American Pastoral

Nathan Zuckerman recalls his childhood worship of Seymour 'the Swede' Levov, Newark's golden boy, in rhapsodic postwar Newark. He reunites with the Swede at their 45th high school reunion in 1995 and learns the Swede's father Lou has died. The Swede dies of cancer before Zuckerman can learn more. What follows is Zuckerman's imaginative reconstruction.

Zuckerman reconstructs the Swede's family history: Lou Levov's Newark Gloves factory, the immigrant entrepreneurial ascent, the move to the New Jersey countryside, and the marriage to Dawn Dwyer, Miss New Jersey. The pastoral life at the stone farmhouse in Old Rimrock is established in full.

Merry Levov as a child: her stutter, her charm, her political awakening. The infamous scene in which Merry, at age eleven, asks her father to kiss her 'the way you kiss Mommy' — a moment Zuckerman will later identify as the first crack in the pastoral.

February 1968. Merry Levov, sixteen, bombs the Old Rimrock post office, killing Dr. Fred Conlon. She disappears. The Swede's pastoral life is instantly and permanently destroyed. The immediate aftermath: police, neighbors, the Swede's disbelief, Lou Levov's incomprehension.

Rita Cohen, a radical student, contacts the Swede claiming to be Merry's go-between. She is manipulative, aggressive, and sexually provocative. The Swede searches for Merry for years while Dawn falls apart and then reconstructs herself through a face-lift and a Swiss cattle farmer. The pastoral house becomes a shell.

The central confrontation between the Swede and Lou Levov: two generations of the American dream arguing about what went wrong. Lou cannot understand why the Swede left Newark, why he married an Irish Catholic, why he raised Merry the way he did. The immigrant father's creed versus the assimilated son's pastoral fantasy.

Years later, the Swede locates Merry in Newark, living as a Jain ascetic — thin, veiled, at peace. She has bombed three more times, killed three more people. The reunion is not a reunion. It is the final extinction of hope.

A 1973 dinner party at the Swede's home assembles the wreckage: Dawn with her new face and her lover Orcutt, the Swede barely holding together, the neighbors with their comfortable certainties. Jessie Orcutt, drunk and unstable, stabs Lou Levov in the eye with a fork. The novel ends mid-explosion.