Smalltown America

Philip Roth's When She Was Good is an intriguing failure.

It's intriguing because any book by Roth is bound to stir up interest. Although only thirty-four, Roth has published two very good books. In his twenties he brought out Goodbye Columbus, a collection of five stories and a novella, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1960; a couple of years later, the novel Letting Go appeared. His other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Sciences.

When She Was Good is also interesting because Roth, in his choice of subject matter, is commenting on current literature and on American society. Almost all of his past works have been "Jewish novels" in many senses. They feature Jewish characters. The conflict between the self-conscious piety of the older generation and the agnosticism and intermarriages of the younger often forms a subsidiary theme. And Roth tends toward the tone associated with everyone from Saul Bellow to his namesake Harry Roth--a wry humor which softens the portraits of even sharply satirized characters' perceptive details and realistic conversations.

Philip Roth's work before When She Was Good is clearly based on characteristics of his own life. For instance, he has spent much of his life teaching--and he often writes of academic life. He tends to be most concerned with people in their twenties and thirties. And certain themes recur in Roth's fiction--such as the way parents use children to try and solve their own problems.

In many respects When She Was Good represents a departure about as shaking as a sonic boom. Philip Roth repeats some of his old themes, but his story is about Lucy, a Midwestern girl living in a small Midwestern town. Horrified by her drunken father, she rejects completely, literally and figuratively sending him to jail. And she adopts rigidly moral ideas about her own life. By being "good" she manages to destroy everything she touches and, eventually, to kill herself while pregnant with the child she conceived to force her husband into a sense of responsibility.

Doubtless many preoccupations encouraged Roth to turn to this type of plot. He probably wanted to expand his own horizons, to escape from the limitations of writing that sub-genus of novel, "Jewish fiction." Perhaps he felt that the kind of book he had been writing has been overworked in the United States as well as in his own career. But When She Was Good also seems motivated by a drive to make a more general point about America than Roth had previously done. Lucy is trying to uphold the morals which symbolize smalltown America and, indeed, "the American way of life." Her attempt to judge people without compassion or understanding, to fulfill an ideal of family life inevitably produces grief and destruction.

When She Was Good fails because, in abandoning his studies of Jewish family life, Roth also puts aside the literary techniques associated with--but of course not confined to--that type of writing. Rather than characterizing people through details such as revealing gestures and speech patterns, he presents unconvincing, over-simplified generalizations about them. He substitutes dull and predictable dialogue for the illuminating conversations in his earlier books. And rather than satirizing his characters subtly and skillfully, he indulges in painfully obvious satire. (This heavy-handed treatment may, of course, reflect the pressing concern about America which motivated the book.) Similarly, rather than painting the comedy which is mingled with the tragic in human lives, he emphasizes tragedy almost to the point of bad melodrama.

But flashes of the perceptive wit which marked Roth's previous books do occur. His next book will be far more successful if Roth can develop important statements about America like those in When She Was Good by means of the brilliant details' of his previous books.