Neil Klugman, and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills meet one summer and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion, as it is about love. Goodbye, Columbus is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender, and illuminate the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and neighbors in the new postwar America of the forties and fifties.
Summary
Goodbye, Columbus
Narrarated by: Jerry Zaks, John Rubinstein, Theodore Bikel, Elliott Gould, Harlan Ellison
eMusic Review 0
03.13.08
Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus
2008 | Label: Phoenix Audio
Like their author himself, the protagonists in Philip Roth’s first published book, Goodbye Columbus (1959) are Jewish-American men: at once ambitious and self-loathing, comic and tragic, reckless and guilt-ridden. Along with the title novella, the collection includes five thematically connected short stories which follow the trials and tribulations of characters who follow similar upwardly mobile trajectories, from the blue collar neighborhoods of European immigrants to the suburban lawns of the educated professional class. A library clerk in Newark falls in love one summer with a wealthy girl from Radcliffe; a 13-year old smart alec challenges his rabbi over textual hypocrisy in the Torah; a married, middle-aged man realizes the extent to which he has missed out on life’s excitement and begins an affair with another woman.
Roth has an almost anthropological tendency to place characters in controlled archetypical settings. Here, we get life in the local high school, life in the Orthodox yeshiva, life in the university, life in the army. With this collection, we can sense Roth getting his bearings, narrating these semi-autobiographical stories from the perspectives that would eventually synthesize into his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Roth’s ability to evoke populist resonance by way of painful isolation is what makes him a modern master. And sometimes, there’s nothing better than the original.
