Goodbye, Columbus

This year Philip Roth turned 75, and was feted at one of those "congratulations on living that long" ceremonies. His first book, a novella titled Goodbye, Columbus, is almost fifty (in an essay in the New York Times I read that it was published in 1958, but that appears to be in error). Roth is the most awarded living American author, starting with his debut, which won the National Book Award. I read it again last night.

It is the story of a summer romance told from the viewpoint of Neil Klugman, a college graduate who is biding time in a boring job in the public library. He lives in Newark with his aunt and uncle who are "old world." One fine day, as his cousin's guest at a country club, he meets Brenda Pitimkin, the pretty daughter of a successful dealer in kitchen sinks. The Pitimkins have roots in the Jewish neighborhood in Newark, but with financial success they have moved into the affluent suburbs, or as Neil describes it, one-hundred-and-eighty feet higher in elevation, where the summers are cooler.

Although on the surface this is a bittersweet love story, looking deeper reveals themes that would mark Roth's future work, namely, his examination of the assimilation of Jews in American society. Throughout the book Neil and Brenda, though hot for each other, have a mutual suspicion of their upbringing. Neil can never quite get over the lifestyle of the Pitimkins, most pointedly expressed with Brenda's brother Ron, who was a basketball star at Ohio State. One of Ron's prized possessions is his "Columbus record," which he got upon graduation. It is one of those cornball evocations of midwestern campus life: "The leaves had begun to turn and redden on the trees. Smoky fires line Fraternity Row, as pledges rake the leaves and turn them to misty haze." To Neil, who lives in a city where people sit on the stoop, it must seem like the moon.

Eventually the book turns on some sexual politics. Neil wants Brenda to get a diaphragm, which was a dicey proposition for a single girl in the fifties. This is for Neil's pleasure, which he makes no bones about. Well, Roth has never been accused of being ahead of the feminist curve. Brenda protests, but eventually gives in, but in a bit of passive-aggressiveness leaves her telltale evidence of non-virginity in her dresser drawer, where her mother finds it, dooming the relationship.

As with most of Roth's work, there is a thread of comedy through the entire thing, in the tradition of Jewish humor that goes back to tummlers and up to Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen. The hard consonants of Jewish names have always provided fodder for humor (as discussed in Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys, with the explanation that words with a K are funny). "Brenda among them was elegantly simple, like a sailor's dream of a Polynesian maiden, albeit one with prescription sun glasses and the last name of Pitimkin." There is also a very funny sequence when Neil is babysitting Brenda's ten-year-old sister, who is allowed to win all games. He decides to bury her in a game of ping-pong.

The most notable comedy is the Yiddish-flavored syntax of Neil's Aunt Gladys, who is something of a forerunner of the mother of all Jewish mothers, Sophie Portnoy. Gladys is one of those Jewish woman of literature who implore young men to eat and stick to one's own kind, and anyone putting on anything approaching airs incurs from her a "fancy schmancy."

Another thread of the book is a young black boy who visits the library to repeatedly look through a book of Gaugin's paintings. A co-worker with casually racist sentiments is suspicious of the boy, and frequently mentions how expensive the book is, but Neil has a more liberal attitude, and encourages the boy. They look at the paintings together, of Tahitian maidens frolicking in the surf, and the boy succinctly puts it, "That's the fuckin' life." Neil can only agree.