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When She Was Good
 
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When She Was Good (Paperback)

by Philip Roth (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
RRP: £8.99
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Frequently Bought Together

When She Was Good + Letting Go + Our Gang: Starring Trick and His Friends
Total RRP: £26.97
Price For All Three: £24.27

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Product details

  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage (4 Oct 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0099484994
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099484998
  • Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 12.8 x 2.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 410,190 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #49 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > R > Roth, Philip

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Product Description

Product Description

In this mesmerizing, funny, chilling novel the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, the subject the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young woman. When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.

About the Author

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'.

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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't put it down, 12 Mar 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: When She Was Good (Paperback)
Just finished reading it... While I have doubts about the (invisible) transformation Lucy experiences at the very end of the book, this is still one of the better written tragedies of the last few decades. Lucy Nelson/Bassart is horribly, fascinatingly real, convincing on almost every page, and Roth's usual unflinching approach to the thoughts of his characters was first demonstrated here, in his third book.

There isn't much of the stylistic flare here that we see in Roth's later books, but it's well-written and compulsive reading, as Lucy is such a compelling character, in spite of the reader learning early on what ultimately became of her. As the last reviewer noted, she is an unusually vibrant, real character, and if I detect a note of mysoginism from Roth in her, it's not too difficult to forgive.

This really is an unusual book; its flaws of predictability and melodrama are overshadowed by its strengths.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars It is only once in a great while,, 12 Jun 1997
By A Customer
This review is from: When She Was Good (Paperback)
even in the work of such a crafty writer as Philip Roth, that the "roundness" of a character (which we are taught to admire and comment on in our reviews) takes on an even higher dimension of reality in order to make its (her, in this case) presence felt. To put it another way: if Tricky of Roth's Our Gang is essentially flat--that is, 2-dimensional--then his Alexander Portnoy is very round (he undergoes change), and consequently more real.

In When She Was Good, we are introduced to that rare 4-dimensional character, and her name is Lucy Nelson. Besides going through changes, she absorbs momentum; a sort of manic kineticism acts on her while she acts on her immediate circle of friends and family. Because of this treatment, and some intriguing structural techniques that ought to remind the reader of Faulkner, the "same" Lucy who evokes deep sympathy eventually demands of us that we dismiss or even ridicule her, until this amazing last page...

To deal with a 4-dimensional character (Hamlet is another example of one) requires a touch of literary mysticism. We must treat the novel as a reality, a chunk of life, instead of a mere representation. Like the main characters of great films (e.g. Citizen Kane), Lucy Nelson bothers our categorization-impulse by putting her internal contradictions in high relief. And she does this without the mimetic advantages that a film possesses.

On the whole, When She Was Good is not Roth's best novel; we do not expect it to be, when we see the photo of Roth (apparently in his mid twenties) on the flap. But that youngster, who went on to stand at the peak of quality and the edge of style in American letters, delivered one of the most compelling ethical statements of our day: systems of moral duties must be constantly fine-tuned when we deal with living, breathing persons instead of hypotheses.

Roth has given us such a person in Lucy Nelson.

Matthew Wayne (scrumle@acad.udallas.edu)

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