{"id":109629,"date":"2017-04-06T16:56:27","date_gmt":"2017-04-06T20:56:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109629"},"modified":"2017-08-03T16:49:02","modified_gmt":"2017-08-03T20:49:02","slug":"rethinking-the-end-of-philip-roths-goodbye-columbus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/06\/rethinking-the-end-of-philip-roths-goodbye-columbus\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Out Alive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rethinking the end of Philip Roth\u2019s \u201cGoodbye, Columbus.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What is \u201cGoodbye, Columbus<\/a>\u201d? A story of a summer romance, a satirical sketch of suburban arriviste Jews in the fifties\u2014sure. But when I stumbled on Philip Roth\u2019s first book on the shelf of my high school library, \u201cGoodbye, Columbus\u201d seemed to me above all a brief against marriage. The story\u2019s point\u2014or so I thought of it\u2014unsettled me. I had no intention of heeding it. I was for marriage, a born ball and chain.<\/p>\n

In the story, Neil Klugman, recently out of Rutgers and the army, works behind the desk at the Newark Library. His summer girlfriend is Brenda Patimkin, a Radcliffe student from tony Short Hills, New Jersey. \u201cWe lived in Newark when I was a baby,\u201d she tells Neil\u2014that is, before the Patimkins\u2019 social climb. For Neil, Brenda\u2019s allure is tangled up with his fascination of her prosperous world, and the closer the two of them get, the closer Neil comes to signing up for the whole Patimkin package: a fancy wedding, a lifetime management job at her father\u2019s factory (Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks), a country-club membership, a house in Short Hills, and, inevitably, babies. It\u2019s cushy, but Neil isn\u2019t sure he wants that life, while Brenda seems to consider no other.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The second\u00a0time I read \u201cGoodbye, Columbus,\u201d I was in my late twenties, living\u00a0in New York City, working in the editorial department of a magazine, and had no aspirations to move to the suburbs. I didn\u2019t think I particularly resembled Brenda Patimkin or the rich young matrons of Short Hills, whose ranks she seemed destined to join, yet I felt very much the thing being cautioned against. I knew myself to be a future wife; I harbored dreams of having children. And I was surrounded by Neils, leery of\u00a0family life. On the subject of family planning, a beau had recently leaned back in his chair and recited \u201cThis Be the Verse.\u201d I have not forgotten his smugness, or my defensiveness: he had some pretty good writing\u00a0on his side.<\/p>\n

He might have read aloud from \u201cGoodbye, Columbus,\u201d from a scene that preoccupied me in those days. While Brenda goes dress shopping in New York, Neil drives up to the mountains alone and observes a group of picnicking young mothers and children: \u201cYoung white-skinned mothers, hardly older than I, and in many instances younger, chatted in their convertibles behind me, and looked down from time to time to see what their children were about.\u201d Neil has seen them in the mountains before; \u201cin clutches of three or four they dotted the rustic hamburger joints that dotted the Reservation area.\u201d While their kids feed the jukebox, the mothers, \u201ca few of whom I recognized as high school classmates of mine, compared suntans, supermarkets, and vacations. They looked immortal sitting there.\u201d They looked immortal sitting there. The irony needled me. The line stayed with me for years. I was sure, on last reading it, that Roth meant not that the mothers individually looked immortal but that the condition of motherhood\u2014and fatherhood\u2014was immortal, the inescapable, wearying lot of most of humanity. Neil was girding himself to get out while he could.<\/p>\n

I read it now and I wonder what made me so sure. The next sentence is \u201cTheir hair would always stay the color they desired, their clothes the right texture and shade; in their homes they would have simple Swedish modern when that was fashionable, and if huge ugly baroque ever came back, out would go the long, midget-legged marble coffee table and in would come Louis Quatorze.\u201d A more local satire than I remembered. And then: \u201cTheir fates had collapsed them into one. Only Brenda shone. Money and comfort would not erase her singleness\u2014they hadn\u2019t yet, or had they? What was I loving, I wondered, and since I am not one to stick scalpels into myself, I wiggled my hand in the fence and allowed a tiny-nosed buck to lick my thoughts away.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGoodbye, Columbus\u201d is full of foreboding about Neil and Brenda\u2019s possible marriage. But on this reading, the story\u2019s specificity came rushing in. It\u2019s not about marrying but about marrying young; it\u2019s about the prospect of working for your father-in-law; it\u2019s about the wisdom of trading your modest independence for air-conditioning and garbage disposals; it\u2019s about marrying within your insular tribe before you ever have a chance to leave. Maybe it really is a story of the American mid-twentieth century\u2014the last time a young man with no particular prospects could so confidently turn down his future father-in-law\u2019s fortune. Except Neil doesn\u2019t actually turn it down. I had forgotten that it\u2019s Brenda, not Neil, who decides they should break up, and she unconsciously brings about a crisis that forces the issue: she leaves her diaphragm back home for her (shocked, disapproving) mother to find. Of course, you could say that it\u2019s Neil who brings the crisis about by pushing Brenda to get a diaphragm in the first place. The story\u2019s meanings loosened and shifted, and it was more interesting than I had remembered: two frightened people halfway in love who collude to bring about the end of their relationship before they give any more of themselves away.<\/p>\n

And then my husband supplied a point I\u2019d been missing. \u201cIt\u2019s about getting away clean!\u201d he said. This man, my husband, also likes to quote Larkin, but we\u2019ve had some children anyway. \u201cLook at this last line:\u00a0I was back in plenty of time for work.\u201d He goes on, animated, \u201cThey can just walk away from it. Everyone is better off, including Brenda.\u201d After all\u2014I was catching his drift\u2014was Brenda destined to be a Short Hills matron? Is she really aligning herself with her parents\u2019 values at the end? Or is shaking off Neil, under the cover of her parents\u2019 disapproval, her own way of forestalling a too-early marriage?\u00a0Roth leaves room to wonder.\u00a0\u201cThey even get to have sex\u201d\u2014the husband continues\u2014\u201cbut they don\u2019t have to marry. Her reputation isn\u2019t ruined. He\u2019s not on the hook. It\u2019s not Jude the Obscure or Tess of the D\u2019Urbervilles. No harm done!\u201d Indeed. Yet Neil isn\u2019t gloating or mopping his brow. He doesn\u2019t assign a value\u2014as some of Roth\u2019s later characters would\u2014to this kind of freedom. He (and presumably Brenda) only had an intuition that the union was wrong or that they wanted more time, which may be the same thing. And they bought themselves time. Neither they nor we nor possibly even Roth, back then, could say what for.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elaine Blair is an advisory editor of<\/em> The Paris Review.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first read \u201cGoodbye, Columbus,\u201d the ending unsettled me. I had no intention of heeding it. 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