Source of book: I own this.
Happy new year, everyone. I’m back from a wet camping trip at the coast, with a few more books returning than I brought, thanks to Phoenix Books, a favorite place since before our kids were born.
Counting audiobooks and live theater, my reading list for last year reached 115, which is less than any of the prior three years, but still more than any pre-pandemic year. In part, this was because we listened to fewer audiobooks. That said, I also saw 22 live theater performances, which is a good bit more than any other year. Our local theater scene has been rocking lately.
To start this year off, I finished reading this book just before leaving on vacation. As always, I count books based on the date of the blog post, not when it was actually read. Hey, I typically have 5-6 books in progress at any given time, so the actual reading often spans the change in year.
Philip Roth is one of those modern authors that I had never read. To be honest, none of the descriptions of, say, Portnoy’s Complaint really appealed to me. However, my wife found this old hardback somewhere, and I read Salman Rushdie’s incredible essay collection Languages of Truth in which he discusses Roth in one of the chapters. All this was enough to make me give him a shot.
Goodbye Columbus and Other Stories is Roth’s first book, published in 1959. The title story is a novella, and the book also contains five short stories. None of the stories are linked, but stand on their own. However, they all center on Jewish-Americans, typically second or third generation immigrants, who try to navigate their unique place in the United States as quasi-outsiders.
The novella warrants the most discussion, as it takes up nearly half of the book. It looks at class differences, the sexual revolution (which was in its infancy), and family dysfunction.
The narrator, Neil, is a Jewish man in his mid-20s, currently working a low-wage job at the library, but with the potential to advance to a better job. He lives with his aunt and uncle in New Jersey after his parents have decamped to Arizona. His cousin introduces him to Brenda, the college-age daughter of a wealthy family. Perhaps I should say nouveau riche family, at least when it comes to the father, who retains a lot of his vulgar and uncouth upbringing despite having risen to wealth in business.
Brenda and Neil date for the summer, have sex, and contemplate if they have a future together. Neil always suspects that it will be just a summer fling, as she will return to college a day’s drive away.
Neil spends time with Brenda’s family, and comes to understand the dynamics of the family. Ron, the eldest, has just graduated from college, and will be marrying his college girlfriend and going to work in the family business. He remains nostalgic about his college days, where he was a sports hero. (The title refers to the song of the school, which Ron plays most nights on his record player.)
Brenda’s little sister, Julie, is a spoiled and entitled child, but also the favorite daughter. Brenda’s mom seems both jealous of Brenda’s youth and frustrated by her personality, and the two clash in ways mostly driven by the mother.
The relationship unravels quickly at the end, in an unexpected way. Brenda has never used any contraceptive, and Neil insists she start. It is implied that they either used withdrawal or condoms but this is not actually stated - in any event, Neil is honest that he will enjoy sex more if he isn’t worried about pregnancy. Brenda agrees to get a diaphragm, in a scene that has a whole ton of references (many of them explicit) to Mary McCarthy and The Group. It helps to have read that book in this case.
When Brenda returns to college, she leaves the diaphragm behind, which is then discovered by her mother, causing a huge family blowup. Neil is suspicious that she deliberately left it behind so that its discovery would cause their breakup.
The best thing about this novella is the way Roth portrays the various cringy relatives of the couple. Neil’s aunt is so recognizable as a certain sort of Jewish woman. (My step-grandmother was Jewish and from New York, and yes, I could hear many of the aunt’s lines in that voice.)
None of us ate together: my Aunt Gladys ate at five o’clock, my cousin Susan at five-thirty, me at six, and my uncle at six-thirty. There is nothing to explain this beyond the fact that my aunt is crazy.
And her explanation:
“Sure, I could serve four different meals at once. You eat pot roast, Susan with the cottage cheese, Max has steak. Friday night is his steak night, I wouldn’t deny him. And I’m having a little cold chicken. I should jump up and down twenty different times? What am I, a workhorse?”
