Easy listening; however, the novel that makes up most of this collection is so dated, with its main crisis concerning use of a diaphram (!) that despite how easy it all slides by, it ends up disappointing. Equally with the diaphram, the fault lies with the male protagonist, who acts idiotically and introduces unnecessary complications into the romantic relationship that drive the plot in a very artificial way. The 5 short stories (which aren't so short) are also easy to digest, but except for one or two, they also disappoint. Roth can write long conversations--such as the one in Goodbye Columbus with the traveling lightbulb salesman--that go on and on and are somewhat interesting in themselves, but end up just seeming like padding. I guess he's trying to be funny and show insight into human nature, and sometimes he does, but any rewards are offset by the triviality of much of this and all the wasted words. Even when he has an interesting subject, such as the intrusion of fundamentalist Judaism into a New York town where Jews and Gentiles have become modern and mostly reconciled, the story is marred by just going on and on. And on and on. And on and on. I assume Roth, who is obviously regarded as a great writer, must have written better stuff than this! ( )

The first story about the relationship between Brenda and Neil seemed the weakest in the collection. The reference to a bump in the nose being a code for a Jewish nose and having a nose job seemed quaint.
I loved the next story about Ozzie called The Conversion of The Jews. The character Ozzie describes his mother with the lines, “Even when she was dressed up, she didn’t look like a chosen person. But when she lit candles, she looked like something better; like a woman who knew momentarily that God could do anything.” He had called the rabbi a bastard saying he didn’t know anything about God. Scene where Ozzie is on the roof and the rabbi screams for him to get done is magnificent. He acts like a martyr-Jesus illusion. He makes the rabbi knell and say God can make a child without intercourse. He tells his mother and the rabbi that they shouldn’t hit him when he’d asked about Jesus. The chilling last line of the story was, “He jumped right into the center of the yellow net that glowed in the evening’ edge like an overgrown halo. “
In Defender of the Faith, Roth examines self-hating Jew which plague Roth thorough his career. The story is about how the Jewish Sergeant Nathan Marx deals with another Jewish solder who’s been complaining about not being given passes on Shabbos or Passover and says, “Why can’t you be like the rest? Why do you have to stick out like a sore thumb?” The solder says “Because I’m a Jew. I am different. Better, maybe not. But different.” Or “It’s a hard thing to be a Jew, it’s harder to stay one.”
The last story is about an attorney Eli who is being pressured by his community to stop a group of Orthodox Jews from wearing their traditional clothing outside of the Yeshiva. The story turns into a stream of consciousness that represents Philip Roth’s mastery of language and plot to end this timeless
( )

Overrated. ( )

I liked Goodbye, Columbus better this time than when I first read it. However, I feel there were many stereotypes of Jews presented and not enough of the positive characteristics that Jews possess. The final story presented mental illness in such a 2-dimensional manor that it was very offensive. The main positive result of this reading was that I found more wit in Goodbye, Columbus than I had previously. ( )

Roth, Philip. Goodbye, Columbus. 1959. Modern Library, 1995.
Goodbye, Columbus is usually called Philip Roth’s first novel, although it is in truth a novella, usually published with five short stories to give it the heft it needed to sell as a book. It has been compared with the works of such writers as J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Ralph Ellison. I suspect that it was a strong influence on The Graduate, both the 1963 novel and the 1967 film. Some orthodox Jews criticized it for self-loathing antisemitism. Others had trouble with its treatment of sex and other distasteful matters. And Roth, himself, was critical of it late in his career. He was especially unhappy with his failure to achieve the tone he wanted in some of the short stories. Rereading it after several decades, I can see two main threads in it that still speak to us. First, it is thoroughly modernist. Neil, the narrator of the novella, wanders through the Jewish suburbs of Newark looking to give meaning to his life, but he never looks inward for it, never seems to see that the shallowness he sees in his own family and in his Radcliffe amour Brenda’s upwardly mobile one is a projection of his own emptiness. Second, like all the great modernists, it hopes to put its ethnicity and locality into a modern context. Its characters often have trouble reconciling their ethnicity with the often value-free demands of 20th-Century American life. It is telling, I think, that the Holocaust is an unacknowledged monster in all these stories, even “Defender of the Faith,” that is set in World War II. It leaves almost all the characters, to borrow the phrase from Yeats that Chinua Achebe used in a similar context, “no longer at ease.” ( )