Word: swedes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rage. The effect is visceral, a queasy feeling that the bottom has fallen out of civilization, and despite our faith in reason, irrationality rules. "He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach--that it makes no sense," Roth writes about his paragon of decency and convention, Seymour ("Swede") Levov, star athlete of Weequahic High in Newark, New Jersey, during the early 1940s...
Roth has frequently celebrated his once predominantly Jewish alma mater as something like a yeshiva of assimilation. Swede, so called for his tall, blond, blue-eyed good looks, is built for a speedy launch into the American mainstream. His luck seems endless. He joins the Marines as World War II is ending; he returns from service to prepare to take over Newark Maid, his father's successful glove factory; and he marries the former Mary Dawn Dwyer, Miss New Jersey...
...Every time she passes a young woman, Mary Dawn hopes it is her daughter. Hope, in fact, is no help. It only inflames the pain every day. Eventually the mother starts to habituate expensive psychiatric clinics. The ideal marriage dissolves, and long before he sickens with terminal prostate cancer, Swede begins to die of heartbreak...
Despite generous reprieves of humor, dialogue that leaps directly from page to ear and a richly textured narrative about the lost world of the '40s and '50s, Roth never lets up on his Jersey Job. When, after five years, Swede tracks down his daughter, she is living as Mary Stoltz in a squalid room in crumbling downtown Newark. She is worse than dead: an unwashed, half-starved, self-styled member of the Jain religion who prattles about the murderous effect soap and water have on germs at the same time that she confesses having blown up three more people...
This moral lunacy is dramatized with the piercing common sense that characterizes both Roth's funniest and soberest works. "The world is not a place on which I have influence or wish to have any," says Merry through a veil, a safety net for microbes. Swede's reply cries out to distraught parents everywhere: "You are influencing me! You who will not kill a mite are killing me...your powerlessness is power over me, goddamn...