people and Boudin fled and went underground with the organization, going into hiding for years, while her parents appeared on TV asking their daughter to come back. This violent episode coupled with the fact that it was unexpected and impossible to accept for the parents probably inspired Roth in the writing of this novel about “America run amok”, the first of what is called the American Trilogy. Additionally, the bomb that Kathy and the members of this 1 See Roth’s comments on president Donald Trump in his emails to The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/philip-roth-e-mails-on-trump