Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories / Letting Go

by Philip Roth, Ross Miller (Editor)

"The title novella, Goodbye, Columbus, the story of a summer romance between a poor young man from Newark and a rich Radcliffe co-ed, is both a tightly wrought tale of youthful desire and a satiric gem that takes aim at the comfortable affluence of the postwar boom. Here and in the stories that accompany it, including "The Conversion of the Jews" and "Defender of the Faith," Roth depicts Jewish lives in 1950s America with an unflinching sharpness of observation." In Letting Go, a sprawling novel set largely against the backdrop of Chicago in the 1950s, Roth portrays the moral dilemmas of young people cast precipitously into adulthood, and in the process describes a skein of social and family responsibilities as they are brought into focus by issues of marriage, abortion, adoption, friendship, and career. The novel's expansiveness provides a wide scope for Roth's gift for vivid characterization, and in his protagonist Gabe Wallach he creates a nuanced portrait of a responsive young academic whose sense of morality draws him into the ordeals of others with unforeseen consequences.

Library of America #157

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, American, Literature, Classics, 20th Century, Audiobook

913 pages, Hardcover

Published August 18, 2005

About the author

Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.
Roth was one of the most honored American writers of his generation. He received the National Book Critics Circle award for The Counterlife, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman, a second National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 2005, the Library of America began publishing his complete works, making him the second author so anthologized while still living, after Eudora Welty. Harold Bloom named him one of the four greatest American novelists of his day, along with Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize in Prague.

Reviews

[Tom Crehore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every time I read Philip Roth one of my first thoughts is, "it's not fair." It's not fair that someone can have this much insight to the human spirit. Wonderful books. Am looking forward to reading some more.

[Jim Bullington · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been a fan of Phillip Roth since I read Portnoy's Complaint in 1967, however I never read his earlier works. I own all books syce 1967. These early works allow those of us Christians that identify as being grafted onto the vine of Judaism to understand a little of how modern Jews feel. I pray for their conversion but i appreciate them for preserving Gods word until Jesus came to fulfill the prophecy.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

goodbye, columbus. this is a beautiful novella. in 109 pages you find yourself recalling your own poignant moments of love and loss and leaving. how single blades of grass moved over university lawns as you laid in them after graduation. after everyone you spent the last four years with have departed and gone home or to jobs and internships in foreign cities. how the light bent through old oak trees and somehow it was sadder illuminating a lawn where two weeks ago your friends sat indian style and talked about philosophy and how when your girlfriend came walking over the lawn all old jeans and rock concert shirt carrying a novel your heart fluttered. sometime later she closed your bronx apartment door and you looked out the window and watched her climb into her old red car and speed away to connecticut. you knew you would never see her again. and now. older. you see all those moments in cracks in concrete and while pumping gas or browsing old bookstores for modern library editions. and finding one brings you back again to hooting and hollering at some show with your arms up over your head and next to you the best thing that ever happened to you looking at you and mouthing the word yes!

[Neko~chan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goodbye Columbus was genuinely the best story in this. The other ones are pretty forgettable. Maybe I’d feel more strongly about it if I were Jewish?

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

After obtaining all nine volumes of the Library of America's novels of Philip Roth (very likely my favorite author), I decided to start from the beginning and read all of them in sequence (much like Libby Herz plans to do with Faulkner in Letting Go-- how's that for coincidence?*)

Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories *** 1/2 (out of 5) Read November 2014
Letting Go *** (out of 5) Read January 2016

Roth's first book features a splendid novella and several good-to-great short stories. They are impeccably written, touching on the themes the fledgling author would concern himself with for the rest of his career, but they're missing something: his voice isn't totally formed yet, so these feel like the apprentice works that they are.

His first novel, meanwhile, ranges from incisively brilliant to frustratingly unfocused and everywhere in between. At 600-plus pages, it's way too long and again, he's not fully himself yet; his writing would soon become more precise.

Verdict: Both works are worth your time, but they're not the titles his legend is built on. We'll encounter one such title in Volume 2.

*Further coincidence: I have all the Faulkner and Bellow LoA volumes and have meant to do the same with their works as well. One project at a time, I suppose.

[John Otto · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a Philip Roth fan, although not an uncritical one. I don't know anyone who depicts the richness of Jewish life in America with such warmth and humor but fearlessness. I wish Amish/Mennonites had someone writing who was half as good.

This book is Roth's first one, published in 1959, and winning The National Book Award.

