Seymour "Swede" Levov comes of age just after World War II, in a thriving and triumphant America. A legendary high school athlete, the diligent and successful inheritor of his father's glove factory, the proprietor of an eighteenth-century stone house in the heart of WASP country, the devoted husband of a beautiful and intelligent wife, and the father of a charming daughter, the Swede appears to have fulfilled the ambitions of generations of struggling forebears. But his carefully constructed life begins to collapse as he and America face the challenges of the turbulent sixties, and he sees his adored daughter, Merry turn, first into a rebellious adolescent and then into a revolutionary terrorist. As Swede Levov watches in bewilderment everything he treasures, everything so industriously created by his family over the course of three generations, is blown up by an angry girl's bomb. American Pastoral is a wrenching and cathartic piece of work. It is a book about America: about loving and hating it, about wanting to belong and refusing to belong.