Houghton Mifflin Company. Zuckerman tells Mr. Roth in that book, reproving him for lapsing into the tame decencies of the uninvented life, ''your indiscretion, the key to disclosure.'' ''The distortion called fidelity is not your metier,'' Zuckerman insists. Or he is the good boy whom Zuckerman can imagine and mourn for only in this way.
Swede is alive when the story opens, dead soon after.
Zuckerman picks up a few details of his life at the reunion, notably from Swede's ferocious brother, a bullying cardiac surgeon in Miami. The rest is his dreamed chronicle. The time is 1968. Merry goes into hiding, is raped and becomes destitute, gets involved in further bombings in Oregon, winds up back in Newark, stick-thin, filthy, a veil over her face, having become a Jain, dedicated to such extremes of nonviolence that she can scarcely bring herself to eat because of the murder of plant life involved. The novel stages an encounter between Swede and his derelict-looking daughter, and the scene manages to be both shocking and discreet.