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In A Nutshell
The good news: when you're done with American Pastoral, you have two more books left in Philip Roth's American Trilogy.
The bad news: American Pastoral is so deeply affecting, so upsetting, so brain-tinglingly Postmodern and so dryly hilarious and biting that... oh, wait. That's also good news.
Okay. The bad news: American Pastoral is such a nuanced and clever look at 20th Century American politics and the media, and has such deeply flawed yet sympathetic characters that... hmm. Still good news.
All right. All right. Here: don't read American Pastoral if you're thinking of buying property in Newark, New Jersey between 1967 and 1995. That's the bad news. This book will dissuade you from time-traveling and flipping houses.
American Pastoral, first published in 1997, is the twenty-second (yeah, you read that right) book by American author Philip Roth. It was nominated for the 1997 National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is on Time magazine's list of the top 100 novels since 1923. Oh yeah—it was a national bestseller, a New York Times editors' choice, and it was awarded the coveted Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
See why we couldn't find any reasons why reading American Pastoral would be bad news bears?
But don't crack this bad boy expecting a happy-go-lucky romp through malt-shop mid- century American. American Pastoral is one of Roth's many tragic novels. And boy oh boy is it depressing: at his high school reunion Zuckerman learns that the daughter of his childhood idol bombed a small-town post office when she was sixteen and killed a doctor. As you can imagine, this tragedy wreaks havoc on the Levov family. Zuckerman sets out to imagine the Swede's life and to explore the effects of the tragedy on the family, all the while interrogating ideas of the American dream.
So put aside all your Americana fantasies. Forget about happy families on rural farms. Forget about peaceful Vietnam War-era hippies offering flowers to soldiers. Forget about the snazzy first days of disco. The America in American Pastoral is, from the early sixties onward, gritty and nightmarish. It's real.
We'll let you keep your nurse-and-sailor-kissing-in-Times-Square WWII-era American dream, though—after all, the Swede remembers those days fondly—and we promise we won't touch 1990's nostalgia. Some things, like Daria, are just sacred.
WHY SHOULD I
CARE?
Everyone's been jealous of someone. They might be a Regina George-type queen bee, who does a car commercial in Japan and can punch whoever they like in the face and leave them sighing, "It was awesome. "
Or perhaps you know someone that's kind of like American Pastoral's "the Swede" Levov. Someone who women want and men want to be. A guy who can out-smooth James Bond, who inspires men to write poems to their girlfriends apologizing for not being as cool as he is, who is so gleaming and perfect that you want to hate him... if only he wasn't so cool, so smart, so kind, so handsome.
There's someone like the Swede in everyone's present, but characters like the Swede tend to exist most often in the past. These mysterious creatures appear most often during the glory days of high school. And dang do we obsesses over them. We obsess over them so much, in fact, that many of us find ourselves thinking about these bright stars for years after we've last seen them.
But what would happen if you not only ran into one of these mythical beings, but also found out that their lives had taken a turn for the dark and twisted?
Well, you might just be tempted to write a novel about them.
American Pastoral is the story of a man who looks perfect on the outside—married to a beauty queen, rich and utterly irresistible, but inside he's shattered with pain, grief, doubt, and guilt. And just as we see the dark inside of the Swede Levov, we also get a peek into the underside of The American Dream, which the novel calls "the American berserk" (3).
Maybe American Pastoral will make you think seriously about your own notions of the American Dream. Maybe it will be a lesson in compassion, nuance, and human complexity. Maybe it will stop you from turning into a green-eyed monster every time you think about your own personal Swede Levov.
Or maybe it will just provide hours of awesome reading. Any way you cut it, American Pastoraldelivers a win. Just like the Swede did in back in his glory days.
How It All Goes Down
taken a vow of non-violence. The Swede also learns that Merry's speech therapist hid her for the first few days after the bombing. The section ends with a brutal conversation between the Swede and his brother Jerry, where Jerry blames the Swede for what's become of Merry.
The novel's final section ("Paradise Lost") begins with the Swede imagining his earlier life with Merry and Dawn in Rimrock. The Swede returns home after his visit with Merry, and the rest of the novel centers around a dinner party happening at the Swede's house that night. First he visits with his parents, in from Florida. They discuss Merry with some anxiety.
