American Pastoral is an homage to industrial Newark, and a history and geography lesson not only about Newark but the western countryside beyond the city as well. The Swede’s father founds a glove-making company. The name of the company is Newark Maid—perhaps a play on the words “Newark Made.” When the Swede is a boy, he apprentices to his father. He accompanies Lou Levov as he goes to pick up completed gloves from Italian families. As they pass ancient factories that have been around since the Civil War, his father narrates inexhaustibly how the city had been built on brownstone and brick. Zuckerman’s own view of Newark starts in the neighborhood: “Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention; that’s the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surfaces of things.” But the Swede has a sixth sense of geography that is broader than Weequahic. With his father he visits the old Italian neighborhoods. And as an impressionable kid he has his “first encounter” with what Roth calls the “manmade sublime.” It is the railroad viaduct that “divides and dwarfs” the residents of the old Ironbound district. The viaduct is “the city’s Chinese wall, brownstone boulders piled 20 feet high, strung out for more than a mile and intersected only by half a dozen foul underpasses.”
In time, Lou Levov leases and then buys an old umbrella factory on the corner of Central Avenue and 2nd Street. He lands a few big accounts and becomes one of the biggest glove producers in America. The Swede turns his back on a promising baseball career and joins his father in the business. The factory is still pumping out gloves by the time the riots erupt in Newark in 1967.
