The thing that most provokes irritation with Lou is his response to Merry’s actions. “I told you,” he says, “‘…something is haywire with that child’. And you looked at me like I was nuts. All of you. Only I wasn’t nuts. I was right. With a vengeance I was right!”

How can a father possibly say that to his traumatized son? “I told you”. “I was right”. And the Swede, as is his nature, simply sits there and takes it. He fought with his father once, to marry Dawn; he had to “collide with that skull, the skull of a brawler” and force him to accept an Irish Catholic woman as his wife. Now he’s done, and Lou Levov has free reign to lecture and scold. We lose all sympathy and admiration for Lou Levov right there. He is not worthy of his son, and through his fighting through the tragedy he has only painted another layer of the black bizarre on the Swede’s solid stone house.

I’m not saying that Lou Levov is at all a bad father; on the contrary, he will do anything for his sons to succeed, and he tries his hardest to be a father to the people he thinks need his help. But as is the case with most of those kinds of characters, the people he feels need his help hardly want it. They hate him for his offer. And this is shown quite plainly in the last few pages of the book. Lou Levov, for the entirety of a dinner party, has been trying to help Bill Orcutt’s wife Jessie to eat, and to stop drinking. Eventually he ends up feeding her, cooing to her as if she is a baby or a dog: “Jessie good girl, Jessie very good girl”. And she stabs him in the face with a fork.

Lou Levov is unable to speak. “His face was vacant of everything except the struggle not to weep”, Roth writes; there is nothing left in him but a lack of ability, a lack of capacity. He has, in his life, ”neglected no one in his crusade against disorder” only to be destroyed by the disorder just like his son was. Lou Levov realizes at that moment, leaning against the kitchen table with blood on his face, that although you think you can protect your family “you cannot protect even yourself”. All that is left in him is fear, fear and astonishment, at the fact that his life’s work– this building of a shield around his family not necessarily for love or compassion but for strength and a feeling of rightness, a need to be looked upon as stable– it has been for nothing.

Lou is the last of the Levov family to crack. Dawn has gotten plastic surgery and a new lover; Merry has become a reclusive Jain; the Swede’s mother has been sweetly sad for years; and the Swede has recently vomited in Merry’s underpass apartment, adding to the filth and losing all hope of redemption for her and for himself. The last one standing was Lou, that unbreakable fortress of correctness, of order; the man who believed in ’right way and wrong way, and this is the right way’– he has finally succumbed to the rampant disorder that is the life of the Levovs. “The breach had been pounded in their fortification”, Roth writes in the second-to-last paragraph, “and now that it was opened it would not be closed again.”

And now– finally, ironically, horribly– Lou evokes some sympathy.

Jerry responds with another long rant, but the important thing is in the first couple sentences: “We are none of us enough!” he shouts. He seems almost gleeful at the idea of his invincible older brother being destroyed by the reality he’s fought to ignore his entire life. Almost ecstatic. And the Swede just takes it, thinking inwardly that Jerry doesn’t know what he’s saying. The idea that Jerry has is that everything is connected– that it was possible to foresee Merry’s actions, and that it was possible to stop her, possible to bring her back.  The Swede knows this isn’t true because he recognizes that Jerry’s first thought– that we are none of us enough for people– is a right one. He knows that “Jerry thinks he can escape the bewilderment by ranting, shouting, but everything he shouts is wrong… causes, clear answers, who there is to blame. Reasons. But there are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are…. Jerry tries to rationalize it but you can’t. This is all something else, something he knows absolutely nothing about. No one does. It is not rational. It is chaos. It is chaos from start to finish.”

Chaos from start to finish. While not necessarily the main theme of American Pastoral as relates to American society (it’s more universal, which is why this isn’t in the ‘American Themes’ section), the idea of chaos as a fact of life is a powerful and poignant truth that pervades the Swede’s story. While reading, we get an uncomfortable sense of premonition; not so much as foreshadowing for the book, but as foreshadowing for our own lives. How can anyone possibly know if their child will grow up to bomb a general store? How can anyone prevent their wife from having an affair? How can anyone predict whether or not their life will fall to pieces?

Chaos. Entropy. The second law of thermodynamics and the idea that in an isolated system, every reaction will increase the entropy of the system. The lack of order in the system. It seems to apply less to science in books and more to the science of life itself; the science of relationships and children and jobs and riots and prejudice and love and bombs. Roth makes it clear that everything we do in life has the possibility of going wrong. Everything we do increases the chaos of our lives– and, sometimes, if we are as unlucky and unfortunate as the Swede and his family, it can overtake us completely.

