[As] an artist Roth has placed his faith in Realism, not Judaism…. [From] the wider perspective available when the ethnic emphasis is set aside for a while, Roth's career is not marked by a vagrant choice of subjects but by a single-minded dedication to a significant goal: finding subjects and techniques which will reveal the effect of the interpenetration of reality and fantasy in the lives of his representative Americans. This concern is what makes an aesthetically coherent whole of his otherwise diverse fictions and supplies the developmental logic which his critics have so often failed to discern. (p. 9)
[In Goodbye, Columbus] Roth is already preoccupied with the central conflicts in American life as they are experienced in the everyday lives of his Jewish characters. These conflicts are economic, psychological, and generational, as well as religious, and they repeatedly point to the underlying incongruity between ethical ideals and material realities in American culture…. [Even in this early work Jewishness is used not to universalize,] but to particularize: to make universal conflicts more specific—"of a time, a place, a group of people, a situation"—and thus more realistic. (p. 19)
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