goodbye columbus

Goodbye,Columbus (1959), is a novella with five short stories attached, and was Philip Roth‘s first book.

The novella is set in 1950′s New Jersey, and describes a romance between an idealistic and disaffected young librarian, Neil Klugman, and Brenda Patimpkin, the spoilt daughter of a wealthy family.  Theirs is essentially a summer romance which is ultimately not strong enough to withstand the reality of their different outlooks and backgrounds. In parallel the story also explores assimilation and class issues in the emigrant Jewish community to which they both belong; and the dynamics of families.

In some ways Goodbye Columbus is a little dated – it’s easy to forget what a big deal sex outside of marriage was in the ’50s before the advent of contraception. But it’s still a really well written story, especially for a first-time author.  It describes beautifully the fragile and tentative beginnings of falling in love with someone, and the way this love is a creation of the lovers, talked into being and made more concrete than perhaps it is.  It also describes really well how people in a relationship can talk past one another and completely fail to communicate.  Neil Klugman is more likeable than many of Roth’s later male protagonists, and the thread of misogyny that runs through his other books is mostly absent from Goodbye Columbus.

The five short stories are also concerned with Jewish-American themes, but don’t sit well with the novella, I think because it isn’t possible to develop characters to the same extent in the space of a short story.

It’s worth reading just for Goodbye Columbus, which is thoughtful and satisfying, and shows Philip Roth’s talent as a writer.

Goodbye Columbus
Philip Roth
Penguin,1960

crabwalk

Gunter Grass is a major player in Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), a thorn in the side of the establishment, part of the establishment, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, and a former Waffen SS member.  Like most of his books, Crabwalk explores the impacts of the past on the present.  The book is narrated by Paul Pokriefke, a journalist who is struggling to understand his relationships with his mother, his ex-wife, and his son who has committed a terrible crime.  As with all of Grass’s book the root of all these problems lie in past events that have been repressed or ignored.

In 1936, a Nazi party functionary, Wilhelm Gustloff, was killed by a Jewish student in Switzerland. He becomes a ‘martyr’ for the Nazi party, and a ship in the Strength Through Joy fleet is named after him. Paul Pokriefke’s mother, Tulla, has happy memories of cruising the Baltic on the Wilhelm Gustloff, but her obsession with the ship has deeper and darker origins.  In January 1945, when Danzig was surrounded by the Red Army, a heavily pregnant Tulla was one of over 10,000 refugees and soldiers who crammed aboard the ship to escape. The ship was torpedoed shortly after leaving shore, and over 9000 people died.  Paul was born, or so his mother tells him, at the moment the ship sank, his first cries mingling with those of thousands of children drowning in the freezing sea.

As Paul grows up in East Germany, his mother tells this story over and over.  The teenage Paul  thinks he has escaped his origins when he moves to West Berlin not long before the borders are closed.  But after German reunification in 1989, his mother is back, and so is the story.  By this time he’s married, has a son Konrad, and has divorced.  Konrad becomes Tulla’s audience for the telling and retelling of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, and he becomes obsessed with it, setting up a website chronicling the full story and calling for  recognition of the tragedy as a war crime.

On the site, Konrad debates with another young man, Wolfgang, who assumes the persona of the Jewish student who shot Wilhelm Gustloff. They agree to meet, in Schwerin, where Wilhelm Gustloff is buried.  Wolfgang spits on the memorial.  Konrad shoots and kills him.

During the trial, Paul Pokriefke struggles to understand how this happened.  His ex-wife blames him for being an absent father.  He blames his ex-wife for being too liberal.  Tulla defends Konrad’s actions and blames West Germany for ignoring the suffering of its citizens during the war, especially those like her who were permanently displaced from what is now Poland.  Paul, his ex-wife, and the dead boys parents meet in a bar after the verdict, collectively and awkwardly wondering how, when they thought they were doing everything right as parents, it seems they were doing everything wrong.

At the very end of the book, Paul visits his son in a juvenile detention centre several times.  Konrad has been building a model of the Wilhelm Gustloff, supplied by his grandmother.  On the last visit, he deliberately smashes it until his hand bleed, asking “are you happy now, dad?”.  On returning home and switching on his computer, Paul comes across a neo-nazi website that exalts the ‘martyrdom’ of Konrad Pokriefke. It doesn’t end, he thinks, it never will.

The title Crabwalk is a reference to the process of moving forwards while appearing to move backwards or sideways.  It echoes the way the characters need to scuttle back and forth across the wreckage of the past in order to understand the present disaster they find themselves in.  The German title is Krebsgang, and Krebs is also the German word for cancer.  I don’t know if that was a deliberate play on words by Grass, but it may well be a reference to the way that Germany’s continuing uneasy relationship with WWII and the divided years that followed, is eating away at the society from the inside.