Eventually, Roth tells us, life will go to pieces, and there is no way to prepare for it. It is a rule of life, and it applies to absolutely everyone– no exceptions. The Swede is a prime example of that… how could anyone but his jealous and vindictive brother ever wish him harm? How could anyone say that Dawn deserved the trauma of her daughter killing a man? Four men? ”And what is wrong with their life?” Roth asks at the end of the book. “What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” Well, nothing. That’s the point. We can’t blame them for anything, and we can’t blame ourselves for anything. We have no choice. We cannot control the chaos. The Swede found that out the hard way– we cannot control chaos. We cannot instill order. Chaos is a rule. All we can do is hope to recover.

I’m not saying that American Pastoral feels like nonfiction, although the attention to detail Roth gives to every single character, setting, or background makes me think that he could make anything seem real– no, I’m talking about the fact that everything we hear about Merry’s downfall and the Swede’s life before and after that are products of the narrator’s mind. Nathan Zuckerman says, “I dreamed a realistic chronicle. I began gazing into his life… and inexplicably, which is to say lo and behold, I found him in Deal, New Jersey, at the seaside cottage, the summer his daughter was eleven…” and the story starts there. There, on page eighty-nine, the Swede’s story begins, and the entire thing is a dream, an effort produced by Zuckerman’s compulsive need to understand. It is fake. And we fall for it. By the end of the book, we are convinced that the Swede was the focus all along, and we have forgotten that Nathan Zuckerman existed. Roth does nothing to stop this from happening– there are no breaks from the dream back to reality, there are no “but I’ve heard it said that the Swede did _____ instead; anyway, then he…”s. There isn’t even a signal, really, that the narrative is going to change. Nothing but the easily-missed “I dreamed” at the beginning of the Swede’s story.

This brings up an interesting question: is a story any less important or emotional when you know it’s a lie? I’m inclined to say no, absolutely not– but only because by the end of American Pastoral I was indescribably and irrevocably attached to the Swede and his terrible American life. The book touches you, but in an odd and unfair kind of way– it lurks in the back of your head for days until you realize it’s there, and then it hits you full force: you feel for these people. The entire thing is a hoax, a fiction within a fiction, but you don’t really get mad at Zuckerman for telling it that way because it still works. You’re as connected to the Swede as Zuckerman himself was when he was an idol-worshipping little high-schooler in New Jersey. But you have to admit that the story could have been written in any number of ways– the characters with different interactions, the fate of Merry completely changed, the history of the Swede and Dawn’s relationship altered– and it would have been just as poignant and just as thematic.

Anyway, if a well-written lie has the same effect as a truth– or maybe even more of an effect– what does that mean for storytelling? Where do the boundaries lie? Roth winds up showing us that there really aren’t any, and that that’s okay– in fact, it’s a blessing. A story means what the author wants it to mean, and when the author has the freedom and ability to shape a true story, or even to just make one up, the result is exactly what he or she wanted it to be, and it affects the reader in exactly the way he or she wanted it to. It’s not the story that matters, then; it’s the purpose. The drive to send a message to humanity and the crafting of the conduit for that message and then, eventually, the story, a truth unto itself, purpose and theme and meaning personified. The Swede’s story affects me, touches me, because Nathan Zuckerman (or Philip Roth) wanted it to. That’s a pretty incredible thing.

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.

The protagonist of American Pastoral is a high-school legend, a demigod of the hallways– someone the narrator, Nathan ‘Skip’ Zuckerman, remembers with more than fondness– his admiration is so intense that when he sees him at a baseball game years later his companions tell Nathan he looks as if he’d met Zeus. When Nathan thinks of the Swede, he thinks of “the Swede’s great fall and of how he must have imagined that it was founded on some failure of his own responsibility. There is where it must begin,” Zuckerman says, “It doesn’t matter if he was the cause of anything. He makes himself responsible anyway.” This is the Swede: the modest hero, the man who accepts responsibility and, throughout the book, gives himself away for other people’s gain. He did it in high school by being the star athlete, letting people feed off of his talent and success; he did it with his wife, giving her his all and working his hardest to make her happy; and he did it with his daughter Merry, who he considered a part of himself, as much as that strong right arm or that often-talked-about handsome face, and she destroyed him. And believes, for a major part of the book, that it is his fault.

