On Wednesday I spoke to my boyfriend, Patrick, about Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus,” the titular novella from Roth’s 1959, National-Book-Award-winning collection.
We’re in New Jersey this week celebrating Pat’s birthday and Thanksgiving. He kindly agreed to read the novella and sit for a recorded conversation. The first, abridged part of our discussion is transcribed below. The second will hit subscribers’ inboxes on Monday.
CARRLEY: What happens in “Goodbye, Columbus”?
PATRICK: Neil, who lives in Newark, is a working-class Jewish boy. He’s 23. He holds Brenda Patimkin’s glasses at the country club where he’s visiting his cousin. He calls [Brenda] and asks her out. It’s a story of them dating over the summer. There’s a lot of funny class commentary between him living with his aunt in Newark and spending a lot of time [at Brenda’s family home] in fancy Short Hills.
CARRLEY: And you’re familiar with the area in Newark where he exists because you went to college there.
PATRICK: I lived there for four years and my dad works there a lot as a salesman.
CARRLEY: And you went to college down the street from his college.
PATRICK: Yeah, the campuses butt up next to each other.
CARRLEY: He works at the library, and he doesn’t want to work at the library.
PATRICK: It seemed to be this kind of idle unhappiness.
CARRLEY: Do you think he had any ambitions?
PATRICK: I’m not sure. Towards the end, he’s becoming more forceful with his boss. He talks about how he may have learned that when Mrs. Patimkin asked him to go get something from [Mr. Patimkin’s] business, the sinks—
CARRLEY: —bathroom and kitchen sinks—
PATRICK: He observes [Mr. Patimkin] dressing down this man over the phone, and he wonders if maybe he could exist in that business. [Mr. Patimkin] came from the same place as Neil. If Neil was a different kind of person he could become him. If he was enterprising, interested in people throwing sinks back and forth… He was so nervous in that scene, around the industry.
CARRLEY: The son, Ron [Patimkin], who’s going to get the business anyway, doesn’t seem entirely comfortable . . . Neil’s ambitions are vague. He doesn’t really want to work at the library, but it’s not clear what he does want to do. He wants Brenda. Even there, there’s a suggestion that it’s kind of just something he willed himself to do.
“What was it inside me that had turned pursuit and clutching into love, and then turned it inside out again? What was it that had turned winning into losing, and losing—who knows—into winning? I was sure I had loved Brenda, though standing there, I knew I couldn’t any longer . . . If she had only been slightly not Brenda… but then would I have loved her?” (135-136)
It seems like all the language about love is something spawned, something willed, turning the pursuit into love. It’s not a vision of spontaneous, heartfelt emotion. Do you think it’s a love story? Do you think it’s a coming-of-age story? How would you define it?
PATRICK: It’s definitely not a love story. [Neil and Brenda] are egotistical in different ways. They’re seeing each other for two weeks before Brenda asks [Neil] a question about himself. He starts to look like her. He’s wearing the dumb khakis or whatever they call them.
CARRLEY: Bermudas.
PATRICK: Bermudas.
CARRLEY: She says, “You look like me, but bigger.”
PATRICK: It’s almost like a sporting event, more than a genuine love story.
CARRLEY: Sports obviously have a huge part in it.
PATRICK: There’s the sporting-goods tree in their backyard with all the sporting objects sprinkled under it as if they’ve grown and fallen to the ground. There’s the proud display of Ron’s jock straps in the bathroom. Julie [Patimkin] beats Neil at basketball. Or does he let her beat him? Sports come in a lot. Ron is playing his Ohio State…
CARRLEY: The tree is called the sporting-goods tree because that’s where all of the sporting equipment lies, underneath the tree, and all the fruit they eat comes from the basement. So the fruit comes from inside, the equipment comes from the trees. In general, they’re pretty cut off from the natural world.
PATRICK: When he’s having that awkward conversation with Mrs. Patimkin, he’s trying to pretend he can hear the birds. He can’t hear the birds through the [living room] windows. Mr. Patimkin’s business is almost an extension of sport. It’s this contest. [Sports are] training for the children to become these competitors.
CARRLEY: The girls aren’t taught to be fair competitors. They’re taught that they can kind of have it handed to them.
I’m wondering if there’s a split between sports and verbal life. When they’re on one of their first dates at the pool, [Brenda] asks Neil if he loves her. He says “No,” I think. Then they start going back and forth.
“We spent the rest of the afternoon in the water. There were eight of those long lines painted down the length of the pool and by the end of the day I think we had parked for a while in every lane, close enough to the dark stripes to reach out and touch them. We came back to the chairs now and then and sang hesitant, clever, nervous, gentle dithyrambs about how we were beginning to feel towards one another. Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them—at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them.” (18-19)
Their relationship develops through physical sport, physical action.
The Patimkin men are presented as being basically nonverbal.
PATRICK: Amazing eaters, very hearty football athletes…
CARRLEY: They have massive bodies. They eat a lot. There’s a line about Ron venturing, or journeying, into language. When Mr. Patimkin is at work and berating Goodman, or whoever, on the phone, he writes something down. It’s just a big—
BOTH: X.
CARRLEY: Anything else to say about the fruit?
PATRICK: Aunt Gladys, when [Neil] says he’s going on vacation [to Short Hills] and she’s kind of heartbroken, gives him fruit. I think it’s the first time she gives him fruit, gives him two specific kinds of fruit—
CARRLEY: —grapes and peaches, or something—
PATRICK: —wraps them up delicately. It’s a special gesture. At the Patimkin house, it’s this never-ending resource. He does get sick, right? He talks about cracking his fragile bowel. Is it the fruits of their labor? Is that the ultimate status symbol? Having this never-ending supply of tropical fruits?
CARRLEY: Such a huge variety. I was thinking about the natural world. As you said, he can’t even hear the birds singing from the living room. You’ve got the fruit in the basement. They’re constantly outside doing things, but there’s no description really of the natural world. They don’t step in dog poop when they’re on the lawn. They go running on the track. They do go see the deer through the fence a few times, and maybe feed the deer. There, he’s more interested in his classmates from high school that had married, moved to Short Hills, and were bringing their kids there. At a certain point, he goes to see the deer and it’s too cold. Maybe it’s a summer love story, because the element of nature that’s really present—
PATRICK: —seasons passing—
CARRLEY: Right, really clearly and definitely. It’s hot in summer. Fall is when Brenda’s supposed to leave for college and it’s immediately cold.
PATRICK: Leaves fall immediately off the trees.
CARRLEY: This book was written 60 or 70 years ago. Nowadays the seasons don’t follow a predictable pattern. It’ll be 70 degrees in October. It seems almost quaint to think of the seasons as being so clearly demarcated. This book [is] from 1959. I think it feels really fresh. Does it make you feel nostalgic?
PATRICK: It strikes me as a teen fling, so that kind of induces some nostalgia. All the mention of them having this hidden sex life in the parents’ home, then ultimately the diaphragm being the undoing…
CARRLEY: Why do you think it’s called Goodbye, Columbus? [Ron’s] Goodbye, Columbus record is a nostalgic artifact. [Neil] is telling the story in retrospect. It’s not the present. There are moments where he’ll go, “We’ll get to that later.” I think it has a nostalgic tone.
PATRICK: You could see him like his boss at the library, this kind of dumpy man. And [the novella] is very romantic in the same way that Ron is so enamored with his football life. When the announcer says his name, he shakes in bed.
CARRLEY: This story, then, is [Neil’s] Columbus?
PATRICK: His professional sports career.