Crabwalk is an enjoyable book.  The characters all have their flaws – Konrad is self-righteous, Paul is a bit of a loser, Tulla is slightly nuts – but they are well drawn.  Unlike Grass’s earlier books, which are very allegorical to the point of being slightly irritating, the metaphors and symbolism in this book are more subtle which allows the characters to shine through and be more like real people than are many in his earlier work.  The only slight wrong note was Grass inserting himself into the narrative as an unnamed older figure that Paul occasionally seeks guidance from in his writing.  I didn’t think this was needed.

Crabwalk
Gunter Grass
Faber, 2002

death and disillusionment

The Great Gatsby and Appointment in Samarra

I’m reviewing these two books together because they are of similar age and cover similar themes.  Both are set between the wars, both are, in some sense, classic tragedies – featuring flawed heroes who must die because of their flaws; and both deal with the disillusion of societies captive to wealth and status.

(Full plot of The Great Gatsby)
(Full plot of Appointment in Samarra)

From the beginning of both books, it’s obvious the heroes are doomed.  Gatsby, because the narrator makes it plain that this is an obituary; and Julian English (the hero of Appointment in Samarra) from the book’s title, which comes from an epigram by Walter de la Mare.  Both of them seem at once responsible for the circumstances around their downfalls, yet powerless to stop. Gatsby has been pursuing a beautiful rich girl, by trying to turn himself into someone else, and he can’t stop.  Julian’s seemingly impulsive and minor acts have larger and graver consequences than he, thoughtless and shallow, can imagine.

Both are wealthy men, though Julian inherited his wealth whereas Gatsby acquired his by dubious means never quite explained.  Both are popular on the wild party circuit in their respective towns where, despite Prohibition, the booze flows liberally and everyone gets very, very drunk, a lot.  But Neither Julian nor Gatsby really know who they are.  Gatsby inhabits a made-up character that he has created for himself, to the extent that he’s lost the self that his girl Daisy loved in the first place.  And Julian has never really had to be responsible for his actions, to the extent that he doesn’t realise what image he projects and what the consequences of his immaturity will be.

Both books use cars as metaphors and important plot devices.  Cars are used to show the type of person being described (flashy, sensible, poor, old-money, new-money, gangster); and also the person’s state of mind (driving slowly, quickly, recklessly, erratically, sensibly, mindlessly).  Cars are also instruments of death.  I guess most of this comes from the time the books are set, when car ownership was becoming middle-class, and associated anxieties about technology and pace of change were beginning to make themselves felt.

There are two main differences between these books.  The Great Gatsby is written in the first person, so the narrative is very tight and controlled.  This adds to the mystery around Gatsby – we can only ever know as much about Gatsby as the narrator does.  Appointment in Samarra is written in the third person, and often uses peripheral characters’ viewpoints to show what is happening to Julian.  This is quite effective, because much of his downfall is not just due to his own behaviour, but also to the gossip and rumour that begins to swirl around him.  The three incidents of bad behaviour that trigger the chain of events are not even seen by the reader, they are read about afterwards.

The second difference is the time they are set.  The Great Gatsby is set in the 1920′s before the stock market crash.  The money and the good times look like they’ll go on forever, making Gatsby’s death seem more tragic than perhaps it really should be.  Appointment in Samarra is set not long after the crash, when the Great Depression is beginning to be felt.  The book uses quite a few example of people and businesses that were overly extravagent in the good times and are now sliding towards the bottom – Julian is just one of these.  Julian and Gatsby are about half a generation apart:  Gatsby is old enough to have fought in WWI, Julian was just too young and with the rest of his peer group feels separated and immature next to the veterans.  The Great Gatsby seems to be a warning of the coming hangover that will be explored in Appointment in Samarra.

Ultimately, The Great Gatsby is the better book.  F.Scott Fitzgerald is a master – there is not one superfluous word in the whole story, and every incident and every piece of landscape is there for a reason.  He can conjure up states of  mind and characters in just a few words, like this, which has everything you need to know about a turning-thirty crisis in one compact line:

Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

John O’Hara is trying a bit harder to shock (for its time, the book is explicit), and he needs many more words and pages and anecdotes to draw his characters.  Not that he does it badly, they are powerfully observed and very enjoyable to read.

I’ve not come across O’Hara before, and I’m keen to seek out more of his books (apparently one of them,  BUttercup8 was banned in Australia till the mid-sixties).  I first read The Great Gatsby over 10 years ago, when going through an extended F.Scott Fiztgerald phase, and I now know I didn’t really get it the first time round.  Both books are highly recommended, and if you buy the latest Penguin edition of The Great Gatsby (with the retro orange cover) it includes an interesting essay on the book which is also well worth a read.

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fiztgerald
Penguin Books

Appointment in Samarra
John O’Hara
Vintage / Random House
(I got mine at Fly-By-Night Books for a ridiculously low price)