Goodbye, Columbus: And Five Short Stories
Updated: Aug 8
Over the past 20-plus years, stretching back to college, I’ve read, by my count, five Philip Roth novels: first was Portnoy’s Complaint, followed by My Life as a Man, The Breast, The Anatomy Lesson, and finally The Counterlife, which, according to Goodreads, was six years ago. If those choices seem haphazard, they were: those were the Philip Roth books on the shelf, either those of my ex-wife when we were together, or those I inherited when we separated.
Although I enjoyed reading each of them, otherwise I wouldn't have gone back to the well so many times, I have only a vague recollection of their plotlines. I don’t know if that means they were merely pleasant but otherwise lacking in necessary impact, that I wasn’t paying enough attention, that that’s completely normal and I’ve nothing to worry about, or that I should be seriously concerned because my memory has gone to shit. Whatever it means, there’s a reason I now write these reviews, and if I’m the only one who reads this one—and chances are I will be—that’s fine by me. Most simply I started writing reviews of every book I read for archival purposes, but my real hope was that, in the process of the writing, each might linger longer in my memory. And, if you, dear reader, take something worthwhile away from any them, then all the better that I was able to put something useful into the world.
My choice, then, of 1959’s Goodbye, Columbus was deliberate. I wanted to go back to the beginning, to Philip Roth’s first published collection to see where it all began, so that I could rediscover what I enjoyed in his other books, and use that discovery as a springboard into his subsequent bibliography. In short, I was looking for the hook that would turn me from casual Roth enjoyer to eager Roth pursuer. Did it work? It did, succeedingly and endearingly so.
Despite the diverse plot lines of the six stories contained within—the doomed-from-the-start young lovers in “Goodbye, Columbus;” the confrontational student in “The Conversion of the Jews” who insists on asking unorthodox questions of his rabbi; the army sergeant who refuses to be manipulated in “Defender of the Faith;” “Epstein,” the eponymous character who goes through a midlife crisis and starts an affair with another woman; the high school student who recounts the meeting of, and subsequent events surrounding, a troublemaker in his Occupations class in “You Can't Tell a Man by the Song He Sings” (the toss off of the bunch); and the lawyer trying to make peace between assimilated Jews and a newly arrived orthodox yeshiva, as well as within himself, in “Eli, the Fanatic,” which is the collection’s apotheosis—Roth’s perceptive, critical, humorous, and, yes, often unflattering examination of the concerns of American Jews as they deal with faith, class, identity, and assimilation is entirely deserving of its National Book Award for Fiction, and is all the more remarkable because he was only 26 at the time of its publication.
If you’ve never read Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus is as fine a place to discover him as it was for me to rediscover him. And as for my next move? Perhaps it will be his 2004 alternative history novel The Plot Against America, or 1971’s Nixon-inspired political satire Our Gang, or maybe I’ll just take him in order (as he may be best enjoyed), with 1962’s Letting Go. And for you? To paraphrase the old Jackie DeShannon song, “put a little Roth in your heart.” You won’t regret it.
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