A Novelist of Great Promise
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING A Novelist of Great Promise By Stanley Edgar Hyman Television has destroyed boxing in our time, perhaps permanently, by killing the neighborhood clubs, at which young...
...But the faults of Goodbye, Columbus are as readily visible...
...When Blair Stott, a Negro on pot, talks hip, it is the best hip, and a delight...
...Two episodes of almost indescribable complexity, at once awful and uproarious, are the clearest sign of Roth's great promise...
...the language is sometimes as inadequate as: "I failed to deflate the pout from my mouth...
...If Gabe is a thin Hegelian essence, Martha is a gorgeous rich Existenz...
...Three years later, Letting Go appears with the same merits and the same faults as Goodbye, Columbus...
...When Margie Howells of Kenosha moves in with Gabe as an experiment in Bold Free Union, she comes with Breck shampoo, an Olivetti, an electric frying pan, a steam iron, and a copy of the Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse...
...Letting Go concludes with Gabe, who has tried to do good without attachment, as Lord Krishna recommends in the Gita, left with little good achieved and no attachments either...
...In the style of college humor magazines, Roth will interrupt a scene to remark: "It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge...
...At the same time, there is a balancing pomposity...
...Roth spends laborious pages showing us why—it was penis-envy...
...and the limited success of Paul and Libby Herz in the same world, despite every handicap...
...When Gabe and Martha quarrel over money, every word rings true, and the reader can feel a sick headache coming on...
...As a result boys are brought up into the big time too soon, and acclaim and fortune are won by the semi-skilled, who then naturally continue to be semi-skilled...
...Defender of the Faith" is the only one of them that seems wholly successful to me...
...Paul recalls necking with a girl in high school, sitting in her living room while her father called out from the bedroom: "Doris, is that you, dolly...
...The novella has no values to oppose to Patimkin values other than a small Negro boy who admires Gauguin's Tahiti, which seems a considerable overmatch...
...Finally, Gabe's weakness is Hegelian essence: "He is better, he believes, than anything he has done in life has shown him to be...
...Some images are bad, like Brenda treading water "so easily she seemed to have turned the chlorine to marble beneath her...
...She is the total of what she does...
...His "Writing American Fiction" speech rejects all the easy affirmations of America, and concludes on Ralph Ellison's sombre final image of the Invisible Man waiting underground...
...There are other sure touches: the cherry pits under Neil's bare feet in the TV room...
...The merits of Goodbye, Columbus and its author are immediately evident...
...Swedish modern and espresso in Jewish apartments in Brooklyn...
...It never in fact becomes a novel, with a unified dramatic action, but falls apart into two narratives which have only a pat complementarity: the failure of Gabe Wallach in the world of personal relations, specifically with the divorcée Martha Reganhart, despite every advantage...
...In 1959, at the age of 26, he published his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, consisting of the title novella and five short stories...
...One catches lampoonings of our swollen and unreal American prosperity that are as observant and charming as Fitzgerald's," Alfred Kazin wrote in the Reporter...
...The Spiglianos (he is the chairman of Gabe's department) have 11 budgetary tins in their kitchen, one labelled: "John: Tobacco, scholarly journals, foot powder...
...Roth was promptly awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, as well as a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters with a citation saying in part: "Goodbye, Columbus marks the coming of age of a brilliant, penetrating, and undiscourageable young man of letters...
...The other is Gabe's mad effort to persuade a scoundrel named Harry Bigoness to sign a legal document that will enable the Herzes to keep their adopted baby...
...Men want to be heroes...
...Eli, the Fanatic" reaches one high point of power and beauty, when Tzuref replies to all the smooth talk about the 20th century with: "For me the Fifty-eighth," but the rest of the story is rambling and diffuse...
...the Kodachrome European trips of Central Park West dentists...
...the refrigeration failed just beyond Mineola, and by the time he got home his life was a zero, a ruined man...
...Is somebody with you...
...The failure of Paul's father in the frozen foods business is one magnificent sentence: "One day, creditors calling at every door, he got into the cab of a truckful of his frozen rhubarb and took a ride out to Long Island to think...
...he only makes "little figure eights, and all the time, smiling...
...In a speech, "Writing American Fiction," at a 1960 symposium, he knocked off his elders and betters: Malamud displays "a spurning of our world," Salinger tells us "to be charming on the way to the loony bin," and so on...
...The major, and really unfortunate, result has been to convince Roth that he has nothing further to learn...
...when that fails she decides to make potato pancakes, "to bring a little religion into her house...
...Tell him thank you, dolly, and tell him it's the next day already, your father has to get up and go to work soon, tell him thank you and good night, dolly...
