Letting Go

The first full-length novel from one of the most renowned writers of the twentieth century, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral, tells the story of a mid-century America and offers “further proof of Mr. Roth's astonishing talent…. Letting Go seethes with life” (The New York Times).Published when Roth was twenty-nine and set in Chicago, New York, and Iowa city, Letting Go presents as brilliant a fictional portrait as we have of America in the 1950s 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