A Merry Little Bomb

I just finished the first of three parts of the novel. This section was entitled "Paradise Remembered." The last journal entry I did was focused on the heroic figure of Swede, a beacon of hope for all the other Jewish kids growing up in Newark, who is both wholly Jewish and All-American. His character is explored further in this section, as well as the character of the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman.

Zuckerman meets Swede for lunch in a small Italian joint in New York City. He picked up on a note of sensitivity in the letter Swede wrote to him, and is eager to unravel his opaque persona. Swede, however, reminisces on the old Newark before it became the crime-ridden ghost town it currently is, his father, the glove-making business he inherited from his father, and his three accomplished young sons, who clearly take after their father. Feeling bored, Zuckerman tries to provoke Swede into diving a little deeper, only to be met with casual responses and gentle sidetracks back to his favorite topic: his family. 

Zuckerman would have considered the lunch a complete waste of time had it not been for Swede's announcement that he just undergone a surgery for prostate cancer. This strikes a chord with Zuckerman, for he had been keeping the secret of his debilitating battle with the same cancer from everyone he knows. While he chooses not to share this fact with Swede, he wonders how this blemish on an otherwise perfect life affected him. Did this confrontation with impending mortality change Swede in some strange, underlying manner? It doesn't matter if it did or not to Zuckerman. He expected to be writing a tribute to the deceased Mr. Levov, while also gaining insight into Swede. The lunch, however, was boring, leaving him nothing to work off of and shattering his image of the all-American hometown hero. Swede seemed to him to be a shallow vessel that looked good, worked hard and treated people well, but with nothing existing beneath the surface pleasantries.

Over the next few chapters, Zuckerman's opinion of Swede begins to change. The next scene focuses on Zuckerman's class reunion in 1995. Through the chapter, ideas of community, nostalgia, aging and time intertwine with each other. A class reunion setting seems to invite nostalgia. Zuckerman spends pages and pages detailing his experiences with childhood friends, remembering every idiosyncracy. The community built at their high school is still intact, as other students call their class 'the smartest group of people [they] ever worked with.' The event is not one for outsiders, as a second wife of Zuckerman's friend is bothered by all of the in-jokes that seem to be shared with the entire graduating class. He explains that, well, he can't explain it, that's just the way that it is and the way that it always had been.

Zuckerman is aware of the communal bonds tying him to his old friends, but with the added years of life experience comes a strange disconnect from those he once knew so well. He develops this by referring to those he knew in their class by both their name and the ages of their children and grandchildren, of which he has none. The differences in their lives give their conversations a new honesty, as when he is talking to an old crush named Joy. She admits that the reason that she did not date him was because she was embarrassed of her family situation, and ends up crying over lost time. The element of time present in both the inevitable aging of himself and his peers and the nostalgia-drenched stories of their time together trap Zuckerman's narrative in some sort of world where time has no effect, somehow grounding him firmly in the future yet switching effortlessly back into the past. 

To summarize, the class reunion was filled with a bunch of people trying to affirm and deny their past selves in various ways, giving the night a weird atmosphere because of the fact that nobody could really tell if it felt like time passed or not. Also, if you didn't grow up in Newark during the forties then you probably should find another way to spend your night because the folks at the reunion don't understand how to explain their pasts to outsiders. 

The story takes a sharp turn when, out of the blue, Swede's younger brother Jerry shows up for the reunion and tells Zuckerman that Swede has just died from prostate cancer. He also reveals a crack in the surface of Swede's pristine life that Zuckerman could not uncover: the existence of a daughter Merry who is a total black sheep in the family. Going against the life of ease that her pristine upbringing brought her, she became a radical antiwar activist and bombed a post office during the height of the Vietnam War, killing a doctor who was dropping off his mail. She subsequently went into hiding, protected by Swede in an act that mystified his family. How could he love such an evil brat? 

Zuckerman now understands the ramifications of the letter Swede sent him. Swede was the American dream: a hard working boy who looked good and acted humbly. Yet, this was almost a burden, as he felt obligated to uphold the title of "Hometown Hero." He had done it all, and yet there was this one flaw in his otherwise perfect life: the unhappiness of his daughter Merry, who suffocated in the pristine environment she was raised in and rebelled against her parent's stoic traditionalism and ends up a murderer. Yet, he can't stop loving her because he sees her flaws not as a reflection of evil, but a personal failure. Where did he go wrong? Why wasn't he the perfect father? He hides this with a new wife and new children to be proud of, but as he receives a fatal diagnosis, the surface of denial he was living off of begins to disintegrate, leading him to question, for the first time ever, the naked cruelty of life.