Roth Looking Back

While reading Goodbye, Columbus I found Roth's voice to be strong and assertive. This seems like an odd voice for a narrator but to me he seemed to know the story he was telling very well. He knew it inside and outside. It was set near his hometown and he was the expert on Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin. This first impression made listening/reading these outside texts very interesting considering how he now feels about this novella.

I really enjoyed the interview with Philip Roth because his character shone through as genuine and honest. He wasn't conceited or too proud of all of his accomplishments, instead he was real and looked back on one of his greatest pieces of writing, Goodbye, Columbus, with silliness. He sees this novella as something written when he was very young and had not really found himself yet. He was still searching for a voice and this story is what came of this journey. He mentions that a line the interviewer  reads was "a bad line" he wrote when he was young. This blew my mind. I hadn't seen any line in the novella that I considered "bad" but when the author of the story calls his own work bad it makes it seem a little less valuable, but at the same time it added character to Roth because of the fact that he can admit this without embarrassment.

It is interesting to hear writers talk about how they have grown and changed since their first works. Also, Roth's confusion on his earlier writings was very intriguing to me. He barely remembered the plot line of Goodbye, Columbus and didn't have too much to say about analyzing it. It seems as if everyone who reads his work analyzes it much further than he ever had, which made me think quite a bit!