Zuckerman tells us that the Swede has “been doing that all his life, making himself unnaturally responsible, keeping under control not just himself but whatever else threatens to be uncontrollable, giving his all to keep his world together”. So it would make sense that when Merry blows up the general store, when Merry kills a man, when Merry runs away and when Merry converts to Jainism and even when Merry tells him she was raped that the Swede immediately identifies the cause of all this as “a transgression”; more specifically, his transgression.

The Swede is deceptively self-destructive in this way, and Roth makes it exceptionally easy to pity him for it. There is something undeniably and achingly familiar in the character of the Swede, this really nice guy, this man who, incredibly, blames himself for not being able to control the world around him. “The disaster that befalls him”, Zuckerman decides, “begins in a failure of his responsibility, as he imagines it.” And we see that the poor Swede does blame himself, multiple times– and that’s unfair, but who else could it be?

Nathan ‘Skip’ Zuckerman

Although not a main character of the story by any means, Nathan Zuckerman is the man who introduces us to the Swede in the first section of the book, ‘Paradise Remembered’. He is at first a fierce admirer of the Swede; he is a writer who looks back on the high school hero as if he was the only person in the world who mattered in those four years. When he meets the Swede for dinner after receiving a letter from him saying that the Swede wants Nathan’s help writing something about his father– for a great shock had befallen him– Nathan is disappointed. He keeps trying to come up with reasons for the Swede’s normality. He tells us that “perversely, my attempts to come up with the missing piece that would make the Swede whole and coherent kept identifying him with disorders of which there was no trace on his beautifully aging paragon’s face”. Later, he asks himself: “Why clutch at him? What’s the matter with you? There’s nothing here but what you’re looking at.”

But it is important to realize that Nathan did clutch at the Swede– so much that when he meets the Swede’s brother Jerry at his high school reunion, he immediately asks how the Swede is doing– and when the answer is “dead”, and Jerry tells him about Merry and the pain and the suffering and the catastrophe that was Seymour Levov’s life, Zuckerman thinks about it for weeks. He starts imagining it. The entirety of the rest of the book is what the imagines the Swede’s life to have been like.

We see Zuckerman, then, as someone who is a deep thinker, almost an obsessive thinker– a man who wants very much to understand, and when he can’t immediately comprehend something he has to delve into it, by whatever means possible, and figure it out. This is the reason he read the Swede’s favorite book in high school, the reason he thinks of a line from John Keats when he remembers a pretty girl he felt special fondness for, the reason he tells the Swede’s story– it is all, in effect, an effort to understand the most confounding puzzle in the world: human nature.

It makes me wonder if parents sometimes become blinded to their children’s faults by the simple fact that they are their children– beings that they have created and brought up, and so, like the Swede says, of course they are perfect, of course Merry is perfect, for how could she be otherwise? I don’t know– it’s the way the Swede reacts to Merry’s psychiatrist telling him why she stutters: “She is an extremely bright and manipulative child… stuttering can be an extremely manipulative, an extremely useful, if not even a vindictive type of behavior.” (p. 96) He explodes. He argues with the psychiatrist, defending his child as a perfect one, saying that she stutters because “her brain is so quick, it’s so much quicker than her tongue” (p. 97) and inwardly calling the doctor a “stupid bastard”, a “cold, heartless bastard”– despite the fact that all evidence points to Merry’s stuttering as, most simply, a cry for attention, and at most a manipulative tool against her mother.

Parents give most everything to their children, and not just materially and monetarily but emotionally, too. To have a child is to be willing to give up a part of yourself (biologically and mentally) and donate it to another. Everything the child learns, for the first couple years, is from you. That’s an enormous responsibility and a really horrifying prospect– but it makes sense, then, that you would always want to believe in the best of your child. The question “did I raise my kid wrong?” is not an easy one to ask.

I know that sometimes it is very easy to lie to my parents, generally because they want to believe I am being honest. And it is pretty evident that their view of me can be vastly different from how I see myself, depending on what they’re looking at. And I’m not saying my parents believe me all the time– they’re quite good at picking out the half-truths from the truths… so good that lying to them is just generally a really bad idea. But the fact that sometimes it works… that is frightening. Is that what you sign up for when you become a parent– becoming child-blinded? Becoming complacent with always believing in the best of your child and ignoring the worst– the very worst– until it smacks you in the face? I’m not Merry Levov. Few teenagers are quite as angst-ridden and disturbed as Merry Levov. But the blindness is still sometimes there with my parents, sometimes their ignorance is bliss, and the sad thing is that no matter how much it disturbs me I’m not going to change it.

