This is my third or fourth novel by Roth and to be honest, I am not crazy about any of them despite the fact that Roth is an American icon. I started out really liking this novel, the first hundred pages as Roth returns to his high school for a reunion and remembers, lovingly, growing up in the 1940's. Unfortunately, he veers from this blast to the past and spends the rest of the novel describing the life of his boyhood idol, Seymour Swede Lovov, a legendary high school athlete, devoted family man, and hard working inheritor of his father's glove factory. The narrator, Nathan Zimmerman realizes early on, we can never know another person; we are mysteries to each other, to ourselves.
Yet he tries to understand Swede who goes through his early life without any bumps, high school hero, college graduate, marries New Jersey's Miss America, has a daughter, takes over his father's factory, and life seems easy and fine. But then as Nathan puts it, "He learned the worst lesson life can teach---that it makes no sense." And 'Things fall apart, the center cannot hold."
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