hello life, goodbye Columbus

 

Ali MacGraw in Goodbye, Columbus

Goodbye, Columbus is on Amazon Prime now.  It is a good movie.  The soundtrack features four songs by The Association.

Cinematography is pretty:  every frame -- every scene, view -- is worth looking at.

---------------------- [excerpt / Philip Roth novella from which the film was adapted] ------------------ Once I'd driven out of Newark, past Irvington and the packed-in tangle of railroad crossings, switchmen shacks, lumberyards, Dairy Queens, and used-car lots, the night grew cooler. 

 

It was, in fact, as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven, for the sun itself became bigger, lower, and rounder, and soon I was driving past long lawns which seemed to be twirling water on themselves, and past houses where no one sat on stoops, where lights were on but no windows open, for those inside, refusing to share the very texture of life with those of us outside, regulated with a dial the amounts of moisture that were allowed access to their skin.  

It was only eight o'clock, and I did not want to be early, so I drove up and down the streets whose names were those of eastern colleges, as though the township, years ago, when things were named, had planned the destinies of the sons of its citizens.  

I thought of my Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max sharing a Mounds bar in the cindery darkness of their alley, on beach chairs, each cool breeze sweet to them as the promise of afterlife, and after a while I rolled onto the gravel roads of the small park where Brenda was playing tennis.  

        Inside my glove compartment it was as though the map of The City Streets of Newark had metamorphosed into crickets, for those mile-long tarry streets did not exist for me any longer, and the night noises sounded loud as the blood whacking at my temples.

        I parked the car under the black-green canopy of three oaks, and walked towards the sound of the tennis balls.  I heard an exasperated voice say, "Deuce again."  It was Brenda....  I crackled slowly up the gravel and heard her once more.  "My ad," and then just as I rounded the path, catching a cuff full of burrs, I heard, "Game!"  Her racket went spinning up in the air and she caught it neatly as I came into sight. ------------------------- [end, excerpt]

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