Goodbye, Columbus
by Philip Roth
Summary
Neil Klugman works at the Newark Public Library, lives with his aunt Gladys, and is nobody in particular, which he knows. Brenda Patimkin swims at the country club his cousin's membership lets him visit, goes to Radcliffe, and lives in Short Hills, where her father's kitchen sink business has bought the family a house with a refrigerator in the basement kept full of fruit, a detail Roth makes carry the whole novella: Neil eating the Patimkins' cherries and nectarines is a boy from one Jewish Newark tasting the assimilated suburb the other one built.
The summer romance that follows is sharp about everything young love is usually soft about: class inside a single ethnicity, desire tangled with resentment, and the negotiation, astonishing on the page in 1959, over Brenda getting a diaphragm, which Neil pushes as proof of seriousness and which detonates the affair when her mother finds it. The ending, at the Harvard Yale game weekend, is a masterpiece of things ending because nobody will say the one true sentence.
Five stories follow, and two are permanent: Defender of the Faith, in which an army sergeant faces a co religionist working the tribal angle for favours, and Eli, the Fanatic, in which suburban Jews hire a lawyer to make a Holocaust survivors' yeshiva look less Jewish, and the lawyer cracks open instead.
Around three hundred pages in all, fast and gleaming.
Best for readers who want to watch a great career detonate on page one, and American Jewish comedy before anyone agreed it was allowed.
Historical Context & Significance
Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1960, while Philip Roth was still in his twenties, among the youngest winners the fiction award has ever had, and the book started the fight that ran the length of his career: rabbis and community organisations charged him with fouling the nest, Defender of the Faith drew furious letters for showing a Jewish schemer in print, and Roth answered in essays arguing that writing Jews as people, faults intact, honoured them more than public relations could. Portnoy's Complaint, nine years later, escalated the argument past recall.
The 1969 film, with Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw, caught the novella's surfaces and made it a period touchstone.
The career that followed, thirty books, another National Book Award thirty five years later, the Pulitzer for American Pastoral, every prize but the Nobel he conspicuously never got, makes this debut read now like an overture: the class antennae, the comedy of appetite and the refusal to protect anyone, all present at first performance.