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Winner of Pulitzer Prize
Vintage
February 1998
432 pages ISBN: 0375701427 Trade Size (reprint)
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Fiction
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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