Pete's review
Goodbye, Columbus: And Five Short Stories
by Philip Roth
Pete's review
Goodbye, Columbus: And Five Short Stories by Philip Roth
Pete's review
If Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is the New York novella about flirting with the city’s upper crust, then Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus is the suburban story for the rest of us.
A coming-of-age story about a summer romance, it plumbs tensions from class, generational, religious, and educational differences, and it does so in a way that is instinctive and visceral. While not the most self-aware, sensitive, or rational, the story’s characters—Neil Klugman, a twenty-three year-old man from the poor neighborhoods of Newark, and Brenda Patimkin, the privileged and pretty young woman from Short Hills—are caught in the throes of imminent adulthood, and their flailing pulls Roth’s readers further and further into the personal tensions that drive the story.
The result is that Goodbye, Columbus is about as human a novella as I know—human in the character’s confusion about their feelings and human in their often-irrational responses to th...more
A coming-of-age story about a summer romance, it plumbs tensions from class, generational, religious, and educational differences, and it does so in a way that is instinctive and visceral. While not the most self-aware, sensitive, or rational, the story’s characters—Neil Klugman, a twenty-three year-old man from the poor neighborhoods of Newark, and Brenda Patimkin, the privileged and pretty young woman from Short Hills—are caught in the throes of imminent adulthood, and their flailing pulls Roth’s readers further and further into the personal tensions that drive the story.
The result is that Goodbye, Columbus is about as human a novella as I know—human in the character’s confusion about their feelings and human in their often-irrational responses to th...more
