Love in the Fifties: Roth’s ‘Goodbye, Columbus’

Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Philip Roth’s brilliant first book, was published when he was 26 and won the National Book Award in 1960.  Roth’s finest qualities are his depiction of idiomatic Jewish speech, his witty lyrical style, and his satiric descriptions of life in Newark and suburban New Jersey.  In the New York Times Book Review of October 1,1989, Roth defined the themes of his book: “the desire to repudiate and the desire to cling, a sense of allegiance and the need to rebel, the alluring dream of escaping into the challenging unknown and the counterdream of holding fast to the familiar.”  The hero Neil Klugman (German for “clever man”) must make crucial choices about work and marriage when he’s still uncertain about his future.

Roth’s novella echoes Scott Fitzgerald’s theme in The Great Gatsby: rich girls don’t marry poor boys.  When Roth’s heroine Brenda Patimkin is fitting her diaphragm at a doctor’s office in Manhattan, her boyfriend Neil waits for her “across the street by the Plaza fountain, and then watched her revolve through the doors”—just as Zelda Fitzgerald had revolved through the same doors before she and Scott jumped fully clothed into the Plaza fountain.  Like Daisy Buchanan in Gatsby, Brenda is one of those careless people who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness . . . and let other people clean up the mess they made.”  When Neil, after attending a wedding, drives out of the Lincoln tunnel and into New Jersey he could see—like the Valley of Ashes and godlike eye of Dr. Eckleburg in Gatsby—“the swampy meadows that spread for miles and miles, watery, blotchy, smelly, like an oversight of God.”

The book takes place during the summer and early fall of 1956.  Roth illuminates the background with contemporary references to people who have faded from memory: the sports announcer Bill Stern, Walter Brennan’s movie Kentucky, Rita Hayworth’s marriage to Aly Khan, the journalist Edward R. Murrow, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and Mary McCarthy’s sex scenes in “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit.”

The title Goodbye, Columbus refers to the nostalgic song that celebrates the basketball exploits of Brenda’s brother, Ron, at Ohio State University in Columbus.  The song that mentions Ron’s name and that he repeatedly plays on his phonograph to evoke his former athletic glory, represents the loss of his fame after graduation and beginning of the less heroic phase of his life.  The “goodbye” of the title is, like Ron, sadly comic.  He keeps slapping Neil on the ass as if he were an old teammate.  His father slaps his own belly to show, despite his huge appetite, that he’s not fat, and also slaps his brother Leo on the back.

Roth’s characters have amusing names.  Scapello, Neil’s irritating boss in the library, suggests scopare, the Italian slang for screwing.  Brenda’s father is named Ben, calls his daughter Bren and gives her the male nickname Buck.  Brenda and Neil are Jewish but have Irish first names.  The comical family name Patimkin alludes to the Russian “Potemkin village,” a false and elaborate facade that’s designed to impress and deceive outsiders.

Brenda’s father speaks coarsely, writes illiterately, and thinks people can’t learn anything useful from reading books and going to college.  Nevertheless, he’s proud that Brenda is at Radcliffe.  While crudely shoveling down quantities of food, Ben remarks that Neil “eats like a bird”.  Neil then asks for more food than he actually wants in order to prove that he’s not avian. Brenda’s mother had been a tennis star, is very attractive, is sympathetic to Brenda and agrees to have Neil stay in her house for two weeks.  Ben angrily threatens a business supplier on the phone; his wife argues furiously about Hadassah business on the phone.  The family worships the baseball hero Mickey Mantle and emphasises competitive sports: horseback riding, tennis matches, diving and racing in swimming pools, golf practice, basketball games, cheating at ping pong and running for miles against the clock.

