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Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in American Pastoral, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Heroes, Legends, and Myth-Making
Family, Responsibility, and Duty
The Irrationality of Suffering
The Unknowability of Others
American Ideals
Summary
Analysis
Nathan is shocked when Jerry approaches him from across the room. Jerry is shocked to see Nathan there, too. “I was sure you’d find the sentimentality repellent,” he jokes. When Nathan asks Jerry why he came, Jerry explains that he was in the area. They joke about their respective modesty (or lack thereof) and about how time has changed them. Jerry, a doctor, remarks that being a surgeon “turns you into someone who’s never wrong.” Nathan says being a writer has quite the opposite effect: it “turns you into somebody who’s always wrong.”
Jerry and Nathan are continuing their joking banter when they observe how one’s job makes him “someone who’s never wrong,” while the other’s makes him “somebody who’s always wrong,” but Nathan’s remark also circles back to an anxiety that has plagued him since the novel’s opening pages: the fundamental human trait of being wrong about everything and everyone in life. Nathan is suggesting here that all the careful scrutiny of others and of himself that his career as a writer has compelled him to do hasn’t made him any wiser—it has only made him see how much he gets wrong about people and about life.
Themes
Jerry asks about Nathan’s life, and Nathan confirms that he lives alone in New England and hardly talks to anyone. Jerry asks if Nathan is having sex with anyone, and he’s disbelieving when Nathan responds no. Nathan explains that writing is all he has to “keep the shit at bay.” He explains that “the shit” is his anxiety about getting other people wrong—how everyone misunderstands one another.
Jerry’s crude questions about Nathan’s sex life casts him as a dirty old man—a recurring archetype in Roth’s body of work, to be sure. In this context, though, Jerry’s crudeness also functions to set him up as the Swede’s opposite: where the Swede is (according to Nathan, at least) an upright, moral person who adheres to convention, Jerry is more the hot-headed, hedonistic type.
Themes
Nathan changes the subject, noting that he saw the Swede a couple months ago. Jerry is surprised—the Swede hadn’t mentioned it. Then he informs Nathan, much to Nathan’s shock, that the Swede in fact died just last Wednesday of cancer. Nathan asks if the Swede knew he would die when Nathan met with him, and Jerry says he probably did. Jerry reflects on his brother, praising him as “the best you’re going to get in this country, by a long shot.” He describes his late brother as “very stoical,” and someone who was entirely “conventional” and had done no wrong.
Jerry’s news of the Swede’s recent death comes as a shock to Nathan (and also to readers). It now makes sense that the Swede was noticeably thin when he and Nathan met for dinner just months ago—contrary to what he told Nathan, he was gravely ill and likely knew he would soon die. Learning this likely exacerbates Nathan’s existing anxieties about getting people wrong. Jerry’s praise for his late older brother is almost comically exaggerated, perhaps suggesting irony, sarcasm, or perhaps bitterness—if everyone thought the Swede was “the best,” then Jerry, it’s implied, is (at best) second best.
Themes
Jerry continues, describing his father, Lou, as “[o]verbearing.” He recalls how Lou moved his desk into the middle of the factory so he could watch his workers. Jerry himself had steered clear of his father’s authoritarian rule and rejected the offer to take over the business, but the Swede “wasn’t built like [Jerry].” He was “too generous” and too eager to please. And so, the Swede was saddled with an “[u]nsatisfiable father, unsatisfiable wives, and the little murderer herself, the monster daughter. The monster Merry.” The Swede got through life constantly striving to charm everyone, Jerry recalls, and then “[h]is life was blown up by that bomb.”
Jerry’s ire at his father seems to confirm that he harbors resentment toward his family. Now that his mythic older brother has passed, he feels at liberty to air some of his frustrations—and, with his cryptic references to a “monster Merry” who apparently destroyed the Swede’s life with “that bomb,” it seems that Jerry is also ready to divulge some Levov family secrets.
