American Pastoral Summary

In 1995, Nathan Zuckerman, an author in his 60s, reminisces about his childhood hero, Seymour “the Swede” Levov. The Swede was a star athlete and local legend in his majority-Jewish Newark neighborhood. To adults and children alike, the Swede was a symbol of hope and a testament to the value of hard work and a personal sense of duty. The Swede’s father, Lou Levov, was the son of immigrants. Lou raised his family up from poverty in the leatherworking industry and started Newark Maid Leatherworks, which by the 1940s had developed into a flourishing glove business. After serving with the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II and briefly attending college, the Swede took over Newark Maid, running the business he’d been trained to run practically from birth. He later marries Dawn Dwyer, a Gentile woman and former Miss New Jersey.

Nathan’s adoration for the Swede lingers into adulthood, and he’s flattered—if a bit confused—when the Swede writes him a letter in 1995 to discuss Nathan’s potentially writing a tribute to Lou Levov, who has recently died. The offer intrigues Nathan, who longs to learn more about who the Swede really is.

Nathan meets dinner at Vincent’s, an old Italian restaurant in Manhattan. To Nathan’s frustration, the Swede doesn’t say anything about the tribute to Lou that he mentioned in his letter. Moreover, he spends most of the time making small talk about his wife, a good-looking woman in her 40s, and the couple’s three sons. Disappointed, Nathan realizes that perhaps there really is nothing deep and complex about the Swede, after all. But Nathan’s high school reunion reveals that this couldn’t be further from the truth.

A couple months after Nathan’s fruitless meeting with the Swede, he returns to Newark to attend his 45th high school reunion. There, Nathan sees his former classmate Jerry Levov, the Swede’s younger brother, who tells Nathan the shocking news that the Swede has recently died of cancer. Then Jerry tells Nathan an even more shocking truth: in 1968, the Swede’s daughter, Merry Levov, bombed the post office of Old Rimrock, the rural village where she lived with her parents, to protest the Vietnam War. A local doctor died in the blast, and Merry went into hiding as a fugitive. The Swede’s life was never the same after the bombing. He spent the rest of his life mourning the loss of his daughter and struggling to understand why someone with the good life she had could have committed such a senseless act of violence.

Nathan’s conversation with Jerry leaves him deeply unsettled. After he returns home from the reunion, he begins the massive project of researching the Swede’s life in order to write his own “tribute” to his late hero. Nathan’s speculative account of the Swede’s life comprises the remainder of American Pastoral.

Nathan’s manuscript picks up in Deal, New Jersey, as the Swede and 11-year-old Merry drive home together from the family’ summer cottage. Merry, who speaks with a stutter, playfully asks the Swede to kiss her “the way you k-k-kiss umumother.” The Swede carelessly responds, “N-n-no,” shocking Merry and the Swede himself: he has never mocked her stutter before, and he feels like a monster. In a misguided attempt at an apology, the Swede kisses Merry on the lips. Years later, as the Swede anguishes over what possibly could have caused Merry to commit her horrific act of violence, he will wonder whether he unconsciously distanced himself from Merry after this bizarre and uncomfortable kiss, and whether this distance harmed her in the long run.

By age 16, Merry is very overweight. She becomes increasingly involved in the campaign against the Vietnam War, and she harbors disdain for her family’s middle-class ideals. The Swede struggles to respond to Merry’s worsening obstinance, but he tries to remain honest and communicative with her, even when he disagrees with her increasingly radical accusations or finds her viewpoints naïve. When Merry starts taking weekend trips to New York, he tries to grant her some freedom, though he asks a lot of questions about the anti-war activities she is involved in and the people she associates with in the city. Eventually, after Merry breaks curfew one too many times, the Swede forbids her from going to the city again. Not long after that, Merry bombs Old Rimrock’s post office to protest the war, killing a local doctor, after which she goes into hiding as a fugitive.

