American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997)

Newark's golden boy had a nickname that sounded like a blessing: the Swede, the blond Jewish athlete every kid in the neighborhood worshipped from a distance. Seymour Levov grows up to claim everything the postwar promise offered: the glove factory, the beauty-queen wife, the stone house in the country. Nathan Zuckerman, half-inventing the life he can only guess at, tells the story because the wreckage demands a witness. The wreckage is Merry, the Swede's stuttering daughter, who plants a bomb at the village store to protest Vietnam and kills a man, then vanishes into the rage of her own country. What Roth grasps, and what leaves a bruise, is that the Swede's ruin grows straight out of his goodness. A gentler father, less patient, less loving, might have seen his child coming. _American Pastoral_ is the novel of how the dream curdles from the inside, how the story you tell yourself about your life keeps telling itself right up until the blast.