Themes
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Nathan, confused, asks what Jerry is talking about—Merry? A bomb? Jerry explains that the Swede’s daughter, Meredith “Merry” Levov, was the “‘Rimrock Bomber’” who blew up the local post office, killing a local doctor who just happened to be there to drop off a letter on his way to work that morning. Jerry speaks derisively of Merry’s apparent act of anti-war terrorism—how she “brought the war home to Lyndon Johnson by blowing up the post office in the general store.” This was back in 1968, when such “wild behavior” among youths “was still new,” explains Jerry. Jerry explains how the Swede was powerless to stop his radical daughter. He’d tried to raise her right, reasoning with her instead of ruling over her as parents used to. He was “a liberal sweetheart of a father.”
Jerry’s shocking admission shatters everything Nathan thought he knew about the Swede. When the Swede earlier admitted to Nathan that he had been divorced, that itself shocked Nathan, given the Swede’s moral uprightness. But it’s even more shocking for Nathan to now learn that the Swede had kept secret the very existence of a daughter he had with his first wife—not to mention the act of terrorism that child apparently went on to commit. Jerry, it’s clear, harbors considerable disdain for Merry and what she did. Critically, this scene shows that for all Nathan’s anxieties about being wrong, he’s certainly right about one thing: there’s more to the Swede than the man’s seemingly perfect life would suggest.
Themes
Jerry characterizes Merry’s act as an act against the Swede himself: his success, his “own good luck.” Before Merry’s crime, the Swede had never had to ask why things were the way they were in the world. After that, everything changed. The Swede was “tough” and built to take hardship, but Jerry saw him break—“only once.” Two years ago, the Swede had taken the family—“the second superbly selfish Mrs. Levov” and their sons—to Florida to see Jerry. The Swede wandered away at some point, and Jerry found him sobbing alone in his car. He said, “I miss my daughter,” and explained that Merry had died. Jerry knows that the Swede knew where Merry was all these years—she’d gone into hiding after the bombing. Jerry can’t believe the Swede continued to visit his daughter—“the killer”—and treat her as his child all these years.
In addition to the straightforward grief of losing his daughter, his family, and the good life they had together, Merry’s act of terrorism also forced the Swede into an existential crisis. Before the bombing, Jerry suggests, life had been a fairly rational thing to the Swede: he worked hard, and he reaped the rewards of that hard work. Merry’s senseless act of violence stirred all kinds of complicated, irrational feelings in the Swede and totally shattered his straightforward understanding of the world. How could a good girl like Merry who was raised by such sensible parents commit such an evil act? How could he continue to love her in light of the evil she had committed? There are no satisfying, obvious answers to these questions the Swede must have asked himself, and for the first time, he can’t account for why his life turned out the way it did.
Themes
In that moment, Jerry recalls, he told the Swede that if Merry truly is dead, then it’s the best thing that had happened to the Swede in years. It’s time to move on from her, Jerry told the Swede, and to see her as the “monster” she became, who was “way out of bounds” and did not “play” the game that Swede, his family, and civilized society played. Twenty-five years of mourning Merry is more than enough.
Jerry’s blunt advice to the Swede comes off as uncaring and unfeeling—it’s almost as though he delighted in seeing his perfect older brother finally forced to struggle. His disdain for the Swede further comes out in his insinuation that the Swede was “play[ing]” a game up to that critical turning point in his life—the comment insinuates that the Swede’s perfect life was somehow superficial or performative prior to Merry’s crime.
Themes
In the present, Jerry tells Nathan that the Swede’s “fatal attraction” was to “responsibility.” His whole life, he did things the way they were supposed to be done. He could have gotten a deal to play professional baseball, but instead he went to work at Newark Maid, suffering through months of working in the tannery, then learning to operate the sewing machine.
When Jerry says that the Swede’s “fatal attraction” was to “responsibility,” he’s suggesting that it wasn’t Merry’s bomb that destroyed his life—it was the Swede’s compulsion to always do the right thing that ultimately (if counterintuitively) was his downfall. In other words, Jerry is suggesting that the Swede could have enjoyed himself more if he’d acted more selfishly instead of always doing what was expected of him—the Swede’s dedication to duty didn’t guarantee him happiness or shield him from pain, as Merry’s crime and its aftermath made abundantly clear.
