AMERICAN PASTORAL by Philip Roth

The title of this novel is an intentional misnomer.  Plus, the main character’s daughter Merry is anything but.  In fact, she’s the reason that Seymour “The Swede” Levov’s life is not the pastoral existence he has strived for.  The Swede is an extraordinary high school athlete who later marries Miss New Jersey and takes over the reins of his father’s leather glove manufacturing business.  His near-perfect life in the late 1960s is shattered when Merry as a teenager becomes an activist against the Vietnam War and purportedly bombs the local general store, killing a well-loved physician.  Merry then goes underground, and the Swede’s only link to her is a mysterious young woman named Rita Cohen.  As the novel progresses, the Swede gains more and more disturbing information about Merry and the bombing, but I didn’t think the ending brought sufficient closure.  Other than that, this was a compelling novel about a family trying to come to terms with their child having done the unthinkable.  The Swede does a lot of ruminating on what may have driven Merry to violence, and I think Roth gets carried away at times.  I love his character treatment, but his verbosity gets to me when he’s describing flowers and countryside, for example.  Some reviewers have complained about the bleakness of this novel, but I felt that the happy ending, so to speak, is really at the beginning when the Swede is waxing poetic about his sons from his second marriage.  Knowing how his life turns out kept me from getting totally depressed while reading this book, and I think Roth wisely gives the reader the good news first.