The sad downfall of a serious man. Meet Seymour "Swede" Levov, who is living the postwar culmination of the American Dream, but is still pleased to meet you and really cares about what you have to say. The Swede is running the multimillion-dollar glove business bequeathed him by his father, married to a former Miss New Jersey, living in a 170-year-old house in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, and the father of a girl named Merry who was born for--forced into, judging by the name--joy. Joy is their birthright as Americans and the only fitting life for a sports hero and big man on campus, a Marine drill instructor, the scion of hardworking Jewish immigrants whose unstinting pursuit of the middleclass dream has come somehow to fruition in the blond WASPiness that gives Seymour the nickname Swede. He is omnicompetent, omnidiligent, omnirighteous, and omnikind. And his family is lovely.

What on Earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?

Only that their American Pastoral is bought at the expense of the "indigenous American Berserk", and their touchpoints--God, country, the conscientious capitalist, rock-ribbed decency and the blameless refusal to develop their own depths--cannot possibly withstand the physical stresses of the geopolitical, psychosocial, and sexual sexual sexual tensions brought home to roost by the old techniques of control finally hitting hyperspeed. Vietnam confronts the Swede Levovs of America with their hypocrisy, and they can swallow the blow--it's in their nature to be happy, to be okay.

But the children can't. Not the children of this world of boundless promise. They are entirely incapable of accepting the price in hate and blood and neo-imperialism. Too spoiled, you know. Never got the chance to work out their fucked-up guilt with a world war. It all unravels with the children. And so Swede Levov's child starts to stutter, starts to crack, and then she goes and blows up a mailbox and a decent country doctor and her family and the suburban dream and the promise of infinite growth. And that's where this story begins--in human hell.

And the scary thing is that it's not just the historical moment. With deftness, Roth marshals repressed sexuality and miscegenation and being a Jew in America and the tension between the social contract and building something for yourself and . . . the simple decline of age, and just overwhelms the reader with these shockwaves of chaos. There is so much chaos. And with tenderness he embraces his poor Levovs and says, How could they have been other than what they were? And with burning sardonic eyes he says, They were doomed from the start.

I'll never forget that reunion moment with Nathan Zuckerman, the narrator, and the girl who wouldn't let him take off her bra in high school. They fall into each other's arms in tears and she says she should have let him do it and you think, We're all just humans in this together and all we can do is cling to each other in the valley of the shadow of death. And for me--I was no sports hero, but in my own quiet Canadian way I've skirted the valley of the shadow of golden-boyness and the gift for decency and joy that is the result of everything coming easily. And like the Swede, ignored the darkness under this blond life for so long, the need to support and underpin your loved ones and friends and take their pain into you, the impossibility of coming to terms with your own ineffectuality in the face of the chaos, the chaos, and the inability to hate anyone for it except yourself for failing . . . how does the man built to help and care come to terms with the irreducible kernel of satanic rage?

I don't want to end like Roth does, with a question. I want to blink back tears and proceed on an assumption, and not an integrated grand-narrative assumption like the Swede's, which the slightest shock--or tiniest mortal blow--can bring down. I look at the women who dominate the denouement here--the demonic Marcia Umanoff, the sunny, hollow Jessie Orcutt, and the speech pathologist Sheila Salzman, whose role in the plot is pivotal and whose actions have a complex mix of good and ill effects upon which no summary judgment can be passed. But what she does? She doesn't run or hide or lie. She thinks, and resolves, and tries.

I'm gonna be a speech pathologist too. But broader than that: I think to be a healer is the highest human calling. To heal the specific ill is a prayer against the unhealable infinitude of human pain. ( )

Nathan Zuckerman returns to narrate the story of his childhood idol, Seymour "The Swede" Levov. The Swede has lived a charmed life as a high school sports star who becomes a successful businessman and marries a beauty queen. His life takes a dark turn, however, when his troubled teen-aged daughter succumbs to the violence and hysteria of 1960s America. His earnest pursuit of the American dream does not prepare him for the betrayal that he ultimately experiences, and he dies without being able to understand or accept the undeserved cruelty of his fate.

Roth frames the story of the The Swede with Nathan Zuckerman's own attempts to understand the man he had once idolized. Zuckerman ultimately realizes that he has misread The Swede, that what pertains on the surface of the person does not well reflect the unknowable core of suffering and responsibility that motivates him from within.

This is a nuanced portrait of a magnetic personality and those who orbit around him without ever guessing at the tragedy behind the man. ( )

This is my third Roth, following Portnoy's Complaint and Sabbath's Theater. I was voluntarily Roth-less for about three years following each of my prior Roth reads, and it will likely be three more years before I pick him up again. It's not Roth's prose that accounts for my reluctance. He write good, especially when he's describing Newark in its bustling, industrial heyday. But I don't read novels to get depressed, and Roth's novels depress me. It's not the subject matter - my current fav Denis Johnson isn't all about rainbows and unicorns. But Roth's powerful descriptions of his characters' internal miseries effectively drag me down into the hopeless territory they are inhabiting. The lack of resolution of the most interesting plot line was also irritating. ( )

Got this out of the library, kind of hated to take it back. Roth is as good as ever, maybe better. So, it's ten years old now, and maybe the stuff about the daughter sounds a bit dated. But the voice is irresistible, and the details about the glove making business turn out to one of the best things in it. So, maybe I'll buy, if I can find room on the shelf. ( )

wow, amazing writing, story has really stuck with me ( )