Four months after Merry’s disappearance, a young woman named Rita Cohen comes to the Swede’s factory. Rita explains that she is conducting research on Newark’s leather industry for her business school thesis, and the Swede excitedly gives her a tour of Newark Maid, feeling refreshed and happy for the first time in months. When the Swede and Rita are alone, though, Rita’s friendly facade drops as she introduces herself as Merry’s emissary and berates the Swede for his capitalist greed. Desperate to see Merry again, the Swede refrains from reporting Rita to the FBI. Instead, he arranges to meet Rita at hotel with $5,000 dollars in hand, per Rita’s request. At the hotel, Rita bizarrely and disturbingly impersonates Merry while simultaneously trying to seduce the Swede. Horrified, the Swede runs from the room.

Five years pass, during which subsequent anti-war bombings wreak havoc on the country. The Swede watches anti-war activist and Communist party member Angela Davis speak on TV. Imagining that Davis holds the key to Merry’s return, the Swede rehearses a hypothetical conversation with Davis in which he pleads for Merry’s return and tries to defend his own actions against Merry’s (and Davis’s) judgment. He recalls, for instance, hunkering down with in the Newark Maid factory with Black forelady Vicky during the 1967 Newark riots. Afterward, as businesses fled the ruined city en masse, the Swede stuck around out of loyalty for his majority Black employees.

In 1973, the Swede receives a letter from Rita Cohen in which Rita explains that Merry is living in Newark under an assumed name. The Swede goes to the address Rita provided in her letter and finds Merry, who smells of rot and appears unwashed and severely malnourished. She wears a filthy veil over the lower half of her face. Nevertheless, she is overjoyed to see her father.

Merry leads the Swede to a dangerous part of town, where she lives in a filthy, run-down room. She explains how she’s traveled around to evade law enforcement. Troublingly, she admits not only to the Old Rimrock bombing but also to subsequent acts of domestic terrorism. She also reveals that her old therapist, Sheila Salzman, sheltered her in her home immediately after the bombing. As for her appearance, Merry explains that she became a Jain a year ago. As part of her extreme adherence to the religion’s espousal of nonviolence, Merry abstains from sex and material wealth, and she eats only plants. Ideally, she would like not to eat even plants, so as not to harm any living being. The Swede insists that Merry cannot live this way and demands to bring her home, but Merry refuses, and the Swede eventually leaves.

The Swede returns to Old Rimrock, where he and Dawn are hosting a dinner party. In addition to the Swede’s parents, the guests include Sheila and Shelly Salzman, and the Levovs’ neighbors Bill and Jessie Orcutt. Bill Orcutt, an architect and the quintessential Wasp, is designing a house for Dawn, who wants a new home where she can start fresh. Jessie Orcutt struggles with alcoholism, and the Swede looks on as she drunkenly tries to talk with Lou Levov. The Swede’s old friend Barry Umanoff is also in attendance, along with Barry’s wife Marcia, whose abrasive and outspoken personality the Swede finds rude and off-putting.

The dinner guests argue about the ongoing Watergate scandal and whether it reflects America’s degraded values. In the middle of dinner preparations, the Swede observes Bill Orcutt fondling Dawn in the kitchen and realizes they are having an affair. Later, the Swede confronts Sheila, with whom he had a brief affair following Merry’s disappearance, about harboring Merry and not telling him. Sheila justifies her secrecy, insinuating that she suspected the Swede may have been abusing Merry.

After dinner later, everyone except Lou Levov and Jessie Orcutt have reconvened for dessert. Suddenly, they hear Lou scream from the kitchen. Instinctively, the Swede fears that Merry has come home and that the shock of her appearance has killed Lou. In the kitchen, however, they find Lou clutching his bleeding face—he had been feeding a drunken Jessie bites of pie when she suddenly grabbed the fork and stabbed him with it. Marcia, rather than feel compassion for the bleeding old man and his drunken attacker, instead starts to laugh. The narration ruminates on the flimsy but ultimately inconsequential life of the Levovs, and about people like Marcia who carelessly take pleasure in their suffering.