Description: As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.
For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager--a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longer-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.

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Reviews: This blockbuster of a book won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Roth tells the story through the eyes of Seymour "Swede" Levov, a typical all-American boy. He is a star athlete in high school, enters the Marine Corps after graduation, and returns home to marry Miss Jersey. They buy and move into a pre-Revolutionary War house five miles outside the quaint, but WASP, rural town of Old Rimrock, New Jersey. Swede inherits and successfully runs the family glove business. Dawn breeds cattle on their 100-acre property. They have one daughter, Merry, who is the delight of her parents and grandparents. They have it all; they have achieved the American dream. The Vietnam War begins during Merry's adolescent years. This extremely intelligent 16-year-old girl rebels against America's involvement in this conflict. She is loud, obnoxious and violent. She is so incensed by the war that she joins the Weathermen, secretly makes a bomb, and blows up the Old Rimrock general store and post office, killi...

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