Bill and Jessie Orcutt are the first to arrive, and we learn some of Orcutt's family history. Barry and Marcia Umanoff and Shelly and Sheila Salzman are also in attendance. The conversation turns to Watergate, and then to the film Deep Throat, reminding us that we are in the 1970s. When the Swede goes to the kitchen to find Orcutt and tell him his wife Jessie is having problems, he sees Dawn and Bill Orcutt having sex in the kitchen.
Soon after, the Swede gets a call from Rita Cohen, accusing him of trying to take Merry away from her. We learns about the Swede's brief affair with Sheila, Merry's speech therapist, and see the Swede confront her about hiding Merry in her apartment just after the Rimrock bombing—a fact he's just learned from Merry.
Throughout the section, the Swede tries to decide whether to go back and get Merry out of the awful room, to run away with Sheila, or to run away with Merry. The novel ends with the Swede's father getting "stabbed" (9) in the face with a fork when he's trying to force a very drunk Jessie Orcutt to eat pie. The fork barely misses Lou's eye. We aren't given details of the extent of his physical injuries, though it's implied they are minor. We certainly hope so, since Marcia Umanoff is laughing at him. The novel's last lines are as follows:
They'll never recover. Everyone is against [the Levovs], everyone and everything that does not like their life. All the voices from without, condemning and rejecting their life!
And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs? (9. 355, 356)
AMERICAN
PASTORAL PART
1, CHAPTER 1
SUMMARY
● BACK
● NEXT
● Part 1 is called "Paradise Remembered." ● The novel begins with the following sentence: "The Swede." (1) ● The narrator (unnamed at this point) explains that the Swede is the name of an amazing "high school athlete" (1) when the narrator was a kid. ● Then we get a flashback: ● The Swede is amazing in part because of his looks. ● The narrator says that "the few fair complexioned Jews in our predominantly Jewish public high school" (1) don't look anything like the Swede. ● The Swede is Jewish, too, but he doesn't look Jewish. He has blue eyes, blond hair. He looks like a Viking. ● (Viking: "any of the Scandinavian people who raided the coasts of Europe from the 8th to the 11th centuries." Swedish people are Scandinavian, hence the nickname.) ● The Swede has starring roles in high school football, basketball, and baseball. ● As long as the Swede is on the team, everybody is happy, win or lose. ● The parents of the Jewish kids in the neighborhood, many of them without education, work really hard to support families and value education (grades) over sports. ● Because of the Swede, the neighborhood is able to "enter into a fantasy about itself" (1), a fantasy that sports can help them forget about "real life" and focus on, well, sports. ● The neighborhood uses sports as a way to "forget the war" (1. 2). ● Somehow the Swede gives them hope that their relatives fighting in the war against Germany and Japan (World War II) will come home alive. ● The neighborhood worships him like a god. ● The narrator wonders what this must have been like for the Swede. ● At the games, The Swede even has his own cheer: ● "Swede Levov! It rhymes with... "The Love!"...[...]" (1). ● No grownups are ever rude to him. They show him respect and call him "Swede." Some of the mothers call him "Seymour" (his real name). ● Sometimes girls call him "Levov of my life!" (1). ● In those days, the narrator is friends with the Swede's brother, Jerry Levov.
● He is still in basic training in Parris Island, South Carolina when the US bombs Hiroshima and the war soon comes to an end. ● So, the Swede spends his time as a Marine on Parris Island as a drill instructor. ● He gets engaged to "an Irish Catholic girl" (1). ● Lou Levov comes down to Parris Island and doesn't leave until the couple is broken up. ● The Swede comes home in 1947, when he's twenty, and enrolls in Upsala College. ● At this point in time, the narrator is in high school. He and his friends would go to watch the Swede play baseball at the home games. ● When the narrator is in college he hears that the Swede has joined Newark Maid. ● He later hears that the Swede is married to a Miss New Jersey who competed in the 1949 Miss America Contest. ● "A shiksa," the narrator thinks. "Dawn Dwyer. He'd done it." (1) ● ("Shiksa" is a term that shows up often in Roth novels. Shiksas are any non- Jewish women. The term can be used derogatorily or for humorous effect. Jewish parents like Lou Levov don't want their sons marrying shiksas.) ● (Now the novel skips forward) ● In 1985 the narrator is in New York with friends to watch a baseball game, the New York Mets vs. the Houston Astros. ● Suddenly, the narrator sees the Swede, who is thirty-six years older than when Zuckerman last saw him. ● He's looking good and is wearing an incredibly nice suit. He has a child with him, obviously a son. ● The narrator goes up to the Swede and tells him he used to be friends with the Swede's brother in the neighborhood. ● The Swede says to the narrator, "You're Zuckerman? [...] The author?" (1) ● Zuckerman says that he is indeed Zuckerman the author. ● They make a little small talk. The Swede introduces Zuckerman and his son, Chris; Zuckerman introduces the Swede and his friends. ● When the Swede leaves, he calls Zuckerman "Skip." ● His friends tease him about it. This was Zuckerman's nickname when he was a kid because he skipped some grades. ● After the Swede leaves, one of Zuckerman's friends tells him, "You should have seen your face—you might well have told us he was Zeus. I saw just what you looked like as a boy" (1). ● Ten years later (1995), Zuckerman gets a letter from the Swede. ● In the letter, the Swede says he wants to take Zuckerman to dinner in New York City and talk to him. ● He says that his father (Lou) died the year before, at ninety-six. ● The Swede has been "trying to write a tribute" (1) to Lou to share with friends and family, and he wants Zuckerman's advice. ● He ends the letter by saying, "Not everyone knew how much he suffered because of the shocks that befell his loved ones" (1). ● He says he'll understand if Zuckerman doesn't have time to meet him.
