Word: levov
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There probably weren't really that many murderous hippies running around in the 1960s, but you wouldn't know it from the novels of the past decade. Ever since Merry Levov blew up a post office in Philip Roth's American Pastoral, it has been like one long, literary Altamont: Russell Banks, T.C. Boyle, Susan Choi, Christopher Sorrentino and Dana Spiotta have all written books about nut-job flower children. And here come two more: Peter Carey's His Illegal Self (Knopf; 272 pages) and Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions (Dutton; 288 pages). Didn't anybody just leave...
...recent years Roth has found inspiration in history and sociology. Ira Ringold, in I Married a Communist, is a left-wing actor caught up in Joe McCarthy's '50s witch-hunts. The wrenching American Pastoral drew on the anarchy of the '60s and '70s. Swede Levov, glove manufacturer and good suburbanite, is devastated when his daughter becomes a fugitive terrorist...
...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...
Grumpy might have been safer. Old Country Jews believed that acknowledging good fortune would attract an evil eye, a kineahora. Roth brings this useful superstition home when, as a teenager, the Merry Levov contracts a lethal case of '60s political self-righteousness. She blows up the town's general store-post office, killing a passerby, and then vanishes...
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