Roth’s protagonist, known to his Jewish community as “the Swede” for his Nordic features and athletic prowess, becomes a hero both on and off the field. He letters in three sports and appears poised for a career in baseball but chooses instead to take over the family glove business. With this choice, his cultural heroism is also cemented in the hearts and minds of Weequahic’s Jews. The Swede, who could have reached the pinnacle of American aspirational culture as a professional baseball player, opts to stay true to his community. Ironically, a man who is worshipped for embodying goy society in his physical appearance and his skill at America’s pastime, becomes an even more mythic figure for shunning those trappings and returning to his Jewish heritage.

The Swede is a people pleaser who depends on the adulation he gets from others, and the person he most wants to please is his father, Lou, who has groomed him to take over the family business since he was a teenager. So accustomed to bearing the burden of cultural and family obligations, he becomes a stoic, repressed adult—a vessel of everyone’s needs but his own. He refuses to believe that he cannot somehow fix Merry and bring her back to her childhood innocence.