Customer Reviews

Letting go

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Don't listen to the negative reviews. I read this book 3 times, the first at age 16. I am now 53. It is my favorite of Roth's work. The fact that he wrote it at age 29 makes it even more remarkable. Make up your own mind.

Three-and-a-half stars. As much as I dislike some of what Roth has written, I can't deny that he's one of the greats in American literature. "Letting Go" reads as you might expect Roth's first novel to read--that is, it's ambitious, outrageous, and (most of the time) brutally honest. Themes that Roth would go on to expand upon later (Jewish identity, the problems of sex and love and marriage, the desire to find meaning in great works of literature) are evident here in spades. But it also reads like a *first* novel--meaning, Roth was still finding his footing and not without a few fumbles.

The book is ambitious, no question--too ambitious, I think. It's as though Roth is trying to consolidate the entire human condition into one novel, which though admirable, is impossible to do. He's grappling with mature themes and questions, but the result is one of dilution. He paints his characters and issues in broad strokes; no particular theme or question gets its full due, despite the book's staggering length. Roth clearly learned his lesson with "Letting Go"--his subsequent novels were much more pointed and concise.

Other drawbacks: the male characters, as is typical of most Roth novels, are drawn far more convincingly than the females, who are too often portrayed as screeching, manic-depressive nags; Roth wanders too often from his narrative course (which accounts for the 630 pages)--for example, the shocking event that transpires in Part 5 is a blatant plot device that screams of insecurity on Roth's part and does nothing to shed light on his characters; and the overall dreariness of the characters and their nihilistic views of life often inspires, not empathy, but eye-rolling.

The strongest aspects of "Letting Go" are the strongest aspects of Roth as a writer: some of the sharpest dialogue out there; some beautifully rendered details and scenes; a genuine seriousness that pervades the work; and a fine portrayal of early-mid-life disenchantment. Most impressive is Roth's ability to show a 1950s America that is about to undergo a radical moral and social change. For a number of reasons, this book reminds me of "Rabbit, Run" by John Updike; but despite its flaws, I like "Letting Go" a lot more.

This book should have been 200 pages shorter, but that's beside the point. What Roth has done for American literature in the 40 years since "Letting Go" was published more than makes up for his early fumbles and shortcomings--and, in fact, renders them rather fascinating.

This vast novel of urban Jewish academic life in the mid-1950s (first published in 1961) is a dark, brooding meditation on birth, death, family, and the inescapable angst of life. Our "hero" Gabe Wallach and Paul and Libby Herz, the married couple his life is entwined with, are at first graduate students in literature in Iowa and then young faculty members at the University of Chicago. Gabe reluctantly and bafflingly becomes more and more involved in the depressing and difficult lives of Paul and Libby. In many ways this is an existentialist novel and reflects the basic ideas of existentialism, which was so popular in the 1950s. Gabe, and the others, are constantly faced with choices, some trivial seeming, others momentous, and must confront their freedom and their inability to ground their choices or even understand their choices.

Among the momentous choices are Gabe's and Paul's rejection of traditional Jewish religion and life. This is a novel of secular Jewish life and its compromises and difficulties. Gabe's mother has just died, and he is drifting away from his New York dentist father. Paul is Jewish, from Brooklyn, but Libby is a Catholic who converts to Judaism. They met and loved as students at Cornell. Both Paul and Libby are shunned by their families, which leads to tragic consequences.

Gabe and his friends are just beginning to explore the leading edges of the Sexual Revolution and are struggling with issues that today seem rather obsolete. Nevertheless these first glimmerings of women's liberation and sexual freedom caused all sorts of turmoil for those in the avant guard. Roth captures the angst, fear, depression, and exhilaration of those exploratory days. In line with the theme of sexual liberation and the existential angst this can cause, the novel is a sensitive examination of the emotional dangers of abortion.

The plot of this novel is structured around the motivations and disastrous emotional effects of Paul and Libby's decision to abort Libby's unexpected pregnancy. Thus this novel can be considered to be a warning and alarm about having an abortion without fully realizing how wide and deep can be the consequences. In this way Letting Go is somewhat like John Barth's Sabbatical. Both of these novels, I think, could fairly be called "anti-abortion novels" but not overbearing, not political--they are sympathetically and complexly anti-abortion.

Letting Go by Philip Roth is not for those who want a quick and easy, entertaining read. The book is long, slow and at times agonizing. There are seemingly endless pages of dialogue, dialogue that circles and circles and does not seem to get anywhere. It reminds me of those French art movies of the 1950s and early 60s where the characters just talk and talk and talk. But Roth is such a fine writer, has such a good ear for dialogue, and is able to marshal so many details that this novel, for me, was gripping, absorbing, and troubling. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s (Jewish, urban, academic) and the reality of this novel is almost frightening, uncanny.

Your favorite book isn't necessarily the greatest book you've ever read: it's just the one that speaks most directly and resonately for you. This is my all-time favotite, and I've read all of Roth. I love the characters, the structure, even the typeface and lay-out design. I first read this book in its old orange mass-market paperback edition way back in the late 80s, in celebration of my leaving graduate school in order to go write my first novel--a novel, I'll go ahead and admit, influenced sharply by "Goodbye, Columbus," which I had also recently read and adored--and for the next couple of years, as I toiled away at that novel, I kept picking up my beat-up copy of "Letting Go" and reading it at random, the way people used to read the Bible: I'd stroke the binding, smell the paper, re-read the notes I scribbled in the inside of the jacket. Later, when I was too poor to do so, I shelled out $65 for a mint-condition first edition of the Random House hardcover edition, complete with a flawless book jacket. After my kids and my wife, that's what I'm grabbing when my house catches on fire. I revere Roth as much as I want to argue with him--he's not the greatest confrontational writer of our time for nothing--and yet this one I remove from that great corpus and insert directly into the fabric of my own life.