The plot of the novella is simple yet dramatic.  Brenda and Neil meet in the summer, are attracted, have sex, fall in love and break up.  Neil comes from a poor background, lives with his aunt and uncle in Newark, and has graduated from his undistinguished hometown college, the Rutgers campus in Newark.  (Roth himself went to Bucknell, not Harvard.)  Brenda has everything a young girl could want: a stunning appearance, the adoration of her parents, a luxurious life, academic excellence and social success.  Neil has nothing comparable and doesn’t like to talk about his dull existence.  He’s been in the army but never describes that experience.

Neil enters Brenda’s world in her country club, her lavish home in suburban Short Hills, New Jersey, and her college town in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Brenda’s family had roots in Newark and she lived there as a baby when they were poor.  But she never enters Neil’s world and rarely asks about his life.  Short Hills is only 20 miles west of Newark, but seems to be on a different planet.

Brenda is close to her parents.  Neil’s parents suffer from asthma and have moved to the dry air of distant Tucson, Arizona.  To save money his thrifty but irreverent old-world grandmother used to “drink hot tea from an old jahrzeit glass” when its memorial candle had burnt out.  Neil lives with his neurotic Aunt Gladys.  She disapproves of his involvement with Brenda, who’s out of his class and his reach.  She warns him, “You’ll stay there too long and you’ll be too good for us”—and not good enough for them.  She also comically complains, when Brenda is in Cambridge, “What does she call long distance.  I almost had a heart attack.”  She worries, when Neil goes on vacation, that he hasn’t got enough clean underwear and declares, “Schmutz he lives in and I shouldn’t worry.”

Brenda has an older brother Ron and a younger sister Julie; Neil is an only child.  Though Neil is a potential husband, he has no ambitions and no plans.  He’s content for now to work at a boring, dead-end job with irritating colleagues in the Newark Public Library.  By choosing Neil, Brenda opposes her parents’ values and ambitions.  Neil knows he would be unable to support a wife accustomed to luxury unless he worked for her father, which would be more lucrative but certainly more boring than the library.  Ron gives up his true calling as a gym teacher and basketball coach.  After his marriage, he agrees to work in his father’s plumbing business, for which he is ill suited.  Neil, “the outsider who might one day be an insider”, is unwilling to make this sacrifice.  The family firm — Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks, “Any Size, Any Shape”—gives Neil a sinking feeling and makes him realize that he will never fit into any size or shape.

Neil courts Brenda with witty teasing jokes.  When he makes fun of her expensive nose job, she counters with, “I was pretty.  Now I’m prettier.”  He also suggests she have her eyes fixed instead of wearing contact lenses.  She repeatedly warns him “don’t be nasty” and rewards him with a kiss when he obeys.  They engage in sexual underwater swimming, and eat cherries with other forbidden fruit in Brenda’s Eden.  Julie even accuses him of stealing the fruit that he has no right to eat.  After Neil walks barefoot on the discarded cherry stones, he finds red marks on the bottom of his feet as if he had been punished by stigmata.  As insurance, Aunt Gladys gives him a bag of her fruit to take with him.

Brenda is a delightful contrast to Neil’s “pain in the ass” cousin Doris, who dutifully invites him to the country club once a year, tries in vain to finish reading War and Peace and tears off her peeling skin.  Brenda makes the first move in their pas de deux by asking Neil to hold her glasses while she dives into the pool.  When he takes the plunge, he notes her generous response: “as her breasts swam towards me like two pink-nosed fish she let me hold them.”  Brenda likes Neil’s intelligence and wit, wants to sleep with him, smuggles him into her house, has risky sex in her bedroom and showers in her bathroom.  During sex, “Brenda is falling, slowly but with a smile, and Neil is rising” with an erection.  It’s like sleeping with panthers, the danger is half the excitement.  She’s sexually responsive, beautiful and bright, but also spoiled and self-absorbed, and may be using him only as a summer amusement when she has no other gentleman callers.

