It’s been four months now since Philip Roth died, long enough in our fast-paced media world that all the eloquent and moving obituaries have largely dissolved into a broader consensus of the kind of writer he was, our culture’s agreed-upon summation of his legacy. It was The New York Times that I think best articulated this mainstream view:
Roth was the last front-rank survivor of a generation of fecund and authoritative and, yes, white and male novelists — the others included John Updike, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow — who helped define American experience in the second half of the 20th century.
Yet I could never see Roth as simply a “white” novelist. Certainly, he was a “male” novelist, and like all the men on that list his he was to some degree problematic in the way he depicted women (though nowhere near the level of Norman Mailer). But to me, it felt wrong to call someone whose novels were so deeply concerned with Jewish identity “white” (the same is true of Saul Bellow, though that deserves a separate blog post). The truth is, Roth wrote about identity and assimilation as powerfully as any writer of color, and as a Muslim American growing up in a post-9/11 America, I often saw myself in his novels and his characters.
Roth’s debut, Goodbye Columbus, is a somber and reflective work about the desire to be white and fit in with what one thinks it means to be American. The novella follows young Neil Klugman, a college-aged kid who lives in working-class Newark with his aunt and uncle and works at the public library and who one day meets and falls in love with Brenda Patimkin, a girl whose auburn hair and tennis playing and golfing and country club membership and suburban address all signify a kind of assimilated Americanness that he longs for. It’s whiteness, though, that’s at the center of his attraction—after all, when he calls her after they’ve met and she asks him to remind her what he looks like, he tells her, hesitatingly, that he’s “dark.”
Over the course of the novella then, Neil becomes enamored not just with Brenda but with her entire family, her brother Ron the college athlete, the family dinners in the dining room, the big house, the oak trees on their property, their whole upper middle class life. And yet, over the course of his summer with them, Neil also discovers the underlying tensions among the seemingly perfect family, how Mrs. Patimkin resents that her daughter has abandoned her Jewish heritage and how Mr. Patimkin feels his son doesn’t understand the meaning of hard work like he did. Even Neil can’t help but react judgmentally when he learns that Brenda has had a nose-job and that Ron will have one soon.
Eventually, at Ron’s wedding, several months into his relationship with Brenda, Neil meets Mr. Patimkin’s half-brother Leo, a lightbulb salesman whose lower middle class family is much more like Neil’s own. It’s Neil’s conversations with Leo and his reflection on the man’s life, in particular a lyrical passage where he imagines him on a train heading north with his box of lightbulbs sitting forlornly on the seat beside him, that underscore Goodbye Columbus’s bleak and ruminative tone and ultimately question the attainability of the Patimkin’s assimilated life:
It was almost dawn when we came out of the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel. I switched down to my parking lights, and drove on to the Turnpike, and there out before me I could see the swampy meadows that spread for miles and miles, watery, blotchy, smelly, like an oversight of God. I thought of that other oversight, Leo Patimkin, half-brother to Ben. In a few hours he would be on a train heading north, and as he passed Scarsdale and White Plains, he would belch and taste champagne and let the flavor linger in his mouth. Alongside him on the seat, like another passenger, would be cartons of bulbs. He would get off at New London, or maybe, inspired by the sight of his half-brother, he would stay on again, hoping for some new luck father north. For the world was Leo’s territory, every city, every swamp, every road and highway. He could go on to Newfoundland if he wanted, Hudson Bay, and on up to Thule, and then slide down the other side of the globe and rap on frosted windows on the Russian steppes, if he wanted. But he wouldn’t. Leo was forty-forty-eight years old and he had learned. He pursued discomfort and sorrow, all right, but if you had a heartful by the time you reached New London, what new awfulness could you look forward to in Vladivostok?
It’s in this moment that Neil recognizes the truth about American assimilation, that for every Brenda and Ron who successfully assimilated into whiteness, there was also a Leo, still struggling with the American dream.
Roth was twenty-five when Goodbye Columbus was published, and I was twenty-five when I finally read it, an aspiring author myself, though as of yet unpublished. Until then, all my stories had avoided the issue of identity. I’d written characters whose race and religion were never specified, but who because of those absences were obviously meant to be white. It was eye-opening to read Goodbye Columbus and see how another young writer hadn’t turned away from his identity but instead had turned towards it and towards all his complicated feelings.
All this is why, then, I find it immensely reductive to describe Philip Roth as a “white and male novelist.” As Mark McGurl argues in The Program Era, an account of twentieth-century fiction through the lens of writing programs, Roth was one of the pioneers of “high cultural pluralism,” the post-war literary tradition of minority writers writing from marginalized perspectives. For McGurl, this tradition includes Leslie Marmon Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Toni Morrison, among many others. The fact that the critical establishment eventually saw Roth as an “American” author and not a “Jewish American” one is perhaps a testament to America’s melting pot. But as Roth demonstrated in Goodbye Columbus, this kind of assimilation into whiteness comes with its own cost. The novella, after all, ends on a melancholy note, with Neil asking himself the following after his failed relationship with Brenda (a failure that was in many ways his own fault), recognizing with new wisdom the inherent problem in his initial desire for her: “What was it inside me that had turned pursuit and clutching into love, and then turned it inside out again?”
That line was written in the 1950s, but in 2018, when our society still deals with issues of identity and assimilation, the words continue to resonate.