In the way it reveals a less than organic structure, Philip Roth’s early novel has some of the marks of a formative effort, but it is all in all, as James Atlas proclaims on the cover of my Vintage paperback edition, “A first novel of awesome maturity.”
In youth I’ve shared the following feelings expressed by Roth’s Gabe Wallach (and the mention of Holland as described in children’s books reminds me of the passage I read every December in our family’s red-backed anthology of Christmas writing):
At seven-thirty the next morning, the alarm sang out one stiff brassy note. Beyond my frosted window, it was a lithographer’s dream of winter; such Decembers they have in the Holland of children’s books. The snow covered the ground, and the sun the snow. With a happiness so intense that I saw no reason to question it, I rose from my blankets. Just living, sheer delightful breathing, had, in earlier periods of my life, convinced me that a man, like a dog, is most himself wagging his tail. … Four inches of snow, and life had changed back to what it once had been, what it should be forever. (p. 230)
But Roth is a realist. A few paragraphs later, humbled by a mis-dialed phone number (meant to show that, while he thinks of Martha, he longs for Libby), he provides the coda:
The moral: Don’t be fooled by the weather. Beneath the lovely exteriors, life beats on. (p. 231)