Goodbye, Columbus: and Five Short Stories

A re-read for me, Goodbye, Columbus was the first thing I ever read by Roth. I was again riveted (except during Leo’s endless monologue at the end of the wedding reception when I flipped through pages, hoping he would soon shut up, even though that's clearly the reaction Roth intended). Through the eyes of two young characters living worlds apart in New Jersey, we get a clear picture of how life tended to play out in mid-20th-century America for so many. One quote from the book – “No sense carrying dreams of Tahiti in your head, if you can’t afford the fare” – strikes me as definitive. Neither Neil nor Brenda could afford the fare that would have to be paid if their love affair continued.

This is about my fourth review of a Philip Roth book and represents a deliberate return to his earlier works. There is no earlier published selection than Good bye Columbus. Not only was this an award winning book, but the title story would become the first of many of his works to become a movie.Goodbye, ColumbusThis review is of the Kindle edition. As others have noted there are a number of transcription errors. I tend to miss or forget if there are a few, but this edition had too many to not notice all of them. I have removed one star for poor copy.Philip Roth will always write about his generation of Jewish American. Specifically one generation removed from the European shtetl and raised in the semi enclosed world of poor to middle class ethnic New Jersey and who generally made it out as scholars or athletes.Coming after a generation of Jewish writers who tended to romanticize all things Jewish, especially family life, his more realistic and complex portrayals would cause him much enmity within the Jewish community. This enmity he would turn into major themes within his future works. All this is in the future as Goodbye Columbus began its circulation.Nowhere in any of these stories will Philip Roth take time to explain Jewish customs, the history of anti-Semitism or even linger on the subjects of the Holocaust. This later issue is an unspoken presence in two different stories: The Defender of the Faith and Eli the Fanatic. Roth takes as given that the reader is intelligent enough to understand how individuals can carry with them the burden and the strength that goes with their heritage. We are in part our culture, the question is not the details of our respective heritages but how much we choose or have the choice to express this relationship.I speak in terms of heritage and culture as unmodified nouns rather than subject to specific adjectives. Neil, in the title novella, Goodbye Columbus is a story of love across the class divide. The conflict that will test the young love in this less than fatal Romeo and Juliette story is about how wealth can buy "Do Overs", not available to the working poor. That the two are Jewish provides context but is not the central fact of the story. In the short story Epstein, everything is about survival in middle school and nothing about religion. My point is that however much these stories are about a particular Jewish experience, they have analogs in a larger American world. In this case it is a largely white America but no less relevant 50 years after original publication.Defender of the Faith has a Jewish sergeant, freshly reposted to America from the horrors of World War II in Europe. He heals his "infantry man's heart" even as he is preparing fresh recruits to go into the war in the Pacific. He is manipulated by a conniving soldier and in letting himself be used he finds himself being healed. This is a deftly told story. In the end, (+++spoiler alert+++)The sergeant refuses to let the master manipulator abandon others who have grown to need his particular skill.Philip Roth deserves your attention not because he has clever plots, or because you cannot guess where he is going in a story. He is a craftsman, using simple language to tell complex stories. We can feel how the Sunday school failed to contain the precociously minded child in the Conversion of the Jews, and how events ultimately take the boy to a place where no one could have anticipated. We can feel exactly how the kind hearted lawyer in Eli, the Fanatic reacts to the conflicting demands of his situation.Roth leads us into complex imaginings and requires us to be aware and alert. Events are less important then the thought process. This is not passive reading. It is reading that will draw you in, and expects you to think to the next step and the ideas behind it, to the next idea.

I find Philip Roth's debut novella, Goodbye, Columbus, to be much more enjoyable than his more famous work, Portnoy's Complaint. For one thing, Columbus is much shorter - it gets to the point. It is not endlessly repetitive, the way Portnoy is - nor is Roth as full of himself in this more modest work.Goodbye, Columbus has all the heart that Portnoy's Complaint lacks. It is the proverbial "coming of age" story of Neil Klugman. Neil is the Philip Roth stand-in - like Roth, he is a poor Jewish boy from Newark. He has his first great love affair with Brenda Patimkin - a rich girl from Short Hills. Brenda is all he could ever want in a woman, so everything should be perfect...right? The reader may guess at the stops along the way, but predictability isn't really the issue - it's the journey that matters.I found the short stories in this collection less appealing. They are all on the same theme: the aversion Roth feels towards Jewish-American culture, while being a Jewish-American. This is one of the central themes in his novels as well, but his short stories are not able to support this theme as well as the other diversions that make his novels enjoyable. As such, the short stories are one-trick-ponies, and I found them tiring. Perhaps this is the reason that Roth is known as a novelist and not a short-story writer. However, the book is worth purchasing for the novella alone.

See the movie if you can. The book is flat. None of the emotion and irony is in book. The book needs motion and scenery. Its very dated. Most people won't under the story thin as it is about ethnicity and class back then and still to.a.lesser degree. Jewish - American princess at Radcliff tmeets Jewish boy from NJ schools with no interest in anything working in a public library after military service. Finding himself. They spend the summer at her house on weekends having sex. After a while he asks her to get a diaphragm which she does after much squabling. She goes back to Radcliff and he visits her. She leaves the diaphragm at home. He parents discover it and blame him not her. Wonders why she left diaphragm running the weekend and their relationship. He backs his bags and returns home by train. No birth control pills in those days. What were they doing until she got the diapragm? The parents got their princess back with expensive gifts to comfort her. He end back at the library, maybe broken hearted or happen to be free again.

I recently relocated to New Jersey and heard about this book on the New Jersey Is The World podcast. I read it and besides being a great story that translates in any setting it is an excellent primary source for exploring New Jersey's class consciousness through neighborhoods. I'm from the South and I can tell y'all that NJ is obsessed with class in a way that people from my home in Appalachia are not. Seller review: book arrived on time as advertised.