Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories by Philip Roth (1959)

Philip Roth's first work, a novella and five short stories.

Book Review: Goodbye, Columbus was published in 1959 when Philip Roth (1933-2018) was 26. This edition contains the title novella, five short stories, and the seeds of genius that speaks to history. It has the sense of autobiography of earlier authors such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, while looking forward to a different expectation of the world. Roth falls into the young writer's trap of believing that the essential subject is one's first experiences with love. Because the whole world must be interested in what the writer is obsessing about. It should be against the law for novelists to write about their early relationships until they're at least 35 (even though here it's a metaphor, and so ... meta). Although Goodbye, Columbus is seemingly about Jews, as presented by other mid-century American writers such as Bellow and Malamud, this is really more about the immigrant experience in America. About leaving the past behind, saying goodbye to a world that can't last (the title is a subtextual reference to the first immigrant), and about what Roth thinks the current generation should be doing with their opportunity. His protagonist (and alter ego) Neil is shallow. He loves Brenda because she is what he is not, but he knows "no more of her than what I could see in a photograph." The heart of the story is the black boy looking at Gauguin books in the library. A parallel to Neil, but without the advantages, and for both there was "No sense in carrying dreams of Tahiti in your head, if you can't afford the fare." The novella is satire, but at times ungenerous, with a lack of empathy. Roth sees the communal flaws, but with the arrogance of youth he doesn't acknowledge the roots of those failings (actually he does once, in the story "Eli, the Fanatic"). The five stories are a mixed bag, but Roth uses them as explorations and experiments, finding out how and what to write. I can see various readers choosing any one of them as a favorite, mine being the difficult "Defender of the Faith" and the hallucinogenic "Eli, the Fanatic." As an aside, I enjoyed the passing reference in Goodbye, Columbus to Mary McCarthy as the conductor for youthful sexual exploration.  Also a mediocre 1969 film with Ali MacGraw and Richard Benjamin.  [4★]