Gloves, Capitalism and Other Things That Remind Me Of My Fugitive Daughter

This reading section took me through a large part of American Pastoral's second part, entitled The Fall. 

The beginning of this section doesn't strike the reader as anything particularly different from the end of the last section called Paradise Remembered, which was basically Zuckerman taking facts that Swede's brother Jerry told him and spinning them into a crazily detailed tale of how beloved Merry Levov became the infamous Rimrock Bomber, and her father's subsequent questioning of his behavior around her. 

It soon becomes noticeable, however, that Nathan Zuckerman is no longer present in the story. We are living out events as they truly happened; we are able to understand the truth as Swede sees it and nobody else. The mysteries of our silent hero seem SO CLOSE to being revealed.

But what if Zuckerman is still narrating? Perhaps the switch between the two sections was supposed to be a more clear-cut transition, letting the reader know that the story has completely switched out of the frame of Zuckerman's reality. But perhaps not. The events in Zuckerman's narration from before match up with some intimate details of the relationship between father and daughter that would certainly not have been known to him, like the time she strangely kissed him on the lips as they were coming back from a day at the beach, or the time they watched the self-immolation of the monks on the evening news, or even her love for his glove factory. Is he that good of a storyteller? Is he a mind reader or something? Probably not. 

Well, whoever is telling this story, whether it's fact or fiction, characterizes Swede slowly but excellently. The chapter opens on Swede giving a guided tour of his glove factory to a woman named Rita Cohen who is writing her graduates thesis at Wharton on the Newark leather industry. He describes the process in detail, talking for pages and pages about the EXQUISITE craftsmanship that goes into each and every glove; how his workers were trained from the ground up to become artisans, masters of the trade. 

Rita is impressed with his love for glove-making, calling him truly passionate. Swede basically feels as if he has been shot through the heart. He is still listing off different tips and tricks to Rita as they wander back to his office, but the list in his mind is replaced with rapid fire thoughts about Merry, and whether or not she is safe, and his wife Dawn's mourning and the hell he cannot escape. 

It is only when they return to his room that Rita admits she isn't actually a Wharton student and that she knows where Merry is. This sets him off on a wild-goose chase, as newly hostile Rita requests larger and larger favors of Swede. He complies, of course, desperate to see his daughter once more. It all ends up with the two of them in a hotel room as Swede holds a briefcase filled with money and Rita begs to have sex with him. He ends up running away, and by the time he calls the FBI with new information on his daughter's whereabouts, Rita has left with the cash. 

These chapters characterize Swede as a man who is desperate for closure. Years pass randomly in the book, and time seems to lose all meaning in the grips of such a catastrophe. The general store is rebuilt, under new ownership, and Old Rimrock slowly begins to forget about the accident, yet to Swede the tragedy is still fresh. He wants his daughter's affection so badly that he keeps his factory in Newark so that she will not see him as another capitalist exploiter. He stays up late at nights talking to an apparition of Angela Davis, speaking of himself as if he were a changed man, a man worthy of the love of his radical daughter, and pretending to accept her praise of Merry's philosophy. He tries so hard to push his quiet capitalistic dream to the side for the impossible: a chance to see her again. It kills him to do it, to separate himself into a man who loves his work and a man who loves his daughter. But he sees his big brick house on a hill, where Merry was once one, and three, and five, and in his mind she is still one and three and five and playing on the swings and he and Dawn are watching her happily. Any possible return to this American Pastoral is worth the suffering that makes up his everyday life.