Goodbye, Columbus: Roth's portrait of the narcissist as a young man

For all the undoubted virtuosity of the other five stories in the collection, it is of course Goodbye, Columbus that is the piece de resistance and the reason Philip Roth won the National Book Award for his first book. The novella certainly has a realistic dimension and shows Roth's equally keen ear and eye. Neil Klugman, a recent graduate of Newark Colleges of Rutgers University, an Army veteran, and working at a dead-end job at the Newark public library, has a summer romance with Brenda Patimkin, a Radcliffe student and the daughter of wealthy parents living in the New Jersey suburb of Short Hills. It would be fatuous to deny that at least some of Neil's insecurity can be ascribed to issues of class, or at least expresses itself in his sensitivity to social slights. On their first date, Brenda's innocent remark, "We lived in Newark when I was a baby," makes Neil "suddenly angry" (12), presumably because it reminds him how far the Patimkins have moved up the social ladder. Not for nothing does Brenda's nose job become a target of Neil's incessant razzing. But as the first fully developed exploration of Roth's quintessential theme of the waning of masculine desire, Goodbye, Columbus sounds depths that cannot be plumbed critically without the aid of psychoanalysis.

In their first telephone conversation, after Neil has held Brenda's glasses at the swimming pool of the Green Lane Country Club but when she still does not know who he is, his description of his swarthy appearance leads her to ask him, "Are you a Negro?" (7). This equation of the middle-class Jew with the black reinforces Neil's sense of social inferiority, as when he later feels even more out of place amid the opulence of the Patimkins' home (40) than does their "Navaho-faced Negro" (21) maid, Carlota. Like the protagonists of Roth's other early stories, Neil is a "man in the middle," estranged both from his family of origin and from the Jewish establishment, just as Brenda experiences her own more privileged life as a "Hundred Years' War" (26) with her family, especially her mother. But, as I said, I think it would be a mistake to reduce Neil's insecurity to factors of religion and class when it is ultimately ontological in nature and manifests itself most acutely in the sphere of love.

Roth develops the motif of Neil's "blackness" above all through his identification with the "small colored boy" (31) who comes to the library one day to look at the art books. The boy is drawn to an edition of Gauguin reproductions, with its enchanting images of Tahiti. Even on his first drive out of Newark to visit Brenda in Short Hills, Neil had felt that the slight elevation in altitude "brought one closer to heaven" (8); and on the very day that he encounters the Negro boy at the library, Neil begins to see Short Hills "in my mind's eye, at dusk, rose-colored, like a Gauguin stream" (38). The equation of the Patimkins' opulence, despite its meretriciousness to which Neil is no less keenly responsive, with the lushness of Tahiti is evident in Neil's Marvellian apostrophe: "Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and sporting goods dropped from their trees!" (43).

The parallel established by Roth between the colored boy's fantasy of Tahiti and Neil's equally fantasy-drenched experience of Short Hills finds a more specific counterpart in the parallel between Neil's ambivalent desire for Brenda and the boy's insecure attachment to the actual book containing the Gauguin reproductions. For obscure reasons, Neil becomes alarmed when one day the boy does not show up at the library, and "as though in his place, a very old man appeared, white, smelling of Life Savers" (48), and tries to check out the same Gauguin volume. Stepping into action, Neil falsely tells the patron that someone has placed a hold on the book, and thus he cannot borrow it for the time being. "And so I was able," Neil reports, "not without flushing once or twice, to get the book back in the stacks."

Neil's behavior becomes comprehensible when he is seen to be trying to replace a lost object--or, in Lacanian terms, to fill a lack in his being--that he experiences in his relationship with Brenda. From the beginning, Neil is plagued by his fears of losing Brenda, which are the obverse of his extreme dependence on her. On their second meeting at the swimming pool, after she had allowed him to kiss her the previous evening, Neil avers while they are underwater together, "I didn't care for anything but Brenda" (16-17). He describes how "her breasts swam towards me like two pink-nosed fish and she let me hold them" (17). The prominence given to the breasts in Neil's attraction is a trademark of Roth's; and their aquatic communion leads Neil to imagine that the relationship might be permanent: "I felt she had made a promise to me about the summer, and, I hoped, beyond."