● Zuckerman tells us that he wouldn't normally agree to meet someone to talk about a tribute for their father. ● But he has "compelling reasons for [...] getting a note off to the Swede — within the hour" (1), agreeing to meet him. ● First, the Swede was his idol, and he is flooded with memories of him. ● Zuckerman wonders "where was the Jew" (1) in the Swede? He thinks, "You couldn't find it yet you knew it was there" (1). ● The Swede just looks and acts so perfectly "all-American." ● He wonders, "what did [the Swede] do for subjectivity? What was the Swede's subjectivity?" (1) ● (In other words, is the Swede something besides his perfect good looks, his complete success, and his star quality? A person's "subjectivity" is their introspection, their self-analysis, their beliefs and desires: what is "under their skin.") ● Because Zuckerman idolized the Swede, he can't imagine anything that is under his perfect surface. ● Zuckerman tells us that "the second reason [he answers] the Swede's letter" (1) is because he's curious about the Swede's "substratum," (1) what's underneath his visible surface. ● He wants to know about the Swede's inner life, and if there were things that challenged and disrupted all that perfection. ● Zuckerman knows that "no one gets through unmarked by brooding, grief, confusion, and loss" (1). ● But Zuckerman just can't imagine it in the case of the Swede. ● Zuckerman ponders the line in the letter where the Swede talks about shocks. ● He thinks that, "The Swede has suffered a shock" (1) and that this shock is what he really wants to talk about. ● But, Zuckerman tells us, "I was wrong" (1). ● He and the Swede meet at the Italian restaurant, Vincent's, where the Swede is a regular, and Zuckerman can see instantly that he isn't going to get anywhere near the substratum. ● Rather, the Swede seems to be showing Zuckerman that nothing has changed; the Swede is just as adored and worshiped as before. ● The Swede doesn't have to order. His running order for the past thirty years is baked ziti and clams posillipo. ● Zuckerman orders chicken cacciatore. ● Now Zuckerman is bored. ● The Swede comes out with (groan) the photos of his children, Chris, 18, Steve, 16, and Kent, 14. ● Their mother is a blond woman who looks about forty. ● As the meal "wore on" (1. 55), Zuckerman sees more and more surface Swede. Still no sign of what could be underneath. ● The Swede, he thinks, is "incognito" (1), a person with a hidden identity. ● Soon, Zuckerman wonders if the Swede might actually be insane, if something has "warned him" (1) against ever "run[ing] counter to anything" (1).
● The coat is too stiff and Jerry can't get it into the fancy department store box, so he and Zuckerman have too tear it apart and re-stitch it so it folds. ● The girl freaks out when she opens the box. ● His father gets mad at him for not properly curing the skins and for cutting up the Swede's parachute. ● Jerry knows the coat smells awful, so he pours his mother's expensive perfume all over it. ● By the time it gets to the girl's house, it smells really, really awful. ● She thinks Jerry hunted the hamsters himself and made the coat as some kind of cruel joke. ● (Flashback over) ● The Swede tells Zuckerman that Jerry is a heart surgeon now and has been married four times. ● He asks the Swede how many times he's been married. He thinks the Swede's wife in the picture looks too young to be a first wife, but he can't imagine the Swede getting a divorce. ● The Swede says, "Two wives, that's my limit" (1. 96). ● Jerry, he says, keeps marrying the nurses in his office and has six kids. ● Lou Levov didn't like it, but he loved his grandchildren and each of Jerry's wives. ● Apparently, Jerry is a very abrasive figure who gets what he wants by yelling. ● The conversation never does get around to the "shocks" the Swede promised in his letter. Zuckerman wonders why he wants to see inside the Swede so badly. ● He leaves the dinner with the feeling that the Swede is "the embodiment of nothing." ● He tells us, "I was wrong. I was never more mistaken about anyone in my life" (1).