On the other side, there is Brenda’s Uncle Leo, who is just cringe-central, even before he gets drunk out of his mind at Ron’s wedding. It is one of the great comic scenes in which he buttonholes poor Neil and keeps him listening to his stories and advice most of the reception.
I also noted this description of the women at the country club.
She wore a black tank suit and went barefooted, and among the other women, with their Cuban heels and boned-up breasts, their knuckle-sized rings, their straw hats, which resembled immense wicker pizza plates and had been purchased, as I heard one deeply tanned woman rasp, “from the cutest little shvartze when we docked at Barbados,” 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 Patimkin.
The story pivots on the scene in which Neil convinces Brenda to get a diaphragm. She is hesitant, and I think that one of her reasons is very familiar.
“I just don’t feel old enough for all that equipment.”
“What does age have to do with it?”
“I don’t mean age. I just mean - well, me. I mean it’s so conscious a thing to do.”
“Of course it’s conscious. That’s exactly it. Don’t you see? It would change us.”
“It would change me.”
“Us. Together.”
Now, this really does seem familiar. I grew up in a religious subculture that believed (and still believes) that any sex outside of heterosexual marriage is sin. In fact, the very worst kind of sin. This doesn’t mean that evangelicals don’t have sex outside of wedlock. Actually, they have it a lot, nearly as much as non-religious folks do. Which ends up resulting in significantly higher rates of unplanned pregnancy and abortion.
The passage above reveals why. To utilize contraception would be to “plan to sin.” Which is worse than just “falling into it” and having unprotected sex.
This is, obviously, absurd. In terms of consequences to others - not least of which the unplanned child - unprotected sex is clearly worse behavior. Responsible behavior would be to use contraception. But we can’t do that, because it is deliberate.
So, in the above scenario, Brenda finds the idea of actually getting contraception to be too “conscious” for her comfort. It means she is planning to have sex with Neil, not just spontaneously ending up doing it out of lust or whatever. Given her parents’ response to finding the diaphragm, this is unsurprising. What is less expected is that they are like this despite the fact that they are not religious. A reminder, I suppose, that prohibitions directed at female sexuality have always been primarily driven by culture, not religion. Religion simply appropriated rules that were originally designed to ensure men didn’t raise offspring that wasn’t theirs biologically, and baptized them with the language of “this makes God unhappy.”
I found Goodbye Columbus to be subtle and nuanced, with a complex relationship and its failure thoroughly believable. Roth isn’t there to lecture, but to observe. The story ends with the question for Neil: the relationship failed because Brenda was Brenda (in his view), but would he have loved her if she hadn’t been the way she was?
The first short story, “The Conversion of the Jews,” is one that felt familiar to me. Not the story itself, but the emotional landscape. The story is about a 13 year old Jewish boy, studying for his Bar Mitzvah, and finds himself questioning his faith. In a flip of the script I was raised on, his crisis involves the problem of the virgin birth of Christ.
Wait, what?
Yep. For us Christians, the source of the crisis would be that the story seems implausible, requiring a belief that God suspended the laws of the natural world. It sounds like a convenient story that Mary made up to excuse her sleeping around. (Or her rape, perhaps.)
For Ozzie, however, his rabbi’s dismissal of the virgin birth as a story leads him to wonder why if God could do all those other miracles, why not that one?
So far, so good. But instead of addressing Ozzie’s questions in a helpful manner, he berates Ozzie as impertinent, eventually slapping him and bloodying his nose. Ozzie runs out of the classroom to the roof of the school, and threatens suicide unless everyone present claim to believe in the virgin birth.
The reason this resonated with me is that I too have experienced this response to legitimate theological and moral questions. Both within my former faith tradition and in my birth family. In the former case, it turned out that questioning the Republican Party was the deal breaker. In the latter, questioning the cultural preferences that had risen to the level of “God’s will for everyone” turned out to be forbidden, even as an adult.
This clash between the political, the cultural, and the religious has been a significant issue in my life, just as it is for Ozzie. Hence, another of his “forbidden” questions:
The first time he had wanted to know how Rabbi Binder could call the Jews “The Chosen People” if the Declaration of Independence claimed all men to be created equal. Rabbi Binder tried to distinguish for him between political equality and spiritual legitimacy, but what Ozzie wanted to know, he insisted vehemently, was different.
