American pastoral

You got it! Exactly! We are not enough. We are none of us enough! Including even the man who does everything right!

And now he is crying easily, there is no line between him and his crying, and an amazing new experience it is--he is crying as though crying like this has been the great aim of his life, as though all along crying like this was his most deeply held ambition, and now he has achieved it, now that he remembers everything he gave and everything she took, all the spontaneous giving and taking that had filled their lives and that one day, inexplicably (despite whatever Jerry might say, despite all the blame that it is his pleasure now to heap upon the Swede), quite inexplicably, became repugnant to her. "You talk about what I'm dealing with as though anybody could deal with it.

You are unrevealed--that is the story, Seymour, unrevealed. That is why your own daughter decided to blow you away. You are never straight about anything and she hated you for it. You keep yourself a secret. You don't choose ever."

No, you're not the renegade. You're the one who does everything right."
"I don't follow this. You say that like an insult." Angrily he says, "What the hell is wrong with doing things right?"
"Nothing. Nothing. Except that's what your daughter has been blasting away at all her life. You don't reveal yourself to people, Seymour. You keep yourself a secret. Nobody knows what you are. You certainly never let her know who you are. That's what she's been blasting away at--that facade. All your fucking norms. Take a good look at what she did to your norms."

When it comes to consolation, it is always the wrong brother, the wrong father, the wrong mother, the wrong wife, which is why one must be content to console oneself and be strong and go on in life consoling others.

All he could think of was the two times she had been raped. Four people blown up by her--so grotesque, so out of scale, it was unimaginable. It had to be. To see the faces, to hear the names, to learn that one was a mother of three, the second just married, the third about to retire. . . . Did she know what or who they were . . . care who they were ... ? He could not imagine any of it. Wouldn't. Only the rape was imaginable. Imagine the rape and the rest is blocked out: their faces remain out of sight, their spectacles, their hairdos, their families, their jobs, their birth dates, their addresses, their blameless innocence.

She had been much too blessed for this to be true. So had he. He could never father a child who killed four people.

That was more than hardship. That was hell. Merry couldn't survive any of it. She could not have survived killing four people. She could not have murdered in cold blood and survived.
And then he realized that she hadn't survived.

"I remember when Jewish kids were home doing their homework. What happened? What the hell happened to our smart Jewish kids? If, God forbid, their parents are no longer oppressed for a while, they run where they think they can find oppression. Can't live without it. Once Jews ran away from oppression; now they run away from no-oppression. Once they ran away from being poor; now they run away from being rich. It's crazy. They have parents they can't hate anymore because their parents are so good to them, so they hate America instead."

They were brought up in houses like his own. They were raised by parents like him. And so many were girls, girls whose political identity was total, who were no less aggressive and militant, no less drawn to "armed action" than the boys. There is something terrifyingly pure about their violence and the thirst for self-transformation. They renounce their roots to take as their models the revolutionaries whose conviction is enacted most ruthlessly. They manufacture like unstoppable machines the abhorrence that propels their steely idealism. Their rage is combustible. They are willing to do anything they can imagine to make history change. The draft isn't even hanging over their heads; they sign on freely and fearlessly to terrorize against the war, competent to rob at gunpoint, equipped
in every way to maim and kill with explosives, undeterred by fear or doubt or inner contradiction--girls in hiding, dangerous girls, attackers, implacably extremist, completely unsociable.