American Pastoral

Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov. A star athlete at his Newark high school, he comes of age in the booming postwar years, when a grandson of immigrants could marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit a thriving glove factory, and buy a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. But one day in 1968, Swede's luck fails him. For on that day his adored daughter, Merry, a loving child who has turned into a sullen, fanatical teenager, plants a bomb at Old Rimrock's post office - a bomb that kills a stranger and hurls Swede out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk.