Source: "The Image of Newark and the Indignities of Love: Notes on Philip Roth," in Midstream, Vol. V, No. 3, Summer, 1959, pp. 96-9.

In the following assessment of Goodbye, Columbus, Fiedler maintains that the title novella's "slovenliness" makes it superior to the book's remaining short fiction.

There is more room in his single novella than in any of his shorter stories for non-theoretical life, for the painful wonder of what is given rather than the satisfactory aptness of what is (however skillfully) contrived to substantiate a point. Random and inexhaustible, such life is, after all, more the fictionist's business than any theme, even the rewardingly ironic and surely immortal one of how hard it is to be a Jew—quite differently elaborated in "Defender of the Faith," and "Eli the Fanatic." For the first, Philip Roth has already received the young Jewish writer's initial accolade: the accusation of anti-Semitism...