Letting Go

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 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 ....

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 gr

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.

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.