It does make the idea of having children quite terrifying, though.

In this, only the thirty-fifth page of a four-hundred-and-twenty-three-page book, Philip Roth begins what he will do for the rest of the book: he expounds on a universal human trait. However, it is not only that; he makes the trait personal for his reader, makes this common human theme uncomfortably relatable, by using humorous figurative language side-by-side with strong diction and complex syntax. The result is a tone that is somewhat ranting, but nonetheless wise in a dry, cynical sort of way; the result is a passage that teaches and explains not with gentleness, or care for self-esteem or sensibilities, but with strictness and brutal honesty. He is telling humans what we do not want to hear.

Figurative language is used well in this passage. The idea of approaching people without bias in an effort to understand them is contrasted with the tanklike “superficiality” and “shallowness” that humans usually show, a contrast put in place only to show that the effort is useless– a disheartening thing to hear about one’s people skills. “You might as well have the brain of a tank” is a rather strong statement, after all. And the simile of being solitary “like the lonely writers”, ignoring real people in place of people we can create and therefore understand, is just as striking. Humans are at such a loss to comprehend each other that the only thing we can do is either pretend or make up our own characters to know them well? That is a sad, painful, and very true image, and Roth uses this figurative language well to get the image across.

Roth then selects his words carefully to show just how useless it is– his repetition of “you get them wrong”, for example, instills in the brain a sense of personal failure because ‘you’ is a very accusatory pronoun, and its repetition adds to the sense of perpetual incorrectness, of lifelong failure, in the reader– not just in humanity in general. The business of trying to understand people, Roth writes, is a “dazzling illusion empty of all perception”– in fact, it is all “misperception”– strong diction that hints at confusion, a lack of authenticity, and an absence of comprehension… again in ‘you’, the reader, along with the rest of humankind. The people we meet “we mangle with our ignorance every day”, he says; and it is important to note that we do not just pain or irritate or even anger them– we mangle them, a word that brings to mind something torn and dirtied, something breathless and beaten and ill-treated.

Like the repetition of the pronouns “you” and “we”, Roth’s syntax is also a concentrated effort to make the passage personal. The rhetorical questions and long, rambling sentences– in conjunction with his almost abusive way of using figurative language and diction– make the entire paragraph seem like a scold, a diatribe directed at the reader, personally. The rhetorical questions express anger by being drawn out and then ending sharply: “…so ill-equipped are we to all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims?” And then, towards the end, his quick shift in tone from anger to dryness again gives the passage the feeling of a monologue; he says, “getting people right is not what living is all about anyway”, and then makes it personal again with “That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong”. As in a monologue, the next sentence is fragmented, speechlike, almost an addition: “Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.” A moral for the audience, and then again, a personal jab: “But if you can do that– luck you.”

Lucky you, he says– rather sharply, thanks to the dashes, the sarcastic “well”, and the lingering image of being a lonely writer or a vulnerable people person. In American Pastoral, Roth uses these kinds of devices– strong and repetitive diction, figurative language and imagery, and long, complex syntax– to make Swede Levov and Skip Zuckerman’s stories into brutal, true, and uncomfortably relatable stories about families, about America, and about humans as a species, as a group who spends too much time worrying about “this terribly significant business of other people“. He attacks the reader personally; and it works. As harsh as his rhetoric is, it is effective; the reader comes away from a passage like this with a vague and, thanks to his shifts in tone, rather unsettling hope.

For some reason this reminds me of the Swede’s dream home, the strong stone farmhouse he wanted for his whole life and that his wife absolutely hated. The doors are open, the blinds on the window flung away, letting in the summer light, letting the green of the trees show into the stone home. It’s interesting, the feelings people get towards houses; after Merry’s bombing and disappearance, Dawn abhorred the house, and it’s not hard to understand why. “…because Merry was still there, in every room, Merry at age one, five, ten…. but as she might not survive their staying– and he, it still seemed, could endure anything, however brutally it flew in the face of his own inclinations– he agreed to abandon the house he loved, not least for the memories it held of his fugitive child.” (p. 192)

This sculpture is in the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis; it depicts a mother, father, and child. The two adults are lifting their kid in the air and dancing around with it, celebrating, as the plaque says (more or less), the union of parent and child, the bond between those who give life and those to whom it is given. It’s one of my mother’s favorite sculptures, but American Pastoral makes looking at it hard. It reminds me of the incredible bond the Swede feels with Merry, the bond parents have to feel with the children they’ve created and raised and that the children feel less and less of as time passes. When he meets her for the first time after the bombing, “all the fathering talent in the world collected and gathered up and mobilized in one man” can not help him; he is horrified, he is deeply hurt– he leaves in a mist of pain and confusion and doubts himself for days afterward. How strong is this bond? How much can a parent love their child when it has killed? When it doesn’t want to be loved by them?