The other five short stories in the book are the equal of or better than Goodbye, Columbus. The Conversion of the Jews, is about a young boy who questions Jewish dogma, arguing that if God is all-powerful there could have been a virgin birth as preached by some Christians. He gets in trouble with the rabbi and winds up forcing the conversion of his entire synagogue to Christianity. Many Jewish Americans were highly offended by the story, while critics loved it.

The other stories in the book are Defender of the Faith, Epstein, You Can't Tell A Man By The Song He Sings, and Eli, The Fanatic. I won't take the time to detail all of them, but generally they follow the same themes as the first two I have mentioned.

If your only knowledge of Philip Roth is the scandal caused by Portnoy's Complaint, when it was published (it wouldn't raise many eyebrows now,) then you owe it to yourself to read some of his other works. You will feel enriched.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! This redeemed Philip Roth for me. I can hardly believe this is the same person who wrote American Pastoral. I gave this a 4-star rating b/c I have mixed reactions. The first 3 stories I would give 5-stars, but the last three weren't as good. A lot of his close-up depictions of the Newark Jewish culture reminds me of my own Kidron Mennonite upbringing (in a starkly different but oddly familiar way). Thanks Sarah for the recommendation.

[jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Goodbye, Columbus--I went to school with this guy. I went to school with six of this guy.



(Oh, well, Roth was U of C.)

[Zack · Rating 4 out of 5]

After several false starts over the years, I finally read Goodbye, Columbus (1959) all the way through. Last fall with no copy on hand, I had been eager to read Roth's second book and first full-length novel, Letting Go (1962). It's not a title of his that many people are familiar with these days, dwarfed by his success later that decade with Portnoy's Complaint, more recently with American Pastoral and The Plot Against America, and of course back with his first book, which established his reputation -- or rather, his many reputations. As such, Letting Go is not, I think, widely available these days, and my only copy of it is in the first of the Library of America volumes devoted to Roth's output; as it's coupled here with Goodbye, Columbus, I saw this as an opportunity to finally finish that one and get a better sense of his earliest writings. I'm going to try to piece together a somewhat coherent review of both but will likely just ramble from thought to thought.

I'll briefly touch upon Goodbye, Columbus, which might seem a fairly uneven collection but is perhaps a fair reflection of Roth's talents and the directions in which he would go -- melancholic stories of love, pitch-perfect comedic pieces, Newark nostalgia (even in the 50s). The first time I read the title novella, I didn't care much care for it and found the two characters, Neil and Brenda, quite grating. I may not have been any more sympathetic to Neil this time round, but appreciated it more with this reading. "Defender of the Faith," "Epstein," and "Eli, the Fanatic" are great at exploring different kinds of tension -- "Defender" and "Eli" with (the Jewish) community, assimilation and modernity, and "Epstein" with the midlife, marital and cultural. "Conversion of the Jews" was hilarious, and I don't think I completely processed "You Can't Tell a Man by the Song he Sings."

The only references I've ever seen to Letting Go were made by Larry McMurtry, who has called it the best exploration of a particular social milieu, one like Roth which he had been a member of: graduate school in the 1950s. When I came upon the first reference, in his book-length rumination on storytelling, modernity and the west, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, I was simply pleased that one of my favorite writers had favorably referenced another. Both had entered graduate studies in English literature around the same time, McMurtry at Rice and Roth at Chicago, and both emerged, as McMurtry put it, doctorateless. Aside from my own general curiosity about or false nostalgia for the 1950s, I consider academia and the lives of writers in that period a rich scene in terms of our cultural and intellectual history. (Stray note: I've often found reminders in Roth's writings that while our culture and world may often be utterly perplexing, it's continually perplexing and always has been. Though much has changed since the transitional period of the 50s in which Letting Go takes place, some of what he paints still resonates today. One of the more trivial but still funny examples from the novel has to do with the clear division that had already arisen then between those engaged in "criticism" and those in "creative writing," something that has only become more pronounced over time.)

Letting Go centers on Gabe Wallach, part-time narrator, but he is one of a handful of characters whose forays into adulthood, love and sex Roth explores. Wallach is the least attached of any of the characters here but finds himself entangled in a number of lives, sometimes incidentally, sometimes as an attempt at meaningfulness. The novel starts in Iowa City, where Wallach is a grad student in English and meets the creative writing PhD candidate Paul Herz, whose own circumstance in life is almost exactly the opposite of Gabe's. Both are Jewish men from New York and in their 20s, but Gabe is independently wealthy and Paul eternally hapless; Gabe is after love and untethered, Paul has found himself in a young but already troubled marriage; Gabe is much loved by his father and seeking room to grow as a result, while Paul and his wife Libby have been entirely disowned by their parents. Gabe and the Herzes all move a lot throughout the 50s, seeking but never quite finding the right station (figuratively and geographically), and end up for a while together again in Chicago, where the bulk of the book is set and Gabe and Paul teach at the U of C. While there, Gabe winds up involved with Martha Reganhart. A fiercely intelligent woman and the single mother of two, she has been left to contend with the social constraints of the 50s, the constraints of parenting and pursuing her own happiness, largely on her own.