Themes
The Swede could have married anyone he wished, and instead he married Dawn Dwyer. They were a beautiful couple. “She’s post-Catholic, he’s post-Jewish, together they’re going to go out there to Old Rimrock and raise little post-toasties,” Jerry jokes wryly. Jerry explains that “Miss Dwyer” was never satisfied with anything. The Swede set her up in the cattle business, then the nursery tree business, and then he took her to Switzerland for a facelift from the world’s best plastic surgeon. None of it was enough. Merry stuttered, Jerry notes. He describes the bombing as Merry “pay[ing] everybody back” for her stutter. But the Swede did everything he could to help Merry, taking her to the best doctors, clinics, and therapists he could find.
Jerry’s joking quip about the Swede and the Swede’s first wife, Dawn, moving to the village of Old Rimrock to “raise little post-toasties” glibly pokes fun at the couple’s idealism. Jerry is insinuating that it was naïve and misguided of the young family to think they could ignore their different religious backgrounds, their families, where they came from, and the various prejudices and conflicts that affect the average person and start fresh in Old Rimrock. The Swede wanted a picture-perfect life and felt he could have it in the picture-perfect town of Old Rimrock, but it wasn’t long before life made his naivety abundantly clear, first through Merry’s stutter and then, ultimately, her shocking act of violence.
Themes
Over the next several months, Nathan will write about the Swede, spending hours each day fixating on all the minute details of his life. He will go to the old Newark Maid factory, to the old house on Keer Avenue, to Merry’s old high school in Old Rimrock, and to all the other places the story took place. He will want to send Jerry his manuscript, but he’ll think better of it, fearing that Jerry will accuse Nathan of having “misrepresented” his family. In the end, though, who can know if Nathan’s Swede or Jerry’s Swede come close to capturing who the man really was.
What Jerry’s rant revealed about his late brother has deeply impacted Nathan, compelling him to write a manuscript that attempts to capture a fuller, more nuanced image of his boyhood hero. In revisiting all the places that played significant roles in the Swede’s life, Nathan hopes to create a story that rings closer to the truth than the mythic Swede his admirers have created through their adoring stories about him.
Themes
Just then, a grey-haired woman approaches Jerry and Nathan, interrupting Jerry’s monologue. The woman asks Nathan to guess who she “was,” then she gives in and reveals her name: Joy Helpern. Nathan, she remembers, took her on a class hayride back in high school. Nathan remembers it—Joy hadn’t let him be quite as physical as he’d wanted. As Joy and Nathan chat, Nathan’s thoughts drift back to the Swede, and about their meeting a couple months ago at Vincent’s. He wonders about the Swede’s motives—about how he’d wanted to tell the tragedy of his life to Nathan, the pro writer, but had chickened out or thought better of it in the end. Nathan thinks about the broader significance of “the destruction” of the Swede’s perfect life and good fortune. “He is our Kennedy,” thinks Nathan.
The scene returns to Nathan’s high school reunion, and Nathan’s narration resumes its light, nostalgic tone as he and Joy reminisce about their would-be romance in high school. Notably, though, Nathan’s thoughts continually return to the Swede, and this points to the tremendous impact his new information about the Swede has had on how he thinks about his late boyhood hero. With Nathan’s observation that the Swede “is our Kennedy,” he implicitly compares the Swede’s tragic demise to the gradual demise America seemed to feel from the mid-1960s onward, when the sentiment of optimism the country experienced in the early postwar years gradually gave way to economic downturn and pessimism.
Themes
Joy and Nathan continue to reminisce about old times, then things get more serious. Joy admits her family had been poor—they lived above the sewing shop after her father died of a heart attack. She hadn’t wanted Nathan to become her boyfriend because she didn’t ever want him to take her home and see how her family lived. Nathan thanks her for telling him this now, and Joy starts to cry.
Joy’s tearful admission about being ashamed of her family’s poverty offers yet more evidence of Nathan’s theory that other people are endlessly, unavoidably unknowable. People are always hiding things about—and even from—themselves. There’s no getting around it.