AMERICAN
PASTORAL PART
1, CHAPTER 2
SUMMARY
● BACK
● NEXT
(Note to the reader: We admit it. This next section is hard to summarize without telling you what it is. So we're telling you. It's the speech that Zuckerman doesn't "give at [his] forty-fifth high school reunion, a speech to [him]self masked as a speech to them" (2. 10).
● Now, you get to hear what the speech is about: ● We summarize the speech in the present tense, but remember that Zuckerman is (hypothetically) asking his classmates to remember back to the time just after World War II, the time when they were in and graduating high school.) ● This chapter begins with the sentence "Let's remember the energy" (2). ● America is in charge of a big chunk of the world. ● Americans are prospering and money is getting looser. ● Prices are getting more competitive. ● Workers are demanding higher wages. ● In Zuckerman's neighborhood, "the boys who came back alive" (2) are hanging out and playing basketball with the neighborhood kids. ● World War II comes to an end six months after Zuckerman and his class start high school. ● America is intoxicated with itself. ● Americans can "start over again, en masse, everyone in it together" (2). ● Even though the people are still nervous, and some still suffering from poverty, the whole neighborhood is "bright with industriousness" (2)—everybody is working hard at working hard. ● Sometimes the fever to have goals and work toward them is out of fear and desperation. ● (This is a Jewish neighborhood, and in 1945-1950 the news was still coming out about the Holocaust. Zuckerman is suggesting that the Jewish people in his neighborhood were working so hard to try to forget about the atrocities in Europe, as well as Anti-Semitism in the good ol' USA.) ● The neighborhood is "cohesive."
● He can't believe Mendy is here before him, not in jail or hell, places Zuckerman thought he'd wind up when they were kids. ● Actually, he's the owner of successful chain of steak houses. ● Mendy looks great, but he tells Zuckerman that he was incredibly nervous about this reunion. ● He shows Zuckerman in the reunion booklet that twenty people from their class are dead. ● Mendy asks Zuckerman if he gets his prostate checked regularly. ● Zuckerman says he does. ● Mendy tells Zuckerman that he's the one who taught Zuckerman to masturbate. ● Zuckerman thanks him, somewhat sarcastically. ● Mendy says he's famous as the "the guy who taught Skip Zuckerman to jerk off" (2). ● Zuckerman wishes he had asked people more questions at the reunion, but he was in a daze. Everything seemed too real, like he was seeing through to the truth of things. ● He runs into a guy named Ira Posner who he doesn't recognize. ● But Ira says that he used to come home with Zuckerman when they were kids, and that Zuckerman's father treated him so nicely that it changed his life. ● He runs into Alan Meisner, whose father had dry cleaners. Alan is now "a superior court judge" (2). ● After they eat dinner, and have dessert and coffee, someone asks Zuckerman, "Is it true what you said at the mike, you don't have kids or anything like that?" (2). ● Around that moment, Zuckerman sees that Jerry Levov is at the reunion; he'd arrived late.
