Book description
Letting Go is Philip Roth's first full-length novel, published
when he was twenty-nine. Set in 1950s, Chicago, New York, and Iowa
City, Letting Go presents as brilliant a fictional portrait as
we have of a mid-century America defined by social and ethical
constraints and by moral compulsions conspicuously different from
those of today.
Newly discharged from the Korean War army, reeling from his mother's
recent death, freed from old attachments and hungrily seeking others,
Gabe Wallach is drawn to Paul Herz, a fellow graduate student in
literature, and to Libby, Paul's moody, intense wife. Gabe's desire to
be connected to the ordered 'world of feeling' that he finds in books
is first tested vicariously by the anarchy of the Herzes' struggles
with responsible adulthood and then by his own eager love affairs.
Driven by the desire to live seriously and act generously, Gabe meets
an impassable test in the person of Martha Reganhart, a spirited,
outspoken, divorced mother of two, a formidable woman whom according
to critic James Atlas, is masterly portrayed with 'depth and
resonance'.
The complex liaison between Gabe and Martha and Gabe's moral
enthusiasm for the trials of others are at the heart of this ambitious
first novel.
In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in
succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for
Patrimony
(1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for
Operation Shylock
(1993), the National Book Award for
Sabbath's Theater
(1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for
American Pastoral
(1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union
for I
Married a Communist
(1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the
White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award
for
The Counterlife
(1986) and the National Book Award for his first book,
Goodbye, Columbus
(1959). In 2000 he published
The Human Stain,
concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar
America. For
The Human Stain
Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H.
Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the
highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold
Medal in fiction, given every six years 'for the entire work of the
recipient'.