Themes
Nathan thinks about Joy and how her brother slept in the kitchen. He thinks about another classmate, Schrimmer, who divorced his wife for his much-younger secretary, whose body is great “but to whom he now had to explain every single thing about the past.” Nathan thinks about himself, who has no children and never married. Then he thinks again about the Swede, and the great act of violence that shattered his life of distinctly American “normalcy.” He thinks about what the loss of Merry signified—she, the fourth-generation American, was supposed to be “the perfected image of his father’s father.” Instead, she blasted him into “another America entirely,” sending him into a realm of senseless violence.
Nathan’s various thoughts here all point back to the unstoppable forward motion of time and to the underlying irrationality of life. The classmate who divorced his wife to marry a younger woman perhaps felt the weight of his own advanced age and thought a younger wife might revitalize him. But the opposite turns out to be true: the new wife only makes him feel his advanced age all the more, for her ignorance about the past makes the weight of the past on the old man’s present all the heavier. Just as the man could not use an enticing younger woman to distract himself from his old age, the Swede’s idyllic life in small-town America could not shield him forever from the senseless evil that affects the wider world. Merry’s bomb took him out of his dream world and transported him into ugly reality.
Themes
As Nathan dances with Joy to the dated music of their youth, he begins to flesh out the pieces of the Swede’s life—what the Swede wanted to but did not say to Nathan that evening at Vincent’s. Nathan tries to piece together all that happened over the course of 25 years, between “the triumphant days at wartime Weequahic High and the explosion of his daughter’s bomb in 1968 […].” He conceives of this “transition” as “the Swede’s great fall.” He imagines that the Swede must have understood the great tragedy of his life as the consequence of some “transgression,” that it was somehow “his responsibility.” And with this, Nathan leaves the reunion behind and “dream[s] a realistic chronicle” of the Swede’s life.
The Swede thinks things are inherently rational: that you can work your way up and toward good fortune, and that if bad fortune comes your way, it is because you have “transgressed.” This rests on the assumption that there’s logic to America and the American Dream. Swede’s belief in rationality parallels Merry’s eventual radicalism: she wants there to be justice for injustice. She is not an aberration of her upbringing—she is the natural consequence of it.
Themes
Nathan’s chronicle of the Swede begins in Deal, New Jersey, at his cottage on the coast. Driving home with her father that day, 11-year-old Merry says, “Daddy, kiss me the way you k-k-kiss umumumother.” The Swede responds, “N-n-no,” shocking them both. He is horrified to realize that he has done what he has never done before: he’s made fun of her. Amid Dawn, who constantly puts pressure on Merry to improve her speech, and the teachers who stop calling on Merry out of pity, Merry has always been able to rely on her father. In that moment, perhaps in apology, and perhaps thinking he is just reciprocating their “mutual, seemingly harmless playacting,” the Swede “kisse[s] her stammering mouth with the passion that she had been asking for all month long while knowing only obscurely what she was asking for.”
From this point forward, the reader will see the Swede’s life as Nathan Zuckerman imagines it in his speculative manuscript about the Swede, which attempts to reevaluate the Swede’s life and character with more accuracy and nuance than the myths his admirers have created—myths Nathan himself grew up with. From the start, then, readers see the Swede in a more complicated—and certainly less complimentary—light. Here, as an attempt at apology for his mocking her stutter, he kisses his daughter passionately on the lips. It’s an uncomfortable moment, and certainly one that clashes with the image of the Swede readers have come to know.
Themes
For a moment, the Swede finds the sensation “frightening.” This is a taboo he has not felt nor even thought about. The kiss isn’t real, nor the imitation of something real. But years later, when he will pore back through his memory to search for some cause to his family’s tragedy, he’ll wonder whether he subconsciously distanced himself from Merry after the kiss and that this was to blame for everything that happened years later. And he would learn to question every aspect of his life he once took for granted, though he never reached any satisfying answers. In retrospect, all his “triumphs” in life became “superficial.” He could no longer attach any “innocence” to his life.
