- Paperback: 640 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (Sep 2 1997)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0679764178
- ISBN-13: 978-0679764175
- Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 2.9 x 20.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 467 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #563,799 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"A first novel of awesome maturity." —James Atlas
"A rich book, full of incident, wry and sad and even in its most desolating scene somehow amusing." —Elizabeth Hardwick, Harper's
"[Roth] has the finest eye for the details of American life since Sinclair Lewis." —Stanley Edgar Hyman
"A rich book, full of incident, wry and sad and even in its most desolating scene somehow amusing." —Elizabeth Hardwick, Harper's
"[Roth] has the finest eye for the details of American life since Sinclair Lewis." —Stanley Edgar Hyman
Book Description
Letting Go is Roth's first full-length novel, published just after Goodbye, Columbus, 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 who, according to critic James Atlas, is masterfully portrayed with "depth and resonance."
The complex liason between Gabe and Martha and Gabe's moral enthusiasm for the trials of others are at the heart of this tragically comic work.
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 who, according to critic James Atlas, is masterfully portrayed with "depth and resonance."
The complex liason between Gabe and Martha and Gabe's moral enthusiasm for the trials of others are at the heart of this tragically comic work.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
My favorite all-time novel,
By
This review is from: Letting Go (Paperback)
Your favorite book isn't necessarily the greatest book you've ever read: it's just the one that speaks most directly and resonately for you. This is my all-time favotite, and I've read all of Roth. I love the characters, the structure, even the typeface and lay-out design. I first read this book in its old orange mass-market paperback edition way back in the late 80s, in celebration of my leaving graduate school in order to go write my first novel--a novel, I'll go ahead and admit, influenced sharply by "Goodbye, Columbus," which I had also recently read and adored--and for the next couple of years, as I toiled away at that novel, I kept picking up my beat-up copy of "Letting Go" and reading it at random, the way people used to read the Bible: I'd stroke the binding, smell the paper, re-read the notes I scribbled in the inside of the jacket. Later, when I was too poor to do so, I shelled out $65 for a mint-condition first edition of the Random House hardcover edition, complete with a flawless book jacket. After my kids and my wife, that's what I'm grabbing when my house catches on fire. I revere Roth as much as I want to argue with him--he's not the greatest confrontational writer of our time for nothing--and yet this one I remove from that great corpus and insert directly into the fabric of my own life.
5.0 out of 5 stars
I beg to differ.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Letting Go (Paperback)
Don't listen to the negative reviews. I read this book 3 times, the first at age 16. I am now 53. It is my favorite of Roth's work. The fact that he wrote it at age 29 makes it even more remarkable. Make up your own mind.
2.0 out of 5 stars
This is the only book by him lacking humanity.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Letting Go (Paperback)
I have read "Letting Go" after reading "Goodbye, Columbus" and "Zuckerman Bound" and I felt bitterly let down by this book. It felt cold, devoid of any real humanity, as opposed to others that I've read. I was expecting fire and life and contradictions and I found lifeless characters and plot lines. It was everything but engaging. I believe Roth was "trying" something new here, a new literary approach, and it failed because it made him move away from his own fictive heart and soul-the deeply personal realm, the contradicting impulses in life, the soaring intelligence faced with the everyday compromises, the devastating sense of humour.
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