Seymour “Swede” Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father’s Newark glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s.Not even the most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate America’s rise and fall - of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder.
For the Swede is not allowed to stay forever blissful inside the beloved one-hundred-and-seventy-year old stone farmhouse, in rural Old Rimrock, where he lives with his pretty wife - the college sweetheart who was Miss New Jersey 1949 - and the lively, precocious daughter who is the apple of his eye. The apple of his eye, that is, until she grows up to be a revolutionary terrorist bent on destroying her father’s paradise.
