The Magic of Philip Roth

A review of Goodbye, Columbus.

It’s scary that Goodbye, Columbus was Philip Roth’s debut, scarier still that he published it at twenty-six. He wrote the novella at an age when all I was concerned with was the removal of lace. He was concerned about that too, but it didn’t derail him then—that came much later.

I have no insight into Roth’s process for this particular story, but if he followed his general approach then it’s likely it took him quite a few tries to get to the beginning. “I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive,” he told the Paris Review, back when it was on the side of literature. “Okay, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there; that’s the first paragraph of the book.”

The first paragraph of Goodbye, Columbus is alive on the order of breath. It begins with Neil Klugman, the narrator and protagonist, holding Brenda Pitimkin’s glasses while she climbs up onto the diving board. After a wonderful depiction of her swimming, Roth describes her exit with cinematic vividity:

I watched her move off. Her hands suddenly appeared behind her. She caught the bottom of her suit between thumb and index finger and flicked what flesh had been showing back where it belonged. My blood jumped.

There’s much to admire about the first few pages—imagery, language, voice, ass—but the author’s greatest accomplishment is the speed and clarity with which he communicates what the narrator wants. Six pages in and Neil has already commenced his quest. Up and out of his poverty-stricken hometown, he drives to meet the girl for their first date:

It was, in fact, as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven, for the sun itself became bigger, lower, and rounder, and soon I was driving past long lawns which seemed to be twirling water on themselves, and past houses where no one sat on stoops, where lights were on but no windows open, for those inside, refusing to share the very texture of life with those of us outside, regulated with a dial the amounts that were allowed to access their skin.

The two still haven’t spoken more than a few words, and the reader is already aware of what resists their relationship: Neil is a working class kid from Newark; Brenda is a spoiled girl from Short Hills, one of the wealthiest towns in the nation. It is a friction as old as time but what makes it feel new—apart from the writing and the setting—are the strife’s two core dimensions. Its first defining aspect is the real, though somewhat well-disguised, prejudice that the Patimkins hold against him. The second is the “poverty complex” that the protagonist grapples with internally. It’s possible that he can resolve both, yet the reader pays more attention to the latter since he has more control over it. If Neil can overcome the inferiority he feels regarding their wealth differences, one assumes that his relationship with Brenda will flourish. If he cannot, one assumes it will languish or snap.

The first dimension of the central conflict (real injustice) is most visceral when Neil is in the presence of his love interest’s relatives. He describes Mrs. Patimkin as “disastrously polite” during their first dinner together, yet she belittles him in conversation by misnaming him “Bill.” Mr. Patimkin, on the other hand, hardly registers him at all except to state that he “eats like a bird.” In response to this dismissal, Neil describes the wilting of his self-confidence:

I felt for quite a while as though four inches had been clipped from my shoulders, three inches from my height, and, for good measure, someone had removed my ribs and my chest had settled meekly in towards my back.

This tension abounds in nearly every scene in which these characters are together. When Mrs. Patimkin sends Neil to retrieve silver from the family office, she implies that his car is unpresentable by insisting that he take their Volkswagen. Upon his arrival the scene is set for the hero to prove himself as someone who could, one day, fit into the household’s trade. But Mr. Patimkin ignores him for much of the time he’s there. Even when they finally speak, he talks to the young man as if he were a stranger stopping by, unwilling to give him the chance to show that he could be a well-suited son-in-law.

The parents feel they’re hiding this disapproval tactfully. If I sat down and criticized their behavior Mrs. Patimkin would point out how welcoming they’ve been. Mr. Patimkin wouldn’t bother responding. But Julie, Brenda’s younger sister, doesn’t deal in adult niceties. One of her roles is to explicitly express the family’s judgement, which she does when she finds Neil in front of a fridge full of family fruit:

Julie was looking at me as though she were trying to look behind me, and then I realized that I was standing with my hands out of sight. I brought them around to the front, and I swear it, she did peek to if they were empty.

Brenda, to her credit, is less condemnatory than her kin. She doesn’t care that Neil lives in Newark. On their second date she unabashedly invites him first to her country club; then to her family’s home for dinner. Once they get more intimate she convinces her parents to let him stay with them for days on end. She even goes as far as inviting him to her brother’s wedding.

Throughout it all, however, the reader is aware of her unshakeable superiority. The relationship between Neil and her appears, at times, like that between master and servant. Brenda’s “invitations” are not as much offers as much as they are (very welcome) commands. She assumes that Neil will look after her sister while she goes to the airport, that he will occupy himself while she shops. Certainly some of this attitude arises because of the power she feels in the relationship—I doubt she’d treat the heir to a billion dollar fortune the same way—but the majority of it is rooted in her upbringing. Brenda, like her sister, has been spoiled by her parents. They’ve come to believe that the world is under their command, and everyone in it will do as they’re told. Neil, like any suitor, does not enjoy the castration of his chivalry.

When he’s alone with Brenda, the reader watches him grapple with the conflict’s second dimension: the protagonist’s inferiority complex. From the first conversation they have, Neil is unreasonably touchy on any subject related to wealth or class. He snaps into defensiveness when she says, ingratiatingly, that her family lived in Newark during her childhood. He becomes angry when she subsequently connects her mother’s frugality to that period of her life. He turns nasty when she asks why he lives with his aunt and works at the library. Routinely Brenda makes anodyne comments; Neil’s tsunami almost always charges in their wake.

To elucidate what drives his sensitivity, Roth includes a young African-American student who frequents the library where the protagonist works. As soon as he walks in, Neil’s manager is up his ass; when Neil later encourages him to check the book out, he reacts like Neil does with Brenda:

“After lunch the colored kid came in. When he headed past the desk for the stairs, I called over to him. “Come here,” I said. “Where are you going?”

“The heart section.”

“What book are you reading?”

“That Mr. Go-again’s book. Look, man, I ain’t doing nothing wrong. I didn’t do no writing in anything. You could search me—”

“I know you didn’t. Listen, if you like that book so much why don’t you please take it home. Do you have a library card?”

“No, sir, I didn’t take nothing.”

These struggles spur you onto keep reading. But the real magic of the book lies in Roth’s ability to bring you all the way back to youth, and make you pine for it again. To this end the settings and scenes he chooses are brilliantly effective. There’s the two of them swimming, kissing, and clinging onto each other by the pool. There’s the hot sweaty tennis match and the earth filled with crickets and cicadas. There’s Brenda lying out in the backyard watching the family play on the basketball court. There’s Neil running laps around the track in the morning. There’s the couple eating fruit and reconstructing the beginnings of movies.

The story shook my memory to life. I remembered my first girlfriend, Isabella, and the summer we shared before we went off to university. I remembered when her mother walked in on her picking lint from my belly button, how she told us in Spanish to get off the floor and “go to the sun.” I remembered how we grasped onto each other at airports on both sides of painfully short separations. I remembered how we lazed around without a single responsibility.

Roth is a master who has the gift of nullification. He takes you out of yourself and your environment. He brings you back to the time and place that you’ll only ever experience once in life, when your nerves are raw and history doesn’t exist. He reconstructs your mind to its original state, before it built all of the armor that protects and dulls.

Today, more than ever, the world is in desperate need of writers with his skill.

---