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| Crowd control on the streets of Newark, 1967 |
“The Swede.” So begins Philip Roth’s Pulitzer-winning American Pastoral (1997), a novel of truly epic proportions about a very ordinary man. And its hero, a tragic hero on the scale of the Greeks, is Seymor “The Swede” Levov. “The Swede.” A declaration. He doesn’t need a verb to be a complete sentence. He simply asserts himself. Not even “Call me Ishmael.” Not “Call me the Swede,” or “We called him the Swede,” just: “The Swede.”