American Pastoral

Seymour 'Swede' Levov is the golden boy of Jewish Newark, a gifted athlete who inherits his father's glove factory, marries a former Miss New Jersey and settles into a stone house in the WASP countryside, the very picture of a life gone right. Then, at the height of the Vietnam years, his stammering teenage daughter Merry plants a bomb in the local post office to protest the war, kills a bystander and vanishes, and the Swede's ordered world collapses into a bewilderment he cannot reason his way out of. Narrated through the imagining of Roth's recurring alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, who reconstructs the story from a high-school reunion decades later, the novel refuses the comfort of explanation. Roth, in a book widely held to be the summit of his late surge, turns one family's ruin into an inquest on the American century itself. What it is really about is the fantasy of innocence: the belief that decency, effort and love can shield a life from history, and the shattering discovery that they cannot.