AMERICAN
PASTORAL PART
1, CHAPTER 3
SUMMARY
● BACK
● NEXT
● Nathan Zuckerman, Jerome Levov (Jerry) ● (We are still in the high school reunion flashback.) ● Zuckerman knows Jerry lives in Florida, so he assumed he wouldn't be at the reunion. ● But here he is, with the same face Zuckerman remembers from the ping-pong ball matches, angry and hot tempered. ● A man who knows nothing of "compromise" (3). ● Jerry says he's surprised to see Zuckerman, too. ● He says that the whole reunion business is "nostalgia. It's bullshit" (3). ● (Jerry is using "nostalgia" to mean looking back with longing on an idealized past.) ● Zuckerman thinks that Jerry's insistence on looking at things his own way explains why he's been married so many times. ● Jerry asks Zuckerman why he decided to show up at the reunion. ● Zuckerman says "of all the forms of bullshit-nostalgia available this was the one least likely to be without unsettling surprises" (3). ● (Meaning, he came because he thought he could find some "unsettling surprises.") ● Jerry keeps asking Zuckerman about his life. ● He explains that he lives like a recluse, without women, just writing. ● Jerry doesn't quite believe him. ● Zuckerman changes the subject to the Swede, tells Jerry he saw him a few months ago. ● Jerry tells him that the Swede died of cancer a few days before. Jerry is in town for the funeral. ● Zuckerman can't believe it. ● Jerry begins talking about his brother, and then reveals that the Swede had a daughter named Merry, who is a "murderer" (3). ● He says that the Swede's "life was blown up by that bomb" (3). ● Zuckerman doesn't know what Jerry is talking about. ● Jerry explains that the Swede's daughter Merry, dubbed "The Rimrock Bomber" by the media, blew up the post office and killed a doctor in the process.
● Anyhow, Zuckerman knows Jerry will just say that Zuckerman got the Swede wrong in the book. ● He imagines Jerry saying, "this is the mind he didn't have. Christ, you even give him a mistress. Perfectly misjudged, Zuck. Absolutely off" (3). ● Zuckerman seems to agree with Jerry on the point. ● First, before writing the book Zuckerman goes to the "abandoned Newark Maid factory" (3), the Swede's childhood home, his home in Rimrock, and at the new store that was built to replace the one Merry had blown up along with the post office. ● He goes to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where the Swede's wife Dawn was raised, and looks at her family church. ● He is even able to get a photo of her being crowned Miss New Jersey, 1949. ● Then he rereads the books by John Tunis, the ones he first saw in the Swede's childhood bedroom. ● Zuckerman knows that his portrait of the Swede is different from the "real" Swede. ● But, he thinks that because the Swede is so hard to see through, so deeply hidden, anyone could imagine his inner life, and it would be impossible to say who is right and who is wrong. ● (The high school reunion flashback begins again.) ● The woman who interrupts Jerry asks Zuckerman if he remembers her. ● She says she's Joy Helpern. ● He remembers her. She was a pretty girl with red hair, and she looked good in a sweater. ● Zuckerman still fantasizes about her. ● They are still attracted to each other, but as usual, Zuckerman is thinking about the Swede, and his daughter's bomb. ● Zuckerman is thinking about the dinner at Vincent's, and how the Swede went on and on about his wonderful sons. ● He must have thought Zuckerman knew about Merry and the bomb and was showing him that things were now okay. ● Maybe, Merry was what the Swede really wanted to talk about to begin with. ● Zuckerman thinks about how he really missed what was right in front of his face. ● Yes, the story about writing a tribute to his father was just a ruse. ● Merry is what was tearing him up inside. The mask Zuckerman saw was the mask he puts on for the world to keep them from seeing his horror. ● He thinks the Swede must have known he was dying, and that as a dying man, the tragedy of his daughter haunted him worse than ever. ● So, he thinks that maybe telling Zuckerman, "the writer" (3. 107) will somehow help. ● But, Zuckerman imagines, the Swede realizes that telling him the story will only make it worse. ● Zuckerman can't believe that the Swede "turned to [him], of all people, and he was conscious of everything and [Zuckerman] was conscious of nothing" (3). ● He imagines the Swede's wife and sons and mother at the Rimrock house, mourning him.