Neil’s attitude to the Black boy who frequently visits the Public Library shows his kind and compassionate character.  His colleagues fear the boy may deface or steal the books, and mistakenly believe that he masturbates while looking at nude paintings by Gauguin.  They want to turn him out; Neil protects and encourages him.  The innocent boy defends himself by telling Neil, “Look, man, I ain’t doing nothing wrong.  I didn’t do no writing in anything.  You could search me. . . . No, sir, I didn’t take nothing.”  Neil explains the exotic locale of Tahiti, offers to get the boy a library card and hides the book from another insistent borrower.  Neil describes Brenda looking like “a sailor’s dream of a Polynesian maiden.”  Both Neil’s connection with the Patimkins and the boy’s interest in Gauguin express their longing for an ideal and unattainable paradise.  Neil also sympathises with the Patimkins’ efficient Black maid Carlota and the Black workers, poorly directed by Ron, in his father’s plumbing warehouse.

The family’s old Newark furniture is stored in their new attic, a hidden remnant of their humble past.  It also represents the shabby stuff that Neil and Brenda would have to live with if he refused to work for her father and they really were poor.  This abandoned junk strongly contrasts to the materialistic acquisitions that Brenda is used to having and Neil doesn’t want: gold dinnerware, handy garbage disposals, expensive clothing from Bonwit Teller and bumpless noses for their children.  Brenda can’t find the money that Ben once hid in the attic; the family is now securely rich and she no longer needs it.

While Neil hesitates to make a commitment, Ron plunges into marriage, a few months after graduation, with his college girlfriend.  Harriet, a suitably emptyheaded consort, arrives for the wedding just before Brenda departs for Radcliffe, and their union reminds Neil of his impending separation.  The feisty Brenda, about to leave home, is jealous of being replaced in her mother’s affections by the bland Harriet.  The wedding is organised by the groom’s family in New Jersey instead of the bride’s family in Milwaukee, perhaps because the rich Patimkins have offered to pay for, and control, everything.  Their scrupulous planning of every detail for the newlyweds accentuates Neil’s refusal to plan anything about his own future.  Roth says nothing about the bride’s relatives, though they are surely at the celebration.  At the wedding Ben’s jealous brother Leo complains to Neil: “I got more brains in my pinky than Ben got in his whole head.  Why is it he’s on top and I’m on the bottom!  Why!”  Leo then urges Neil to seize the glittering prize, and marry the rich and beautiful Benda: “You’ll go far.  You’re a smart boy, you’ll play it safe.  Don’t louse things up.”

Neil and Brenda fiercely argue about whether she should acquire a diaphragm to avoid getting pregnant.  Brenda’s bold hedonism anticipates the sexual revolution of the 1960s, but she rejects the liberating device because she’s already been liberated without it.  Neil worries that he’ll lose her and believes the diaphragm will keep them together.  Insisting that she must get one, he says, “we’re not children”—and he doesn’t want to have any.  If she becomes pregnant, he would have to marry her, and he wants to make that crucial choice himself.  Like Saul Bellow’s Augie March, Neil could shout, “I want, I want,” but he doesn’t want anything badly enough to ruin his life by working for Brenda’s father.  Neil wittily says the diaphragm will “add to her wardrobe,” and when Brenda returns from the doctor she proudly announces, “I’m wearing it.”

On their first phone talk Brenda had asked, “What do you look like?”  At the end of the novel, when they plan to meet in the Boston train station, she cleverly reprises with, “How will I know you?”  In the Cambridge hotel, where thoughts replace reality, Neil has an idealised memory of Brenda, whom he’s about to lose.  He recalls that “first warm night when I had put my arms around her and felt the tiny wings beating in her back”—as if she were an angel.  They were not discovered when they had two weeks of risky sex in her house, but the truth comes out when they’re away from home and Brenda’s nosy mother finds her diaphragm stuffed into a drawer.  It’s ironic that the contentious safety device leads to the end of their affair.

