Description

Whilst the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that's an elegy for several our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark senior school, who matures in the booming post-war years to marry a former Miss Nj, inherit his father's glove factory, and transfer to a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And the other day in 1968, Swede's stunning National fortune deserts him.For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, is continuing to grow from the warm, quick witted woman right into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teen with the capacity of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched from the extended-for American pastoral and in to the indigenous American berserk.