This seems to me at once both more and less measured than the other works of Roth's I've read and sampled. More in the sense that there is little of the narcissism or chauvinism his later material would be charged with; the male characters here may occasional make unfortunate, cringe-worthy statements and actions, but these are presented as ultimately human flaws. Though one is portrayed as fairly hysterical, the women in this novel are fairly well drawn, their desires and opinions are not given short shrift, and it's clear that all of the characters here are simply confused with their lives.

The novel is less measured, though, in its sprawl, which is not to say it's indulgent or a bore; on the contrary, it was nice to get lost in. Whereas his later works pivot on -- hone in on, really -- some artistic conceit (playing with history, the form of the novel itself, or the relation a writer has to his work, of autobiography to fiction), this would be better characterized, like those early stories were in miniature, as a contemplative character study. Indeed, along the way there are some profound scenes and narratorial musings, the most striking of which anticipates the opening lines and much of the thematic terrain of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. That is to do with the predicament of our one life and of meaning(lessness); though each novel is also characterized by a slow-building crescendo and focuses on a few male and female characters, the two share little else in common, stylistically and otherwise.

I think I'll be chewing on this one for a while. I can't say it was everything I hoped it would be, but it was definitely satisfying. As always, I continue to love great prose stylists and Roth is one of them.

[Bruce Carlson · Rating 4 out of 5]

You go to the restaurant and get all the appetizers instead of a meal. You have some great taste sensations and even feel full. Until you realize you have not quite had a meal. You wish you ordered a steak or a chicken dish. Still you know what you ate is very, very good.

I felt a bit like that about Goodbye, Columbus, Roth's story of teenage summer love, and through that prism, life and fulfilment. Interesting characters - kept me reading even with some of the archaic depictions of people.

I liked the story of Neil and Brenda which is the majority of this book. I think this story could/should have been a whole novel though [but to talk like a GC character. Who me? Criticize a book from the 1950's. What chutzpa?], but I'll put that aside. What was there was excellently written, compelling. But yet, some elements were undeveloped. The other stories were good but what it was lost on my why I was reading them. I kept waiting for the army Sarge to turn out to be Neil's relative or something.

Still and all you should read it. And if you are from Jersey - that's an order.

I had the true honor of reading this in the Newark Public Library, where his character Neil worked )(and perhaps Roth did?) and there is a Roth wing which he donated books and dollars to.

[Catherine Bishop · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philip Roth is everything he’s cracked up to be: a vivid character writer, a master observer of mid-century American life, and a misogynist.

In many ways, Roth is the Jewish extension of Hemingway. They write from the straight male perspective, but they write well. For me, that’s worth the read, even if I didn’t love the detailed descriptions of every single female character's breasts. I never want to hear a boob compared to a blow fish again in my life.

The only thing Hemingway hated more than women was Jews, and I wish he could have lived long enough to see a Jersey Jew catapult his writing style to a new level of bluntness. Hemingway perfectly tracked the disintegration of his fellow white peers within the Lost Generation, while Roth was a mouthpiece for a wide range of people. His contemplations on the immigrant experience include people of all races and religions, including a chillingly good subplot about young black boys in Goodbye Columbus. The “All-American boy” takes up little space in Roth’s America. Traumatized veterans, religious fanatics, and the poor all get a place in his stories, and I don’t think he gets enough credit for widening the artistic understanding of who is American.

But if Roth should be known for anything, it’s his meditation on how Jews treat other Jews. Jews (even contemporary ones) like to evade that question by instead asking, “But how do the gentiles treat us?” Roth was an unapologetic transcriber of classism and disagreement between Jews. I don’t think non-Jews can ever understand how difficult a subject that is. By exposing the rifts within his community, he left a deeply traumatized group vulnerable to an already anti-Semitic world. Many Jews were certain that Christian America would use his books as evidence against them, and no doubt some people did. But many others used Roth’s stories as a window into a usually closed-off Jewish world, and came away understanding Jews for who they are: just another flawed group of people.

