BOOKS: WHEN SHE WAS BAD

This spring an unusual and virtually simultaneous blooming of senior novelists is taking place. Norman Mailer (see following review), Saul Bellow, the mysterious Thomas Pynchon and a seemingly perennial Philip Roth all have new works scheduled for publication. American Pastoral (Houghton Mifflin; 423 pages; $26) is Roth's fourth offering in fewer than seven years, making the 64-year-old a sort of Cal Ripkin of American letters.

Roth's three previous books--Patrimony, Operation Shylock and Sabbath's Theater--won leading literary prizes, which is no small achievement in the contentious world of book awards. American Pastoral could make Roth's record four for four.

The novel is a scorcher about prosperous New Jersey parents whose picture-perfect life is destroyed when their daughter becomes a terrorist. This cultural horror story is deepened by Roth's genius for blending humor, pathos, sympathy and rage. The effect is visceral, a queasy feeling that the bottom has fallen out of civilization, and despite our faith in reason, irrationality rules. "He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach--that it makes no sense," Roth writes about his paragon of decency and convention, Seymour ("Swede") Levov, star athlete of Weequahic High in Newark, New Jersey, during the early 1940s.

Roth has frequently celebrated his once predominantly Jewish alma mater as something like a yeshiva of assimilation. Swede, so called for his tall, blond, blue-eyed good looks, is built for a speedy launch into the American mainstream. His luck seems endless. He joins the Marines as World War II is ending; he returns from service to prepare to take over Newark Maid, his father's successful glove factory; and he marries the former Mary Dawn Dwyer, Miss New Jersey of 1949.

A golden couple in a golden time, the Levovs rise effortlessly on an unbreaking wave of postwar prosperity. They move to a 160-year-old stone house in one of the Garden State's classiest exurbs. There Mary Dawn breeds prize cattle on a 17-acre homestead and rears daughter Meredith, a bright, bubbly child the Levovs call Merry.

Grumpy might have been safer. Old Country Jews believed that acknowledging good fortune would attract an evil eye, a kineahora. Roth brings this useful superstition home when, as a teenager, the Merry Levov contracts a lethal case of '60s political self-righteousness. She blows up the town's general store-post office, killing a passerby, and then vanishes.

You will search the shelf of contemporary fiction long and hard to find a parental nightmare projected with the emotional force and verbal energy that Roth brings to American Pastoral. Every time she passes a young woman, Mary Dawn hopes it is her daughter. Hope, in fact, is no help. It only inflames the pain every day. Eventually the mother starts to habituate expensive psychiatric clinics. The ideal marriage dissolves, and long before he sickens with terminal prostate cancer, Swede begins to die of heartbreak.