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Letting Go
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Letting Go Paperback - 1997

by Roth, Philip

  • Used

Newly discharged from the Korean War, Gabe Wallach struggles to live seriously and act generously. The reader will find acclaimed author Philip Roth's fictional study of 1950's American morals and social mores far different from those of today. TIME calls Roth "The uncontested master of comic irony".

Description

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Used - Good. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages.
Used - Good
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Details

  • Title Letting Go
  • Author Roth, Philip
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition Reprint
  • Condition Used - Good
  • Pages 640
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, New York, New York, U.S.A.
  • Date 1997-09-02
  • Bookseller's Inventory # 4905147-6
  • ISBN 9780679764175 / 0679764178
  • Weight 1.03 lbs (0.47 kg)
  • Dimensions 7.95 x 5.16 x 1.1 in (20.19 x 13.11 x 2.79 cm)
  • Themes
    • Chronological Period: 1950's
    • Ethnic Orientation: Jewish
    • Religious Orientation: Jewish
  • Library of Congress subjects Psychological fiction, Jewish fiction
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 97006675
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

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From the publisher

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004.” Recently Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. Roth is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize.

From the jacket flap

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.

Categories

Media reviews

"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

Citations

  • Booklist, 11/15/2001, Page 555
  • Publishers Weekly, 08/18/1997, Page 0

About the author

PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians' Prize for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004." Roth received PEN's two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.

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