GOODBYE COLUMBUS by Philip Roth (fic)

A valued friend gave me a beautifully bound old copy of "Goodbye Columbus" for Christmas this year.  What a treat to read it again after these many years.  Philip Roth announced his retirement from writing this year, and "Goodbye Columbus" being the first book he wrote, made the reading more meaningful.  "Goodbye Columbus" was published in 1959 when he was a twenty something teacher of writing.  It won the National Book Award that year.
If you are a follower of "Mad Men," you may wish to go back to reread this novella, which portrays the same era, all-be-it from the viewpoint of two Jewish kids from opposite sides of Newark. 
Years ago when I first read the story, I was younger than the collage-age characters in the story. Rereading it now is fascinating. Here we are decades later, and we know what is in store for the world and these two students who had a brief summer liaison in a more innocent time.  Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin are trying to find themselves, before computers, birth control pills, smart phones and all the other trapping that young adults have today.  It was a time when people took buses and wrote letters and smoked cigarettes and ate lots of meat and potatoes without guilt. They planned weddings in just two months; and it was easy to find a venue and go out and buy  gowns for brides and attendants in a single day.  It was a time when uneducated workers could own businesses like Patimkin's kitchen and bathroom factory, which enabled his daughter to grow up a princess and attend Radcliffe, where the Harvard girls still lived and studied separately from the boys. 
Neil who came from the poorer side of Newark and attended Rutgers University was very conscious of the differences that their upbringings accorded them.  In the end the differences were too great for Neil and Brenda to make a go of it.  The reader feels Neil's pain as he tries to fit into Brenda's nouveau-riche family with their glitzy trappings and material life style, as well as Brenda's confusion in trying to understand a world so different from hers.  Neither came close to "getting" the others needs. 
The era of the 1950s is so very different from ours today, yet the angst of the young searching for love, is just as valid in both worlds.  The story is still good reading.