Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, grows up in the booming post-war years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him. His teenage daughter has become capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism, wrenching Swede out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American beserk.