Brenda defensively tells Neil, “you act as though I wanted her to find it.”  He replies, “Brenda, sweetheart, wouldn’t the safest, smartest, easiest, simplest thing been to have taken it with you?  Wouldn’t it?”  The conclusion of the book is ambiguous.  Either Brenda left her diaphragm, consciously or consciously, in her dresser at home because she remains faithful to Neil and has no plans to use it with other men in Cambridge.  It’s also possible that Brenda deliberately left it there so her mother would find it and force her to break with Neil.  He believes, even though Brenda had invited him to Cambridge and reserved a hotel room, that she left the incriminating evidence at home on purpose.

Brenda also has to make a crucial choice.  Faced with her parents’ emotional blackmail expressed in their sorrowful letters to her, the sexually rebellious Brenda submits to their mindless and materialistic values.  They would never tolerate the vile seducer and would never again invite him to their home.  He would have to see Brenda secretly, and there would be no more swimming pools, fruit, friendly slaps or weddings.  Neil becomes furious and, in a rare moment of self-assertion, rejects Brenda before she rejects him.

Neil then walks into the Harvard Yard, filled with far more promising suitors than in Newark.  He is drawn to the Lamont Library, a soulmate building, which Brenda once told him had rest rooms adorned with Patimkin Sinks.  Neil sees his reflection in the plate glass window and has an urge to throw a rock through it.  To compensate for losing Brenda, he wants to destroy not only the library that represents her college in Cambridge and his job in Newark, but also his own troubled image.

The excellent film version of Goodbye, Columbus (1969) stays close to the plot, characters, dialogue and humor of the novella, and visualises the nudity during their sexual encounters.  The irresistible Ali MacGraw actually had a Jewish mother.  Michael Meyers, who gave up acting and became a doctor, is effective as Brenda’s loose-limbed, empty-headed brother, who hangs up his jockstrap in the bathroom like a triumphant banner.  But Richard Benjamin’s Neil doesn’t have the attractive looks and charisma that would instantly arouse Brenda and make her want to sleep with him.

The script by Arnold Schulman added some valuable scenes.  Instead of Newark and Short Hills, the film (perhaps for legal reasons) contrasts the Bronx to the town of Purchase in suburban Westchester.  Ron’s fiancée Harriet comes from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, instead of Ohio.  To intensify the drama Brenda’s mother is less physically attractive, and more openly hostile to both Brenda and Neil than she is in the novella.  Fearing refusal, Brenda does not ask permission to have Neil to stay with them for two weeks during his summer vacation.  Her mother is angry and resentful about having an unwanted guest while she is making frantic and elaborate preparations for Ron’s wedding.  In another scene Neil begs Brenda to come back to his car, leaving the audience to realize, just after his orgasm, that he can’t get out and talk to her with stained trousers.  An elaborate dance scene, when Brenda encounters some of her old boyfriends, reveals that Neil doesn’t belong in that wealthy set.  But the lovers escape, strip off their clothes and swim naked in a nearby pond.  The best film scene takes place at Ron’s wedding when Brenda is tipped as the next bride.  Her father embraces her, and declares that he loves and trusts her and thinks she’s a perfect daughter.  She cries because she has secretly betrayed his trust by sleeping with Neil.

Epilogue: Roth’s 1950s setting describes my own high school and college years, and my social milieux.  I too had a beautiful and bright, spoiled and selfish girlfriend, daughter of a Park Avenue doctor, educated at Wellesley and tanned at Atlantic beach.  (ABC, the Atlantic Beach Club, meant Always Bring Christians; ABH, the Atlantic Beach Hotel, meant Always Bring Hebrews.)  But I knew that the slim salary in my hoped-for academic career would never satisfy her luxurious tastes and that we had no future.  Another girlfriend, like Brenda keeping Neil waiting during her prolonged tennis game, kept me waiting to test my patience while she made a very long and gossipy phone call.  A third girlfriend, responding to my urgent plea, also whispered Brenda’s “Later,” a promise of pneumatic bliss and the sexiest word I ever heard.

Jeffrey Meyers published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath in 2024.  Forty-Three Ways to Look at Hemingway appeared in November 2025.  The Biographer’s Quest will be out in April 2026.

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