Goodbye, Columbus

Neil Klugman lives with his aunt and uncle in working-class Newark and spends a summer courting Brenda Patimkin, whose family's sporting-goods fortune has bought a house in Short Hills stocked with two refrigerators, one holding nothing but the overflow of fruit nobody has gotten around to eating. Roth stages the romance as a tour of class distance dressed up as a summer fling, Neil cataloguing the Patimkins' effortless abundance, the country club, the wall-to-wall carpet, the casual assumption that more of everything will simply keep arriving, with a mixture of real desire and a contempt he never quite manages to resolve into either love or rejection.

The diaphragm Brenda gets fitted for, at Neil's own urging, becomes the novella's real engine, standing in for everything neither of them will say plainly about commitment, parental approval, or whose life is actually expected to bend for whose. Roth is less interested in whether the romance survives the summer than in what it exposes: an assimilation-era Jewish American ambition, the Patimkins' money scrubbed of its Newark origins, tested against actual desire the moment it has to choose between comfort and risk.

The second refrigerator, kept running in the Patimkins' basement purely to hold fruit of every description, peaches, grapes, cherries, plums, that nobody urgently needs, is the novella's single clearest image of wealth without material limit, and Roth returns to it more than once through Neil's eyes. Set against his aunt's careful Newark economizing, every purchase weighed and justified, the fruit that simply accumulates and sometimes spoils in the Patimkins' basement reads as abundance so complete it no longer has to notice itself, which is exactly the quality in Brenda's world Neil can't decide whether to envy or despise.

A subplot follows a young Black boy who keeps visiting the library where Neil works, not to check anything out but simply to look, over and over, at a book of Gauguin reproductions of Tahiti. Neil quietly hides the book from the shelving system so it stays available whenever the boy returns, a small act of protection that has no real effect on Neil's own situation with Brenda but clearly mirrors it: both Neil and the boy are outsiders drawn toward a beauty and abundance they're allowed to look at but not fully possess, one guarding a library book, the other auditioning for permanent entry into Short Hills.