● Maybe, Merry isn't really dead, and she comes out of hiding to cry over her father's grave in disguise. ● But then again, she probably is dead, Zuckerman thinks. Maybe she got murdered. ● (We are still in the high school reunion flashback.) ● As Zuckerman is thinking about the Swede, Joy is telling him the things he didn't know about her when they were kids. ● Her father had died of a heart attack before she was ten and she and her mother and brother were poor. ● Her brother slept in the kitchen, and she and her mother shared a bed. ● She didn't get close to Zuckerman because she was ashamed of her family's poverty and didn't want him to see it. ● The song "Dream" comes on and Joy starts to cry. ● Zuckerman thinks about all the old days, and, of course, about the Swede. ● He thinks that Merry is, "The daughter who transports [the Swede] out of the longed for American pastoral and [...] into the indigenous American berserk" (3). ● (For some discussion of this, see "What's Up With the Title.") ● Zuckerman and Joy are dancing to "Dream" and Zuckerman is still thinking about the Swede. ● He says, "I am thinking of the Swede's great fall and of how he must have imagined that it was founded on some failure of his own responsibility. [...] It doesn't matter if he was the cause of anything. He makes himself responsible" (3). ● (This is an important line because it shows that in the story to come, Zuckerman isn't blaming the Swede for what happened with Merry, but exploring how the Swede might have blamed himself.) ● He wonders what the Swede might have done wrong with Merry that would have made him feel most responsible. ● While he's dancing with Joy he begins to dream "a realistic chronicle" (3). ● He first imagines the Swede "in Deal, New Jersey, at the seaside cottage, the summer when his daughter was eleven" (3). ● (We are now in 1963) ● They are driving back from the beach, and Merry "half innocently and half audaciously" (3) says, "Daddy, kiss me the way you k-k-kiss umumumother" (3). ● He makes fun of her and her feelings are hurt. ● He hasn't seen her so hurt in a long time. ● Her mother puts lots of pressure on her to overcome the stuttering. ● Merry thinks that the stuttering isn't a big problem, but how her mother feels about it is. ● And now he's made fun of her. ● She's stammering, and he holds her and kisses her passionately. ● Uh oh. ● He becomes a little frightened. ● It was the first time he'd given over to a strange urge.
● She says "You f-f-ucking madman! You heartless mi-mi-mi-miserable m-monster!" (3). ● The Swede and Dawn tell her that she does have power to try to influence political figures. ● But she is just too angry. ● She also talks on the phone all the time, and she's forgotten about trying to control her stuttering. ● Babies and children are dying in Vietnam, and her stuttering problem seems insignificant to her. ● Merry's anger and her political discussions are driving Dawn nuts. ● She can't stand it when Merry says "the Democratic Republic of Vietnam" (3). ● The Swede defends Merry, saying she has "a political position" (3). ● Dawn and Merry argue all the time. ● Merry accuses her of caring more about the cows. ● (More on the cows soon.) ● Swede plays the mediator between them. ● He tries to convince Dawn that this will all pass, that it's a phase. ● Dawn thinks Merry needs more discipline. ● The Swede thinks they need to keep being "reasonable" (3) and keep having conversations with her. ● Eventually, she will outgrow this sixteen-year-old angry phase. ● They just have to keep being there for her. ● The Swede keeps talking to Merry, and she keeps trying to find out what she's up to. ● He becomes alarmed when she starts spending lots of time in New York City. ● (The next few pages of the novel cover a total of sixty seven conversations the Swede has with Merry about her trips to New York. We don't get all sixty seven conversations; but the ones we do get are numbered.) ● Apparently, Merry is hanging out with people who are "against the war" (3) and brings home literature on Communism. ● The Swede doesn't like her staying overnight in the city. ● He encourages her to try to protest the war from home in Rimrock. ● She says she doesn't like living in Rimrock anymore, and would rather live in New York. ● He asks her if she wants to go to college in New York when high school is over. ● She says she's not sure she still wants to go to college. ● When Merry doesn't come home again on a Saturday night, the Swede presses her for details. ● She says she's with friends, friends of her friend Sherry. ● The Swede says if she's going to spend the night in the city she has to stay with the family friends the Umanoffs. ● Not the Umanoffs, she says. ● She says she stays with some people named Bill, 19, and Mellissa, 22. Friends of Sherry. ● Merry says she has a responsibility to try to stop the war, and that is more important than her responsibilities as a daughter.
● She can't believe the Swede and Dawn can sit passively by while people are dying. ● Merry does stay at the Umanoffs, but doesn't like it. She wants to be with the young people. ● This goes on and on until conversation number sixty seven. ● In this conversation, the Swede again encourages Merry to be active against the war from here in Rimrock. ● Merry doesn't buy it, but she does stop going to New York, permanently, from what the Swede can see. ● And then she blows up the post office. ● The general store attached to it is also blown up. ● So is Dr. Fred Conlon. ● The store belonged to Russ Hamlin, who "had raised the American flag every morning since Warren Gamaliel Harding was president of the United States" (3).
AMERICAN
PASTORAL PART
2, CHAPTER 4
SUMMARY
● BACK
● NEXT
● Part 2 is called "The Fall." No, Roth isn't referring to the bleak Northern Irish serial killer drama. He's referring to Satan's fall from heaven. ● Merry has been missing four months now. ● Rita Cohen, who claims to be twenty-two but looks about eight, pays the Swede a visit.
Summary American Pastoral 2
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