As I pack and unpack stuff, I have fallen into reading novellas from an yellowing "Norton Anthology of the Short Novel" that I picked for a dollar at some book sale. The first short novel that I finished reading was Philip Roth's masterful study of class and class mobility (more particularly of the Jewish variety) in America in his "Goodbye, Columbus". It caught my attention among the eight short novels included in the anthology, mainly because the story is set in the great state of New Jersey, which is also currently the scene of my unfolding American story.

When I usually read stories or novels, I try to find a character I can identify with very closely, and into whose life I can somehow enter mentally and psychologically. While I found that I could understand the dilemmas and yearnings (and sympathize with) of Roth's lower middle class protagonist, Neil Klugman in his love affair with Brenda Patimkin of the newly yuppie and upwardly moblie Jewish Patimkin clan, I found it hard to identify myself in Neil, and thus enter the novel fully. This was unlike my New Year's re-reading of Tolstoy's " The Death of Ivan Illyich", where I could deeply feel, and be moved by, Ivan's suffering and self-understating brought on by the onset of death.

The fault, however, is not with Roth's skill as a writer for a masterful writer he is. For starters, his descriptions of sexual stimuli that young people respond to powerfully, have a simple elegance that imprints such descriptions instantly in the reader's memory. Who will be able to forget that Neil's yearing for Brenda began with a simple gesture of hers as she flicked her swimsuit to cover again the exposed skin on her hip coming out of a swimming pool?

My lack of identification towards characters in this novel then has to do with my expectations from it. While Roth clearly sets it up as failed love story of a poor boy meets rich girl, right in his title, the novel, in my reading, his writing devolves more into a study of manners, habits and social mores, and less into a love story. Perhaps Roth intentionally kept the love story tepid (it is hard to see how Neil and Brenda love each other vs. each being a more prosaic seeker of sex) in order to focus the reader's attention on questions of class mobility, in order to make the reader focus on the question if such mobility is worth all the trouble it entails?

This is a novel I definitely plan on re-reading again in the next few months for I will be making that upward journey myself here in America. In this context, this may well be the last substantial post here at Buoyantville for the next few weeks (or months) for I am renouncing (finally!) my graduate student bum hood, filled with numerous literary side trips, in order to scrabble for greenbacks from Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. Posting will resume, at a much lower frequency, once I find my groove, and clear some space in the course of work week to think about and absorb stimuli non-work related.