You saved your panic for the last act, didn’t you? Roth, I’m talking to you. You had Neil, your stand-in, your man—your young Jewish protagonist—clutching for answers, calling on Brenda, the girlfriend from the other side of the tracks, to come clean and admit to all that would fit his projections: he’s unwanted, an outsider who never really had a chance. It’s unfair what just happened, by the way—that thought that just disappeared due to an errant stroke of a finger. What happened? Words just left, retrievable only by the technically adept. Anyway, it’s like what happened to Neil. His confidence: it just left him in the end. His sense of assurance, of being loved and having a future of his choosing, because that’s what was owed to him, had just vanished.
Brenda wouldn’t cop to it, of course, the ulterior motive he assigned to her. She was in denial, like she had been from the outset, playing it cool, pretending to not remember Neil when he first called, full of chutzpah—there, that’s the word that got away. She sorta came clean in the first few passages, saying she liked him, wanted to sleep with him, steal away from under the noses of affluent parents, find herself in Short Hills, New Jersey, not Connecticut, where school and high society beckoned. In the middle act, they slip and slide, playing at love, making love, discreetly and with reticent suggestion, fifties style. Neil was pre-sexual revolution, all from the boys’ side of things: do it for me, he said, regarding the diaphragm that became the point of contention, the fly in the ointment for a silent class war. It would increase his pleasure, was his argument to her. Would it? They’d know it already, the kids today. Nothing new anymore about carnal knowledge, the defeat of sexual guilt. But this was a post-war, fifties neurosis being navigated, with sex as the battleground. Naivete aside, you’re made to wonder as a sympathetic reader where the story was headed had it not been for the sexual mishap. What’s the future of a young aspirant couple heading into the sixties, scratching at their pants, but with much to look forward to, it seemed.
It all blows up like a sudden cold war crisis. Neil’s panic seems to have him looking backward to a fear that has sat dormant thus far, squeezed into the subtext of an otherwise bland coming of age tale. What happened? Did something disappear, like words from a screen in our digitally cloudy age? No, a discovery of a physical object was the problem: discovery of the diaphragm by a priggish parent whose attachment to decorum and probity is at once ignited, only that’s not the true crisis from Neil’s point of view. What’s on his mind is what’s on Roth’s mind having been in psychoanalysis and then decided to make the Freudian arts a motif in his stories. So, with that in mind, Neil has it out with Brenda about the diaphragm, about why she let it be found by her snooping, we-thought-we-raised-you-better mother. Why didn’t she take it to school, avoid the problem of it being found, Neil asks. A mother going through a daughter’s belongings: that’s to be expected, he chastises, perhaps thinking of Jewish mothers in general and his own burning sexual guilt. Brenda has an explanation, an excuse for her laxity, only Neil is having none of it. His sense of persecution is piqued, and is foregrounded as they fight, which leads to a deadened climax—their break-up. Now the chutzpah with which he once approached Brenda and later called upon her, feeling brazen and hopeful, is gone, displaced by a paranoia that was previously absented, but ever floating in the literary unconscious. Don’t you know? He says as she bristles at his insinuation that she’d deliberated this discovery. No, she insists. Now she’s estranged from her parents, having disgraced them with her sexual impropriety. Why would she do that on purpose?
But what Neil experiences, what he feels and what he calls upon the reader to acknowledge if she won’t, is his rejection, as if this were all pre-ordained. Yes, she liked you. She wanted you. She might even have fought someone over you in the unseen, unwritten scenes of a middle act. But in the end, she can’t have you and you can’t have her, not even in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, plus being equal. And worst of all, you can’t even get it straight, as in the truth, if there are blind spots. That this was her plan all along—a dalliance, but not a life due to her myopic self, which is foreshadowed in their first meeting—is his and our putative takeaway. She didn’t remember him, she first claimed, being demure and foreshadowing their unhappy end. She asked him to hold her glasses at the pool. She didn’t see him. Goodbye Brenda, and middle America. Goodbye Columbus is the name of the story.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 