American Pastoral is perhaps most obviously a book about the idea of the American Hero and the form such a hero always seems to take– the brave, self-sacrificing, and modest superstar; the town darling, the school’s champion athlete; the man you look up to for so long and whose attention you crave so painfully that a wink from him could send you into convulsions of joy and agony, deep agony because you know you will never be as good, as true, as chest-thumpingly American– and it is about his complete and absolute destruction when he is thrust from the idealized American pastoral into the “indigenous American berserk” that seethes under the surface of shimmering office buildings and solid suburban homes.

The annihilation of heroes is something that America experiences often and that Americans hate to see. ”The brutality of the destruction of this indestructible man”, as Roth writes, is the fear of the nation– not necessarily because we feel personally for the heroes themselves, but because America is a country that identifies itself by its leaders. It has always been this way– from John Smith in Jamestown to Barack Obama today, America has identified itself by fitting neatly into the outlines of the brave, the self-sacrificing, the modest and the strong and the admirable. Every period in American history has a couple of these demigods, and America has shaped itself accordingly to their strengths. With Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone we become frontiersmen, strong and hardy and braving the unknown. Abraham Lincoln made us fair and right; Martin Luther King, Jr. extended that into a basic acceptance and open-mindedness that in reality seems ironic at best. Our American Heroes, then, often smack of the extraordinary and the godly.

Our Hero has branched off, though, from the truly supernatural to the merely perfect, and this is where Philip Roth’s Swede Levov comes in. He is our regular hero, a man who is suburban and successful, the self-made man who grew from high-school athletic and social stardom (the quarterback/prom king type) to a man with a beautiful wife, intelligent and well-mannered children, a high-paying job, and a house (not too large, not too small) with just the right number of perfectly-trained pets.

Although this kind of American Hero may seem less sensational than those previously mentioned, it is important to note that the loss of Swede Levov to Roth’s main character is twice as crippling as that of, for example, JFK. That is because the destruction of the Swede hits closer to home. He is your high-school idol, the acquaintance from math class you want to be your best friend, the star player of the ____ball team and the focus of your envy and your idolization. You know him. You know the Swede, and when Roth makes you lose him you do what all Americans do at the loss of a hero– you weep for weeks and remember forever because there it goes, a part of ourselves– the better part of ourselves– gone.

This old picture reminded me of the Swede when I saw it– I think it’s a good way of showing the immense care he took in shaping his life; helped by luck and talent, he drew lines of normalcy and happiness around himself and his family quite like his father took so much care in making those Newark Maid gloves– and Merry blasted him out of those lines as surely as Newark itself has been swiftly changed from idyllic childhood playground to a noisome, dangerous place of car thieves and drag racers.

It is just as fascinating as it is horrifying, and Merry took it to heart. The Swede believed that this monk’s immolation, and that of other monks, later, had touched Merry somehow, so deeply and so profoundly… that it was the immolation of the monks, televised into their living room, that caused her to bomb the general store. So far, it’s hard to tell whether or not that’s only wishful thinking. How else could the Swede try to understand the pain his daughter caused in the town– in himself– in herself? “Out of nowhere and into their home, the nimbus of flames, the upright monk, and the sudden liquefaction before he keels over; into their home all those other monks, seated along the curbstone impassively looking on… into their home on Arcady Hill Road the charred and blackened corpse on its back in that empty street. That was what had done it.” (p. 154)

There are so many things about this picture that remind me of the main character, Skip Zuckerman, and his high school reunion– the picture is old and the people are clearly aging, first of all, which is one of the main things he seems to focus on– the fact that everyone is old, and the people who act young are lying through what teeth they have left. The dancing, too, struck me, not because Skip danced at his reunion with a girl he used to like but because of how the picture was taken; the couple in the center are awkwardly close and the others are completely in the dark, their legs skewed at weird angles and their faces hidden. All the dancers seem rather mismatched, their faces blurred and strained, as if they are trying hard not to upset or irritate their partner and so stay moving, with cheery smiles, the whole time. The entire thing has an air of awkwardness to it, actually, and disappointment; like you’d imagine a high-school reunion to be, and like Zuckerman found his.