The Swede unthinkingly gives his young daughter Merry the passionate kiss she’s asked for, and it seems to bring him instinctive pleasure that disgusts him and makes him question whether he’s really as morally upright and uncompromised as he’s thus far believed himself to be. The book presents this kiss as the Swede’s original sin or loss of innocence, likening it to eating from the Tree of Knowledge, as in the Book of Genesis in the Bible. Later, the Swede will attribute Merry’s act of terrorism to this kiss, which (the Swede fears) compelled the Swede to distance himself from his daughter, leaving her vulnerable to negative outside influence and corruption.
Themes
The narration shifts back to Merry’s eleventh year. Back then, she loved Audrey Hepburn. Before that—to the Swede’s dismay—she went through a Catholic phase when she’d accompany Grandma Dwyer to church to pray. After Grandma Dwyer gave her a picture of Jesus to place above her bed, the Swede tried to ignore it. He reached his limit when Grandma Dwyer gave Merry a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, and he sat her down one day and gently asked her if she might at least put these objects away when her grandparents Levov came by, as they were Jewish. Merry agreed, and in time, she tired of Catholicism.
In Jerry Levov’s rant about his late brother’s idealism, he mockingly describes the Swede and Dawn’s grand plans to raise a family without religion—to move beyond the traditional ways of their elders and become fully assimilated into mainstream American society. Grandma Dwyer’s meddling poses a problem for this goal and points to how difficult it can be to fully break with the past and with one’s family.
Themes
Now, that passion is for Audrey Hepburn, and Merry has assembled a scrapbook of Audrey Hepburn photos and magazine articles. Merry takes to flouncing around the house pretending to be Audrey Hepburn. She buys the soundtrack to Breakfast at Tiffany’s and sings along to it for hours. She’d manage to sing the lyrics to “Moon River” without stuttering at all, and for this reason nobody says a word about her obsession. They let her continue her imaginary games.
This scene points to a similarity Merry shares with her father. Her obsession with Audrey Hepburn and all the playacting it involves is not unlike the Swede’s obsession with Americana, which has compelled him to move his family out to a picturesque rural suburb and act out the part of the upstanding, all-American family man. Moreover, the fact that Merry doesn’t stutter when she sings along to the Breakfast at Tiffany’s soundtrack suggests that such playacting comforts and calms her, just as the Swede’s playing the part of the all-American man comforts him and reassures him that he’s living his life the right way.
Themes
Merry has everything going for her: she is smart, thin, beautiful, and with wealthy parents. Her stutter is the only thing that holds her back. Dawn takes her to regular sessions with a speech therapist over in Morristown. On Saturdays, she sees a psychiatrist, and the Swede is irate when he discerns Merry’s stutter getting worse with these appointments. The psychiatrist tries to instill in Merry that she is choosing to stutter to manipulate her parents, who expect too much of her. The Swede resents the psychiatrist’s insinuation that Merry hates growing up in the shadow of Dawn, the former Miss New Jersey, and that she resents her mother’s superficial focus on looks.
This passage lays out all the advantages Merry has in life, from her conventional good looks to her parents’ wealth. In so doing, it emphasizes how baffling it is that she will eventually go on to commit a horrific and senseless act of violence as a teen. How does someone who has suffered so little in life go on to inflict suffering on others? The Swede’s tense exchange with the psychiatrist indicates that perhaps Merry’s life isn’t as happy it appears on the surface, and that the Swede is merely imagining her to be happy because it fits within his image of the picture-perfect American family.
Themes
The psychiatrist assigns Merry a “stuttering diary,” in which she is supposed to record daily situations that make her stutter. When she leaves the journal behind one day, the Swede is dismayed to find that basically all situations cause Merry to stutter: when people put too much pressure on her, when they put too little pressure on her, around people who know about her stutter, around strangers. She works on “strategies” with her therapist and records them dutifully and in great detail in the diary. The Swede has never seen such fierce, unwavering dedication. But none of it matters. In the safety of the therapist’s office, Merry can speak fluently. But back in her real life, she struggles enormously.