I recommend these stories to anyone interested in religion and race in mid-century America or anyone who loves a good short story. I especially had a wonderful time with this audiobook!

[Vilas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my second reading of the book. I found it hard to read and understand when I attempted to read it 3 years back. But it was definitely smoother this time around.
Philip Roth’s stories, backdrop and the atmosphere draws the reader deep into the world of characters and they stay with us for a long time. The way the he immerses the reader with the almost passive yet deeply internal thoughts and dialogues were highlights of the book.

Although most of the stories are set at a particular point of time (1940s and 1940s) in US and mostly revolves around Jews, it also emphasises and captures human tendencies and behaviours across time.

I still felt certain passages and part of the stories were little hard to grasp. But, I hope I will be better evolved to grasp Mr Roth’s work by the time I revisit this for the third time.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

July 2019. Our book group at LMU was assigned "Defender of the Faith" a wonderful short story. I read some of the other Goodread reviews. More than for any author Ive read, the readers demonstrated their "rating system" and most seemed to be college professor ty[es that were very hard graders! I am most curious as to reactions from Jewish readers and reactions from non-Jewish readers. The first person protagonist is Nathan Marx and the antagonist is Sheldon Grossbart. I've not done this before but upon finishing this story I made lists of adjectives describing both Nathan and Sheldon. In some ways the story is quite dated and in other ways it is most timely. I highly recommend it!

[Richard Kriheli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall rating:
Goodbye, Columbus - ★★★★
The other stories - ★★

So this book sits somewhere in the middle of the road / 3 stars. Not great, but reading Roth is always a treat as a long-time NY'er and as someone with a partial Jewish heritage. His works are fully immersed in that "world" and it's really not for everyone. These works are very dated and could come off as cringy at times, but being aware of when they were published is critical to its understanding. Also considering this is Roth's first major publication (I think) is also important when thinking about his body of work as whole. It's truly impressive that this was written in his 20s but it does show a lot.

[Marcia Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm still deciding whether I like the short story form or not, this collection didn't sway me either way. I disliked Epstein only because there were two too many unanswered questions at the climax...why did he go to the neighbor's house, and what happened when his daughter went into the house after the ambulance left? Goodbye, Columbus was the reason I picked up the book and it was of course the best of the bunch.

[Thomas Watkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goodbye Columbus was beautiful and filled with excitement and energy. The short stories were fun and engaging for the most part and shared similar themes. This one might be worth adding to my personal collection. I’m excited to read more Philip Roth. I’m glad I read his first book (Goodbye Columbus) first.

[Don Siegrist · Rating 3 out of 5]

My second go at Philip Roth. I came away with the same opinion, a great writing style but a tired topic. His unflattering portrait of 1st/2nd generation American Jews must have been incendiary in the 1950's but it now seems hackneyed. The characters seemingly come out of Borscht Belt comedy routines, the narcissistic, oversexed Jewish male and the whiny, demanding female. Oy vey.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Please see my reviews of each of the two volumes included in this collection. My edition contained obvious typographical errors that may originate in the uncritical adoption of the original printed versions of these texts.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A snapshot of post WWII Jewish folks in the US in the late 50s. I read several Roth novels in the 70s, including our friend, Portnoy, but had never read Goodbye, Columbus or any short stories. Columbus was OK but the short stories were excellent!

[John Gutiérrez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was an incredible reading. i like so much the mean story, Goodbye Colombus and the movie is good, too.

[Vivienne Strauss · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would be difficult to express how much I loved this collection of stories and novel! Nearly 900 pages of dense writing and I savored each and every word.

[Jane Gregg · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic for a reason. Philip Roth - what a funny, funny guy.

[john callahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Buenissimo! NOTE: I read "G.C. & 5 short stories." There is another novel in this edition, "Letting Go." I did not read it.

[Sumner Forbes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classic! A fantastic entry point for Roth and one that forecasts his greater work to come.

[RK Byers · Rating 4 out of 5]

he seemed to be in between styles in these stories. kinda Marvin Gaye post-Ain’t that Peculiar but pre-What’s Going On.

[Jordan · Rating 2 out of 5]

read most of it

[Jodi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very retro and non PC language, but an unexpected deep dive into the conflicts a practicing Jew faces in American in the 1940’s, 1940’s and today.

[Soc Page]

everyday stories told from the point of view of a Jewish man

[🐳 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Judaism y'all... can't live with it can't live without it

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This guy is revolting about women but(and) this gives the most thoughtful and clarifying pictures of mid-century suburban American Jewish life I’ve ever seen