'Fascination With Corruption'

...I don't know about Roth's military experiences, but, enlightened as the U.S...

...And whatever undoubted quality these stories have is often weakened by Roth's tendency to have the norm represented by hypocrites or shlemiehls, among which only the rather colorless narrator shines as a modest beacon of integrity...

...But the two principals, Neil Klugman and Brcnda Patimkin, remain strangely blurred, in contrast to the intelligent and scalpel-neat way the rest of the Patimkin family is mounted for our inspection...

...But where in previous decades there was no shortage of respectable and commonly accepted enemies, today, when (to the intellectual, anyway) the leap from slum to country club seems to come about faster than you can say "social mobility," it is no longer quite so easy to look back in anger...

...an infantry barracks to carry out some kind of minimum observance of his rather conspicuous and exotic mitzvot (daily prayer, dietary laws, Sabbath abstention from work) surely still takes, at the minimum, a heroic amount of poise...

...Some of the other stories are specifically concerned with religious aspects of American-Jewish life, and here the author has a tendency to tilt at straw men with which his acquaintance is, let us say, not exactly intimate...

...And since that is far too shapeless and complex a subject about which to make worthwhile generalizations, it was generally narrowed down to some of its more vulnerable features: the vulgarity of the newly-rich, and religious orthodoxy (or rather the author's jaundiced recollection of the way it had been imposed, and far too often misinterpreted, by incompetent teachers and defeated parents...

...a funny and touching story of a young suburban Jewish lawyer in the process of having his third nervous breakdown...

...Army certainly is in conventional matters pertaining to religious freedom, for a practicing Jew in, say...

...Just as I was beginning to tell myself that here, at least, is a perfect Scott Fitzgerald type of story for "Playhouse 90...

...To the Jewish writer of the postwar period, once militarism, U.S...

...the action suddenly runs aground in a long and dreary squabble about a contraceptive device...

...The resulting work, by and large, is more frequently successful as satire than as fiction, and at the moment its most talented and interesting practioner is Philip Roth...

...The story was, I believe, inspired by a true incident, and in it Roth, in one long burst of exuberant and lacerating comedy, dramatizes the dilemma of the "emancipated" Jew who probably baffles hell out of his neighbors by his insistence on denying his individuality as the price of being tolerated, without realizing that wherever "tolerance" carries a price-tag, he couldn't afford it anyway...

...In "Defenders of the Faith," some Jewish soldiers attempt to extract religious privileges from an ambivalent Jewish noncom, who starts out irritated at being forced to take some sort of stand as a Jew, but is conveniently allowed to evade the issue with the help of the author's sudden suggestion that, among Jews at any rate, protestations of religious impulse had better be taken with a ton of salt...

...Army style, had exhausted its mileage, one of the principal targets remaining was American-Jewish life...

...Eli Peck has been entrusted with the mission of ejecting a small and shabby Talmudical academy from a residential district, because his well-adjusted Jewish neighbors fear that the sight of ragged refugee children in skullcaps, and a bearded man in a large black hat and coat, will cost them the hard-won tolerance of their Protestant neighbors...

...Not even irony or growth...

...Perhaps what prevents the suburban Jew from ever successfully going through the melting-pot is the fact that, whereas the American Protestant has respectably buried his antecedents and can afford to relax now, the Jew is still at any time liable to have his stiff-necked ancestors move in across the street, and...

...Reviewed by Shimon Wincelberg Contributor, "Best Plays of 1958-59," "Best American Short Stories of 1953" WITHOUT SOME DEGREE of underlying rage, serious fiction tends too often to confine itself to lyrical embroidery or tranquil recollection of outgrown traumas...

...Columbus," which starts out quite enjoyable as a shrewdly observed love story of a sensitive sojourner among the Vulgar Rich...

...I'd consider this last story almost perfect, except that Roth's acquaintance with Talmudical academies possibly owes more to the nightmare world of Kafka than to first-hand observation...

...Fairly typical of his approach, in this volume of short stories, is the long title story, "Goodbye...

...The whole intriguing premise of a poor boy who, without particularly scheming for it, is on the verge of drifting into permanent bondage to the warm beds, pools and fleshpots of a family surely no more unpleasant than the one he'd like to escape from, comes to exactly nothing...

...To me, the most successful story by far is "Eli, the Fanatic...

...sometimes, even be tactless enough to insist that, split-level and all, he is still one of them...

...The Conversion of the Jews," an intriguing anecdote inflated into farce, holds us as a story largely because it allows us to savor the squirming downfall of a teacher who demands the respect due to religious authority, but isn't smart enough even to stay out of a primitive philosophical trap laid for him by a bright and unruly youngster...

...But while I find it hard to admire Roth's rather fixed stance of appalled fascination with the corruption of just about everyone but himself, there's not a story in the book which doesn't somewhere show the touch of a first-class writer in the making...