Source: "The Image of Newark and the Indignities of Love: Notes on Philip Roth," in Midstream, Vol. V, No. 3, Summer, 1959, pp. 96-9.

[In the following assessment of Goodbye, Columbus, Fiedler maintains that the title novella's "slovenliness" makes it superior to the book's remaining short fiction.]

There is more room in his single novella than in any of his shorter stories for non-theoretical life, for the painful wonder of what is given rather than the satisfactory aptness of what is (however skillfully) contrived to substantiate a point. Random and inexhaustible, such life is, after all, more the fictionist's business than any theme, even the rewardingly ironic and surely immortal one of how hard it is to be a Jew—quite differently elaborated in "Defender of the Faith," and "Eli the Fanatic." For the first, Philip Roth has already received the young Jewish writer's initial accolade: the accusation of anti-Semitism; and both stories are effective, convincing—the second even terrible in its reflections on how these days the holiest madness is "understood" and cured. But their terror and irony alike remain a little abstract—fading into illustrations of propositions out of Riesman, or pressed hard toward some not-quite committed religious position. I should suppose that if Roth is to be as funny and as terrifying as he has the skill and insight to be, he must move out in the religious direction he has so far only indicated; but at the very least he must learn to risk a certain slovenliness, which in his short stories he evades with the nervousness of a compulsive housecleaner. Other readers, I know, are more capable than I of responding to his pace, vigor and candor without the nagging sense that they are all a little compromised by something uncomfortably close to slickness; but I cannot deny that feeling in myself.

Goodbye, Columbus appeals to me, therefore, precisely because it is untidier than the rest, not so soon or so certainly in control. And in its generous margin of inadvertence, there is room enough for a mythical Newark, truth enough for the real one. In the end, Goodbye, Columbus does not quite work as a novella. Its plot (satisfactorily outrageous, but a little gimmicky and eked out with echoes of Mary McCarthy) and its themes tend to fall apart. Unlike some of the short stories, it evades rather than submits to these themes, perhaps because the author is afraid to submit to the old-fashioned motif of love across class lines which struggles to become its point. But love, desperate and foredoomed, love as a betrayal which takes itself for pleasure, is the only subject adequate to the city Roth has imagined. This he knows really, and incidentally has exploited fully even in Goodbye, Columbus.

It is in its incidents rather than in its total structure that the novella comes alive. Its details are as vivid as its themes are inert, its properties more alive, perhaps, than its chief protagonists: the furniture which symbolizes status, refrigerators crammed absurdly with mountains of fruit, a jockstrap hung from the faucet of a bathtub, the record that gives the story its name. Things writhe, assert themselves, determine lives in a Dickensian frenzy. But some of the people who are possessed by them or subsist in the margins they leave free come alive, too—like Uncle Leo with his memories of the "oral love" which he learned from a girl called Hannah Schreiber at a B'nai Brith dance for servicemen, and which he exacted later from his wife, who was "up to here with Mogen David" after a Seder. "In fact, twice after Seders. Aachh! Everything good in my life I can count on my fingers." Here it seems to me is the profoundly atrocious pathos which is Roth's forte, his essential theme. Love in Newark! Beside it, the reminiscences of childhood, the anecdotes of peacetime army life, even the accounts of the disruption of the Jew's suburban truce with respectability come to seem of secondary importance—preludes to a main theme.