Character Study II: “That people were manifold creatures didn’t come as a surprise to the Swede…”

Dawn Levov

Dawn Levov defies all expectations; in that way, she is as remarkable as her demigod-husband. She entered a beauty pageant in order to send her brother to school; she went all the way to the Miss America competition and then wanted nothing to do with it. She had a daughter she loved dearly, but focused so much on Merry’s stuttering that Merry began naming her mother as the source of it, and later turned Dawn into an enemy. Dawn married the Swede under great disdain and suspicion on the part of his father, to whom she had to prove herself with nothing less than an interview as well as agree to what sounded like a contract to abstain from raising whatever children she had with the Swede Catholic– and then she has an affair at the end of the book with Bill Orcutt, their neighbor and the architect of the new house they’re planning, a man she once disdained and despised.

More than anything, having Merry changed Dawn. The Swede describes it best when he expunges on how much he “wanted his wife back–it was impossible to exaggerate the extent to which he wanted her back”. She was “so serious about being a serious mother, the woman so fiercely disinclined to be thought spoiled or vain or frivolously nostalgic for her once-glamorous eminence”; Dawn was strong and fierce and determined, but Merry changed her. Merry, once she had grown into her “turbulent wanting-to-become”, as the Swede puts it, clung to Dawn like a parasite, sucking the fight out of her, sucking the confidence right out. “I don’t have any sense of what I did to her or even what she perceives I did to her,” Dawn says on the nights she goes to bed in tears, and then:”I cannot control her. I cannot recognize her.”

Merry Levov

It is hard to explain Merry Levov. She is, when she is young, the Swede’s “precious lighthearted jokester”; she is a girl who stutters and tries hard to beat it, a girl who does ballet two afternoons after school, goes to a speech therapist another two, and then goes to a psychiatrist every Saturday to round it off. And although the Swede protests and shouts that she was, at this time, ”simply in the hands of something she could not get out of”, the psychiatrist’s idea of Merry stigmatizing herself “with a severe stutter, thereby manipulating everyone from a point of seeming weakness” seems more credible; because as she grew up, she stops trying to fight it. The stutter becomes ”the machete with which to mow all the bastard liars down”– the ‘bastard liars’ being politicians, classmates, the bourgeoisie, and even her parents– and instead of working hard for their approval, Merry falls into “total self-certainty”. And she bombs the general store.

The only time she is seen after that is when she has become a Jain. Merry and her father meet in a shoddy apartment next to a sketchy, shady underpass, and the Swede finds out that she has changed. She has learned ahimsa,  nonviolence, and has hardly changed for the better. She has a stench because of where she lives and her doctrine of not washing to avoid sullying the water. It is the smell “of everything organic breaking down…. of no coherence…. of all she’s become”. The Swede can hardly believe it. He vomits. He shouts: “Who are you?” And Merry asks him to leave. “If you love me, Daddy, you’ll let me be.”

Besides the Swede’s constant self-blame, there is nothing to suggest where or why or how Merry changed so drastically and so many times. By the end of the book, we know that she’s killed four people, she has been raped, she has lived in Miami and run from the FBI and washed dishes in Oregon, Idaho, Kentucky, Maryland– she has slept in a woman’s coat and begged for money and studied religion and became a Jain. She has absolutely destroyed her father with these changes– not only because after each one he blames himself, but because he is torn apart by the realization that he has no idea who his daughter is. Merry Levov was a sweet, intelligent, sarcastic stuttering little girl, a beautiful girl, a girl with the potential, really, to be anything– and she turned into a slovenly, radical bomber before switching to a religion so centered on nonviolence that she carries a broom to sweep the microorganisms on the floor away from her feet. She is the American bizarre. She is the American potential– for both what we consider good and successful and what absolutely horrifies us.