Merry’s “stuttering diary” reveals that, indeed, Merry’s life is far less carefree than the Swede imagines it to be. Whether for real or perceived reasons, she constantly feels under pressure to perform well and impress others. That Merry can speak well in her psychiatrist’s office but not outside of it suggests that she thrives in controlled, predictable, and safe environments but flails when thrust into the unknown. This is another way she and her father are alike: the Swede thrives when he operates according to convention and social norms, which give him a blueprint for understanding the world, his place in it, and what’s expected of him.
Themes
And then, Merry becomes suddenly very overweight, declining food at home but eating junk food nonstop outside of the house. At 16, her classmates nickname the large, nearly six-foot-tall Merry “Ho Chi Levov.” Merry has by now adopted a fierce, anti-war position. She snarls, stuttering, every time Lyndon Johnson appears on the TV screen, calling him a “c-c-coward” and “f-f-f-f-filthy fucking collaborator.” The Swede himself has joined a group called New Jersey Businessmen Against the War, but Merry turns him down on his offer to accompany the group down to Washington to speak with their senator. She calls North Vietnam the “Democratic Republic of Vietnam,” much to Dawn’s annoyance. The Swede urges Dawn to let Merry be—she has a political stance, and that’s a good thing. And there’s “compassion” behind it, too.
The narration implicitly ties Merry’s sudden weight gain and excessive consumption of junk food to her budding political radicalism, perhaps suggesting that these physical changes symbolize her rejection of societal expectations (like staying trim and healthy). While the Swede also opposes the Vietnam War, he expresses his opposition without going against the establishment: he joined a political group and remains civil and lawful. Merry, however, distrusts America’s institutions and in time will take things further, committing an act of violence.
Themes
It’s around this time that Dawn and Merry start to fight nonstop. Dawn tells Merry that she should be thankful to have “contented middle-class people” for parents, an attitude Merry retorts that she isn’t “brainwashed enough” to have. Dawn goes to bed in tears, not knowing where she went wrong as a mother to have Merry fly off the rails so badly. The Swede assures his wife that Merry is just a teenager—teenagers are like this. She’ll grow up eventually, and things will get better.
As the Swede’s advice to Dawn suggests, Merry’s outbursts are (at least at first) typical for a girl her age. Though she’s still a child, she’s developing ideas and interests separate from her parents, and she feels stifled under their care and scrutiny. Even if Merry’s broader grievances against predatory capitalism have merit, her parents are hardly monsters for being “contended middle-class people.” Her disdain for them might be overblown, but it’s also not surprising given her age and inexperience.
Themes
The Swede tries hard to follow his own advice, talking to Merry and answering her questions and accusations, however enraged they might make him. He asks her about her political involvement and the new friends she’s made—lately, Merry has started traveling to New York City on Saturdays. Merry’s trips to New York unsettle the Swede, and he discusses the subject with Merry carefully but persistently. The Swede suggests that not all parents would let their teenage daughter travel to the city by herself, so it’s the least she can do to tell him what she does there and who she sees. Merry obstinately refuses to answer his questions, or else she offers vague non-answers. She claims that she hangs out with college students there—“people with ideas.”
The Swede continues to try to strike a balance with Merry, giving her some of the independence and respect she so craves while also acknowledging that she’s a child and so might not know what’s best for her. Merry responds with the stubbornness one might expect. At the same time, it makes sense that she’d want to spend time with “people with ideas,” whose worldviews oppose the conventions of mainstream culture—conventions that have informed practically all aspects of the Swede’s life.
Themes
When the Swede questions Merry about the “Communist material” she comes home with, Merry suggests she’s just doing what he taught her to do: to “learn,” and to be engaged with her surroundings. The Swede tries to be kind and understanding. After she fails to come home one night and only belatedly calls to share her plans to stay with friends, the Swede reprimands her, but not too harshly. The Swede tells Merry that if she needs somewhere to stay in the city, she can stay with the Barry and Marcia Umanoff, family friends of the Levovs.
The Swede continues to level with Merry as best he can, trying to respect her support of communism as valid even if it’s not what he believes in. He continues to try to compromise with her, allowing her to return to the city but with the caveat that she stay with friends of his, who can look after her. The narration emphasizes the Swede’s repeated efforts to illustrate how difficult it can be as a parent to respect a child’s agency while also knowing when to step in and exercise parental authority.
