Quote of the Day (Philip Roth)

"What was it inside of me that had turned pursuit and clutching into love, and then turned it inside out again? What was it that had turned winning into losing, and losing -- who knows -- into winning? I was sure I had loved Brenda, though standing there, I knew I couldn't any longer."—Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus

(Here’s a Columbus Day treat—no, nothing about the explorer, but an excerpt from one of the great debuts by a major American literary figure: Roth’s well-received 1959 story collection. People who know this property only from the 1969 film starring Richard Benjamin and Ali McGraw and featuring the title song by the Sixties group The Association – a movie that, admittedly, Roth himself regards as the best adaptation of his work—will be delighted to find a novella as well-wrought as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, only with larger doses of wit and considerably more sexual frankness.

Like Gatsby, Goodbye, Columbus focuses on a love affair involving class and identity—the latter a theme that has obsessed Roth for the half-century since then. Both Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin are Jewish, but the class differences between them turn out to be more crucial. As the lower-middle-class Neil is taken in by her family in the summer of their magical romance, he regards with increasing ambivalence their wealth. At the same time, we are subtly made aware that Neil is not exactly the most reliable narrator of this tale, as he blindly relates his own sexual manipulativeness toward the beautiful teenager.

Another aspect of the novella and film interested me particularly, one that I shared. Like myself, Neil is a librarian who comes not just from the lower middle class, but a religious group that in certain ways feels deeply its outsider status in American life. Offhand, I can’t think of another significant American work of fiction that revolves around a librarian. You certainly get the sense that Neil’s job is more of a placeholder for him on the way to something else rather than a career.

In its anti-Americanism—a trait that one of the judges foolishly and arrogant displayed once again this past week for all to see—the committee handing out the Nobel Prize for Literature once again bypassed Roth. Just how blind is their anti-Americanism? Well, Roth, as demonstrated not only in this tale but his subsequent career, is anything but one who sings the praises of American society, being particularly critical of its materialism, shallowness and puritanism.

Now, I can’t say that Roth is the nicest, most generous of men—his treatment of his longtime companion and, briefly, ex-wife, the actress Claire Bloom, sounds cold and unfeeling—but for productivity, consistency, and even growth in style and storytelling power over the course of a long career, I think you’re going to find it hard to discover anyone who surpasses him. In the last decade alone, he produced what I think might be the best work of that career: the so-called “American Trilogy” of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. The Nobel committee’s snub of this great artist was disgraceful.)