As the American century draws to a close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified gratness that is an elegy for all our century´s promises ofprosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth´s protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father´s glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And the one day in 1968, Swede´s beautiful American luck deserts him.