Seymour "Swede" Levov is a prosperous, hard-working family man who comes of age in America's triumphant postwar era. The owner of a Newark glove factory, Swede leads a blissful existence, complete with a 170-year-old stone farmhouse, a beautiful wife - Miss New Jersey 1949 - and a lively, precocious daughter. But when the country begins to run amok in the 1960s, Swede's perfect world crumbles. His cherished daughter becomes a revolutionary terrorist, bent on destroying everything her father holds dear. In chronicling Swede's rise and fall, author Philip Roth paints a vivid portrait of a man swept away by a current of conflict and violence in his own backyard.