...it culminates in a horrifying and splendid scene when they both invade the Herz bedroom just after Libby comes home from the operation...
...Who had tried...
...Providing, that is, that all the matchmakers and promoters leave him alone...
...Not being the sum of his actions, Gabe is not really anything in the book...
...What many writers spend a lifetime searching for—a unique voice, a secure rhythm, a distinctive subject—seem to have come to Philip Roth totally and immediately," Irving Howe wrote in the New Republic...
...Epstein" is an inflated joke...
...There are letters that no one would ever have written, and long pedestrian explanations of past events by the author...
...An elderly Midwest woman says to Gabe: "You talk to the top professors and you see if they're not Masons...
...the end is merely a running-down...
...A two-page history of the marital sex life of the Herzes has a clinical leadenness that would sink the most buoyant novel...
...Since the novel is six times as long as the novella, it shows Roth's architectural weakness six times as strongly...
...Gabe's effort, as he finally recognizes when he loses her, had been to turn her into a sniveling Libby...
...At her low point, Libby, who has converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism on marrying Paul, tries to commit suicide...
...Eventually Gabe steals the baby in the night and drives it to Gary, Indiana, to confront Bigoness...
...One is Libby's abortion, which becomes entangled with the effort of an elderly neighbor, Levy, to steal a job-lot of jockey briefs from another elderly neighbor, Korngold...
...No manner of speech seems to be beyond Roth's powers...
...A pathetic event finally ends the liason between Gabe and Martha...
...WRITERS & WRITING A Novelist of Great Promise By Stanley Edgar Hyman Television has destroyed boxing in our time, perhaps permanently, by killing the neighborhood clubs, at which young fighters learn their craft...
...The novella shows a sardonic wit, and the sharp eye of a born writer...
...Let us get the faults out of the way first...
...Characters experience "relief—though by no means total relief," and children eat, "manipulating their food like Muzak's violinists their instruments...
...the Ohio State sentimental record of the title...
...Many of the incidents do not advance the action...
...The next year, Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award as "the most distinguished work of fiction published in 1959...
...The long monologue by Patimkin's unsuccessful half-brother Leo at the wedding is a masterpiece: funny, moving, perfect...
...Roth's ear is just as remarkable as his eye...
...The best of Letting Go comes from the marvelous quality of Roth's imagination...
...the book has no fewer than three epigraphs—by Simone Weil, Wallace Stevens, and Thomas Mann—any one of which would do for a dissertation on Covenant Theology...
...I think that after he has seasoned longer, after another book or two, if he is prepared to learn from his mistakes, Philip Roth will be a fine novelist...
...Undiscourageable...
...The prose is still quite lame in spots...
...A fellow-dentist with whom Gabe's father goes ice-skating is characterized in a phrase...
...Roth may be the Lewis of Suburbia, but he is potentially much more...
...The stories show the same balance of strength and weakness...
...For the rest, it is a series of comic set pieces and vignettes: dirty diapers and high thought among the instructors at Midwest universities...
...Martha's vitality dominates the book, and if Gabe's final "letting go" of the world is at all poignant, it is poignant chiefly in that he had a chance to keep Martha and failed it...
...He has the finest eye for the details of American life since Sinclair Lewis...
...Most important, the novella shows Roth's architectonic weakness...
...The Patimkin way of life, with its white hair "the color of Lincoln convertibles" and its 23 bottles of Jack Daniels, each with a little booklet tied around its neck, decorating the unused bar, has been rendered for all time...
...It was greeted with a cascade of adulation, of which some remarks quoted on the back of the paperback reprint are a fair sample...
...Beyond that there is cocktailparty Freud...
...Consequently, we will probably never again see fighters with the artistry of Archie Moore or Ray Robinson...
...Martha's older child, Cynthia, pushes her younger brother, Mark, off the top of a double-decker bunk, which results in Mark's death...
...Roth really does know how hard life is...
...She is bawdy and vulgar, honest and decent, funny and heartbreaking...
...In the literary arenas, the same thing is done by gushy reviewing...
...The minor result of the shower of praise and coin that Roth received was to make him arrogant...
...The virtues of Letting Go—of Roth, really—are equally impressive...
...The Conversion of the Jews," with its pat moral, "You should never hit anybody about God," is ultimately hokum, as "You Can't Tell a Man by the Song He Sings" is immediately hokum...
...At twenty-six he is skillful, witty, and energetic and performs like a virtuoso," Saul Bellow wrote in Commentary...
...Philip Roth, whose first novel, Letting Go, has just been published (Random House, 630 pp., $5.95), is a case in point...
...A woman at least realizes there are certain rotten things she's got to do in life and does them," Martha explains to Gabe...
Vol. 45 • June 1962 • No. 12
