Illustration by Joan LeMay
I have always had a thing for what David Foster Wallace called “the great male narcissists,” such as Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow. Philip Roth, however, is my favorite. I love how funny he could be, how crisp his language is, and how neurotic his whole aura seemed to be—at least on the page. He was misogynistic, moody, and allergic to happy endings, and was steadily nurturing a panicky fear of age and anything faded or about to fade. “Old age isn’t a battle,” he said, “it’s a massacre,” a quote that rings especially true to a professional athlete, for whom old age comes early in life.
In other words, he was my kind of guy.
I fell in love with Roth, who died earlier this year, once and for all when I read his short novel Goodbye, Columbus. It’s the story of a summer romance told from the perspective of Neil Klugman, a lower-middle-class kid from gritty Newark, N.J., who pursues, wins, and then loses Brenda Patimkin, a college girl from the tony suburb of Short Hills. They meet for the first time at the tennis courts, where Brenda invites Neil to pick her up for their first date. If you thought I wouldn’t be moved by a layman’s tennis metaphor, you’re mistaken. This one hit me right on the nose, so to speak.
Here’s Roth describing Neil’s first impressions of Brenda:
I parked the car under the black-green canopy of three oaks, and walked towards the sound of the tennis balls. I heard an exasperated voice say, “Deuce again.” It was Brenda and she sounded as though she was sweating considerably. I crackled slowly up the gravel and heard Brenda once more. “My ad,” and then just as I rounded the path, catching a cuff full of burrs, I heard, “Game!” Her racket went spinning up in the air and she caught it neatly as I came into sight.