Themes
After staying with the Umanoffs one night, Merry returns to Old Rimrock and complains to the Swede about the couple, accusing them of simply performing liberalism as they live “their little comfortable b-b-bourgeois life.” The Swede retorts that the Umanoffs are professors—“serious academics who are against the war.” Merry brushes this off and declares that she doesn’t want to stay with the couple again.
Merry sees the Umanoffs as hypocrites who preach the merits of progressive politics while living a “little comfortable b-b-bourgeois life” that better resembles her own family’s. Merry’s insinuation that it’s not enough for the Umanoffs to oppose the war if they don’t practice what they preach underscores her growing radicalism and frustration with the stifling conventions of mainstream society.
Themes
Later, after Merry fails to show up at the Umanoffs one Saturday night, the Swede tells her she’s grounded. Merry protests the punishment, suggesting that the Swede and Dawn are “spewing [their] fear” onto Merry and trying to make her as afraid of the world and uninterested in change as they are. She questions the Swede’s certainty that his way of seeing the world is the only right way—that it’s wrong of him to call her New York friends “radicals” simply because he doesn’t agree with them. Merry insists that “strong ideas” are the only thing that accomplishes anything. She cites one of her friends, Melissa, who dropped out of Columbia because “stop[ping] the killing is more important to her” than a silly degree.
The Swede does his best to compromise with Merry, and when she refuses to meet him halfway, he grounds her—a reasonable punishment, if understandably frustrating to Merry. Rather disturbingly, the timing of Merry’s grounding so near to the bombing, combined with her praise for “strong ideas,” points to the possibility that she may have set off the bomb as retribution against her father as much as to protest the war. This interpretation adds to the brutal senselessness of Merry’s crime.
Themes
Later, the Swede confronts Merry about her friends in the city, Bill and Melissa. He insists she needs to be careful in the city—she could be “raped” there. Merry counters that girls “end up getting raped whether they listen to their daddies or not. Sometimes the daddies do the raping.” She and the Swede continue to argue. She accuses him of only caring about his business. The Swede tries to keep calm, disciplining Merry but also respecting her. He tells Merry he understands that she’s tired of life in Old Rimrock, and he promises her that they can work on her going away to school in the future.
Merry’s dark comment about girls who “end up getting raped whether they listen to their daddies or not,” and that “[s]ometimes the daddies do the raping” has incestuous undertones that subtly point to the unintentionally inappropriate kiss she and the Swede shared years ago. Recall that the remaining chapters of the book don’t necessarily convey what really happened in the Swede’s life, but rather represent Nathan Zuckerman’s speculations about the Swede’s life. With this caveat, then, Merry’s disturbing remarks here add more fuel to the Swede’s fear that he is somehow to blame for Merry’s gradual demise, a downward trajectory that began in the fateful moment he unwittingly inflicted abuse on her with the kiss—his symbolic fall from grace.
Themes
In a later argument, the Swede suggests that Merry bring her activism home to Old Rimrock. Plenty of people there support the war—she could actually stand to change some minds if she brings her activism to her conservative hometown. Merry brushes this aside as meaningless, suggesting that local activism won’t change anything. This ends up being the last conversation they have about New York. As far as the Swede is aware, Merry doesn’t go to New York again. She continues to be argumentative at home and at school, and one day she blows up the post office, killing Dr. Fred Conlon and destroying the general store.
Keeping with the interpretation that Merry sets off the bomb to punish her father, the Swede’s advice for her to bring her activism home to Old Rimrock strikes an eerily prescient tone and sets up the Swede as a tragic hero of sorts, who brings about his own demise. That is, to Merry’s mind, he’s essentially daring her to take action, and she accepts the dare when she bombs the post office and general store. This is clearly not the sort of activism the Swede had in mind—indeed, he likely could not have conceived of his daughter carrying out such a brutal crime. From this point forward, the Swede will pore over his past interactions with Merry, like this one, and search in vain for anything he might had done or said to lead her to such violence.
Themes
