Goodbye, Columbus

Goodbye, Columbus
by Philip Roth
read: circa 2000
National Book Award

Caution: contains spoilers.

I read this back in college, for fun.  It was after Time had named Philip Roth the greatest living American author in their millennium issue.  Most critics have read this as a tale of a lower-middle-class Jewish young man trying to assimilate into upper-class life.  I read it as a love story.  In that vein, two parts stand out: when Neil confesses his love after playing a night-time game in the pool that is possibly an innocent lover's flirtation, possibly a manipulative effort to coax emotion by making Neil feel insecure and abandoned, and likely something in between.  The second part that stands out is the climactic, "If she had only been slightly not Brenda…but then would I have loved her?," which in a deft non-sentence sums up the course of nearly every failed relationship in human history.  Roth is one of my favorite writers, and this was a fine introduction to his work.

There were other stories in this collection, but I honestly don't remember a thing about them.