A story about a Jewish guy, Seymour "Swede" Levov, who is living the American dream until his daughter commits an act of political violence and fucks it all up. Subsequent events unfold in distressing and unpredictable ways.

I liked how sympathetically Roth portrayed the normie/npc phenotype (which incidentally we don't see enough because every protagonist nowadays is some misunderstood college dropout faildaughter spiritual neet who is too smart for their economic situation! we fucking get it). Yes the Swede is a dumb jock compared to everyone else in his life, but he is still a sensitive guy with enormous capacity to introspect, self-castigate, spiral and be otherwise moved by tragedy. He can have a bit of emotional constipation as a treat because he went from living on easy mode to realising that human agency is locked in a neverending (and usually losing) struggle against the extremely cruel whims of the universe.

Don't really know how to explain this but the novel has a good sense of proportionality - the tragedy engulfs the Swede's life without cannibalising everything else going on. I loved the prose, which was elegant and naturally propulsive, and I found the structure of the novel to be remarkably well-constructed. However the ending was abrupt and unsatisfying