I went back and read Goodbye Columbus, then Letting Go on purpose and just loved Letting Go even more the second time around. Roth was showing flashes of his magic with his short stories, but his first novel was masterful. Oh, those poor shiksas ...

The second read was better than the first ....

_Letting Go_ is not one of my favorite Philip Roth novels. Although quite realistic in its complex approach to male-female relationships, this may account for why I did not quite like it. While I admire Roth's honest approach to inter-faith marriages (a novel set in the 1950s of a Jewish man marrying a Catholic woman), I found the work way too negative and depressing.

It became readily apparent that the Paul and Libby Herz union was seemingly doomed to fail. Then again, at least today, about half of the marriages in this country fail, no matter what the religious backgrounds of the couples. Plus Paul, in the early part of his marriage to Libby, encourages her to abort their intended child. This, too, puts a strain on their relationship. Gabe Wallach a/k/a Wallace, a colleague and friend of Paul Herz, falls in love with a divorced woman, Martha Reganhart. She has her own issues related to her ex-spouse and their two children.

A large part of the book concerns Paul and Libby's problems related to a possible adoption (much of the issues related to their mixed marriage) and a would be young, rather pathetic, surrogate mother, Theresa, and her money grubbing, thuggish husband, Harry. Gabe becomes deeply involved in paying Harry off to sign a legal admission of his being the father of the Theresa's new-born child. The results are rather funny and scarey at the same time.

The author's own experiences with marriage probably account for much of the book's negativity. Plus the book seems to take forever to complete reading. One can tell that _Letting Go_ is Philip Roth's first novel. His later works are more concise and more to the point.

LETTING GO receives Luke Daniels' fine professional voice adds fire and life to this account, Roth's first full-length novel published just after Goodbye, Columbus when he was twenty-nine. It provides a story of mid-America's changing morals and tells of a newly discharged Korean War vet freed from duty and reeling from his mother's recent death. A fine classic for any audio lending library.

I've had the pleasure of reading ten of Roth's books, and plan to eventually read all of them, but I must admit to being quite disappointed with _Letting Go_, his first full-length novel.

_Letting Go_, unlike _Goodbye, Columbus_, and later novels, but like _When She Was Good_, is what can only be described as "self-consciously literary." Roth downplays the talents he showed in his first book to create a sweeping (too sweeping), long (too long, at 600+ pages, as far as I know his longest book), Jamesian (too Jamesian) novel. Gabe Wallach is a veteran from the Korean War, if memory serves, who in this disjointed narrative undergoes and failes a series of trials of conscience as he tries to help people less fortunate than him. In the end of the book, Gabe finally "goes the distance," with disastrous results, alienating all his friends... and for those who don't get the "point" of the novel, there's a letter from Gabe at the end which pretty much sums up the entire novel.

There are only two interesting characters here: Gabe's father, who has basically a bit part, and Martha, Gabe's erstwhile lover, who is really the backbone of the story. Roth has admitted that his novels are not "plot" novels but "character" novels, and that he specializes in putting his characters in impossible situations. In many of his books, the result is brilliance, but in _Letting Go_ most of the characters are flat, even the central character, Gabe, so it's hard to sympathize with them.

I'm led to believe that _Letting Go_ is supposed to be "funny" at points, presumably in the ridiculous climactic scene, but by that time the story had simply gotten on my nerves. The death of Martha's son, and the events leading up to and following it, are particularly bad.

The narrative here is disjointed at times, as mentioned earlier. The purpose of switching from first to third person is lost on me, as is the fact that the seven parts of the book have little continuity. Such devices can work sometimes, but they don't in _Letting Go_.

This novel isn't all bad. Yes, the characters are flat, but compared to many writers they're positively 3-D, and Roth had already showed an improvement in style compared to his first book. And I can't say I regret reading this book, even while I felt Roth was being "self-consiously literary" and not just doing his own thing, as he would start doing with _Portnoy's Complaint_. Overall, however, avoid this book unless you _must_ read everything Roth has written.

The previous review matches my own experience reading the book quite well. For someone who's read a lot of Roth, the book is interesting as a way of seeing him develop his themes - guilt, Jewish identity, etc. But the characters never quite become distinct enough (with the exception of the children and Gabe's father). Still, the book is continually moving in its depiction of the struggle of young adults coping in the mid-50s, trying so hard, it may seem to us now, to be 'adult.' Captures very well a feeling of hopelessness and a trapped quality to so many lives of quiet desperation. I didn't find anything particularly comic about the book, and felt in fact that the book strained for tragic dimensions at times. Maybe I didn't agree with that last review so much after all. I would hate to keep anyone from reading it -- but I wouldn't want to be responsible for sending someone out to buy it. (Given the themes of moral responsibility that the book grapples with, that seems an appropriate note on which to end.)

I have read "Letting Go" after reading "Goodbye, Columbus" and "Zuckerman Bound" and I felt bitterly let down by this book. It felt cold, devoid of any real humanity, as opposed to others that I've read. I was expecting fire and life and contradictions and I found lifeless characters and plot lines. It was everything but engaging. I believe Roth was "trying" something new here, a new literary approach, and it failed because it made him move away from his own fictive heart and soul-the deeply personal realm, the contradicting impulses in life, the soaring intelligence faced with the everyday compromises, the devastating sense of humour.