And this is exactly the point, isn’t it. Ozzie doesn’t want to know why there are two standards so much as why his Rabbi insists on the morally repugnant one. The ending is fascinating, with Ozzie finally getting things off his chest.
“Mamma, don’t you see - you shouldn’t hit me. He shouldn’t hit me. You shouldn’t hit me about God, Mamma. You should never hit anybody about God -”
That is the truth, although it is far from universally acknowledged. In the figurative sense (since you can’t hit adult children literally), this is what I experienced as the adult child of Fundamentalists. Me and mine were punished over our beliefs regarding God. (Specifically that God didn’t mandate gender roles, or enact dress codes.) This is the core of what Fundamentalism is, of course: hitting other people over their beliefs about God.
The next story, “The Defender of the Faith,” is hilarious. It is about a Jewish sergeant in the Army who has to resist the manipulation of a fellow Jewish soldier who tries to parlay their shared religion and ethnicity into special favors. Apparently, this story caused a bit of a stir in Jewish circles, as perhaps not being very flattering. This misses the point. Roth was Jewish, and wrote from that perspective, but this story is totally universal. The “types” are universal. It’s hilarious not because the characters are Jewish, but because they are entirely human and behave in typically human ways.
There are some interesting lines. The first one is more serious than the rest of the story. The narrator talks about how his two years fighting in Germany had changed him.
I had changed enough in two years not to mind the trembling of the old people, the crying of the very young, the uncertainty and fear in the eyes of the once arrogant. I had been fortunate enough to develop an infantryman’s heart, which, like his feet, at first aches and swells but finally grows horny enough for him to travel the weirdest paths without feeling a thing.
Roth never saw combat, although he did enlist in the Army during the Korean War. Unfortunately or fortunately (take your pick), he injured his back in basic training and was given a medical discharge.
One of the things that makes this story great is the way that the reader only gradually realizes how manipulative Private Grossbart is. Just like the way it takes the narrator a while to see it. The issues start with a legitimate one: the Jewish soldiers want to attend the Jewish church service, but this conflicts with traditional inspection times. The Sergeant solves this by having the announcement made that all soldiers are free to attend their religious service.
This has to be handled carefully, because otherwise the Jewish soldiers will be accused of shirking their work. The announcement makes things “more formal” as Grossbart puts it.
It is after that, however, that the real manipulation begins, and how it plays out is the humor of the story.
I’ll also mention the line about the Messiah being a collective idea, that all of us are the Messiah together. There is, for me, a lot of attraction in that idea: God works in the world not by some magical telekinesis, but through the actions of humans. We are all - or at least can and should be - the hands of God toward other people. We are to ensure our fellow humans are fed, not expect magical manna.
“Epstein” is a rather odd story, humorous in a really dark way. The titular character, at age 59, undergoes a mid-life crisis, believing that his years of responsibility have led to him missing out. This is triggered by his nephew and daughter loudly fuck their respective partners while staying at Epstein’s house. He then has an affair with a widowed neighbor, and his dick gets a rash from all the sudden and unexpected use. His wife thinks he has syphilis (he doesn’t), and asks for a divorce, leading to his heart attack.
“You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings” is a brief story - almost a vignette, about the narrator’s experience with a juvenile delinquent assigned to his school. I don’t really have anything to say about this one. It was okay, but not great.
The book ends with “Eli the Fanatic.” A traditional orthodox Jewish yeshiva is established in a small community of assimilated Jews, who worry that this will make it difficult for them to co-exist with their gentile neighbors. Eli is the lawyer tasked with making the orthodox go away. He decides that the best compromise is to have them wear normal clothes to town. This ends up with a crazy twist at the end.
Overall, I thought this was a good book. It has a few moments where Roth seems a bit raw and green in his writing, but his humor is pretty funny, and his characters generally well drawn. I still may never attempt Portnoy, but I do plan to give The Plot Against America a shot next time.
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