Word: roth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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MARGARET GEGHEN ROTH Chicago...
Letting Go, by Philip Roth. The talented satirist of Goodbye, Columbus has produced a long novel on the troubles of the university young; page by page, it is a delight of flawless dialogue and sour wit, but taken in sum it is another solemn novel about a young man lured by the sirens of Meaninglessness...
...York dentist, Gabe is an intelligent, joyless, bored young man who is a scholar more by default than vocation. When the reader first sees him, he is a graduate student at the University of Iowa (his most irksome course is, naturally, Anglo-Saxon-a sly touch of the kind Roth is best at). There Gabe meets Paul and Libby Herz, a morose young couple living in a water-stained barracks apartment furnished chiefly with smudged paper-ungraded exams, piled paperbacks, Utrillo reproduction tacked to the wall. Their poverty is merely the standard lower academic kind, but the Herzes are more...
...grey plague-a paralysis of the apparatus that detects meaning in life. Greyness of spirit is what one writes about these days; fair enough. But the author's view of things must not be greyed. And in Letting Go, after a few fine satirical flashes at the beginning, Roth becomes bogged in solemnity whenever he tries to assess his dreary hero...
Letting Go must finally be counted a failure, although it is a failure of a quality few writers could achieve. Novelist Roth joins a select and puzzling company of young American writers-among them John Knowles (A Separate Peace}, whose second novel was disappointing, and John Updike, whose last few books have been second ones. Roth's similar floundering raises the question: Will the spreading greyness continue to muffle all the best new voices...