Recommendations
Books Like Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
Philip Roth early fiction, American Jewish suburbia, and debut novellas that announced a career
If Goodbye, Columbus amused and moved you with its portrait of postwar Jewish American social mobility — the Patimkins' swimming pool and refrigerator full of fruit against Neil Klugman's Newark library — these eight works share its satirical sharpness about the contradictions of success and its sense that assimilation has costs that comedy is the right mode for exploring.
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Buy on AmazonPortnoy's Complaint
by Philip Roth
The logical continuation of Goodbye, Columbus — Portnoy is what Neil Klugman becomes a decade later; the same anxieties about Jewish identity, Gentile desire, and the family intensified into the most scandalous American comic novel of the 1960s.
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Buy on AmazonThe Ghost Writer
by Philip Roth
The first Zuckerman novel and the beginning of Roth's major period — the young Nathan Zuckerman's visit to E.I. Lonoff and his fantasy that Lonoff's companion is Anne Frank; the most literary of Roth's novels.
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Buy on AmazonAmerican Pastoral
by Philip Roth
Roth's Pulitzer masterpiece — the Swede Levov's perfect American Jewish life destroyed by his daughter's radicalism; the most ambitious Roth and the one that achieved the widest recognition.
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Buy on AmazonHerzog
by Saul Bellow
Bellow's masterpiece from five years later — Moses Herzog's breakdown after his second marriage collapses; the same world (American Jewish intellectual life) rendered in Bellow's more philosophical, less satirical mode.
- 5Buy on Amazon
Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
The novel of young American alienation that preceded Goodbye, Columbus by eight years — Holden Caulfield's refusal of the world his parents have built for him is the non-Jewish version of Neil Klugman's discomfort with the world the Patimkins have built.
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Buy on AmazonWhat Makes Sammy Run?
by Budd Schulberg
Schulberg's 1941 novel of a Jewish boy from the Lower East Side who claws his way to Hollywood success — the most cynical version of the Jewish social mobility story that Goodbye, Columbus takes a more ambivalent view of.
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Buy on AmazonCall It Sleep
by Henry Roth
The Lower East Side predecessor — David Schearl's immigrant childhood is the world the Patimkins have escaped and that Neil Klugman's family is still escaping; reading both gives the generational arc of Jewish American assimilation.
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Buy on AmazonThe Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's great Midwestern family novel — the Lambert family's dysfunction and the parents' last Christmas together; the non-Jewish version of the family comedy Roth built his career on, equally sharp about the costs of middle-class American success.
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