58 pages • 1 hour read
Philip RothGoodbye Columbus
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1959A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Epstein”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Lou Epstein sits in bed one night and listens as he believes his daughter, Sheila, and her hippie boyfriend come in and have sex in the living room. To distract himself, he lets his mind wander. He thinks of how he and his wife, Goldie, are aging and how her body is so different from when they met. He thinks of his company, Epstein Paper Bag, and his impending retirement. He laments that he has no heir, his son having died at the age of 12 from polio, and that his estrangement from his brother, Sol, precludes even his nephew Michael taking over. Michael is staying with them, having recently been stationed at the nearby Fort Monmouth. He is out this night on a date with a girl from across the street. Not wanting to listen to the sounds of sex anymore, Lou goes downstairs to confront his daughter and her boyfriend, but he finds instead that it is Michael and the neighborhood girl having sex in the living room. He watches briefly before sneaking back upstairs. They soon leave, but Sheila and her boyfriend come in again after, and the noise starts all over again.
Chapter 2 Summary
Lou wonders when the problems in his life began. He thinks about how a week after Michael’s date, he picked up the girl’s mother, Ida Kaufman, at the bus stop. Her husband recently died from cancer, and Lou was usually too absorbed in business matters to notice and stop for her, but after seeing her daughter naked, he could not help but see a resemblance and wonder what Ida looked like under her clothes. He gave her a ride, and she told him that Michael looks like him. He found this funny and started joking with her. He was not accustomed to such joking, certainly not with his wife or daughter, and in his mirth, he was stopped and given a ticket for running a red light. He got two more tickets that day for speeding, one on the trip to Ida’s summer cottage in Barnegat and one on the way back. He dropped her off at the end of the day and arrived home late, thinking of an excuse about the business to assuage his wife’s worries.
Chapter 3 Summary
Weeks later, Lou is in the bathroom wondering if he has a sand rash from post-coital beach lounging, hoping that explains the itch in his groin. His wife startles him after her hot tub soak, and he drops his pants and covers himself. She finds his reaction strange, and after he removes his hands and she sees the rash, she is more than suspicious. She realizes what the rash means and starts tearing the sheets off their bed, screaming at him and wanting to burn the sheets.
Both Lou and Goldie are naked, and as Lou tries to calm his wife and wrest the sheets from her, Sheila and Michael appear in the doorway, wanting to know what is wrong. They are shocked by their older relatives’ nakedness, but they do not leave despite Lou’s orders. Sheila’s boyfriend appears, sees the rash, and asks if Lou has syphilis. Goldie declares that she wants a divorce and faints.
Lou is banished to sleep in his son’s old room with Michael. He speaks with Michael about the struggles of immigrating as a child to the US and about his dissatisfaction with his aging wife. He even tells Michael about how he once took a nude photo of Goldie when they were younger to remember her, although she eventually tore it up. Michael laughs at first but soon condemns Lou for cheating on his wife. Lou dismisses him, saying he cannot know what it is like to have a marriage crumble. He tells Michael that he saw him with the neighborhood girl in the living room and begins to cry. Michael is shocked and silent, never having seen an adult cry.
Chapter 4 Summary
The next morning is a Sunday, a day of errands for Lou. He often runs out for lox and newspapers as usual, but this particular Sunday, he comes downstairs to find that everything he usually gets is already there. Lou thanks Sheila, but she tells him that her boyfriend bought the lox. She tells him his name is Marvin, but when Lou calls him Martin and blames his poor hearing for the mistake, Goldie mentions that syphilis softens the brain and that maybe that is the reason for the mistake. Lou blames Sheila for the comment, and a fight breaks out in which Goldie doubles down on wanting a divorce. He asks where Michael is, and they tell him he took his date to the beach. Lou goes to the corner luncheonette and agonizes over his marriage and family. On his way home, he sees Ida in her yard and crosses the street to join her.
At noon, the Epsteins hear sirens and run out as an ambulance pulls into the Kaufmans’ driveway across the street. A crowd gathers, and Sheila and Marvin make their way to the front while Goldie is stuck on the fringe with Mrs. Katz, the neighborhood gossip. Sheila follows the medics as they make their way through the crowd, and Goldie sees that it is Lou on the stretcher. She convinces the doctor in the ambulance that she is his wife, despite Lou being found naked in Ida’s house, and rides with Lou to the hospital. He had a heart attack while having sex, and the doctor tells Goldie that he needs to live a calm, normal life. Goldie assures Lou that they will live a normal life together. When they arrive at the hospital, Goldie asks about the rash on Lou, and the doctor says that he can fix it so that it does not come back again.
“Epstein” Analysis
At the beginning of “Epstein,” Lou Epstein, the protagonist, occupies the center of a stable, apparently successful family. The story is centrally concerned with the power of eros to erode just such stability, and for this reason, it begins with Lou having his sleep disturbed by the sounds of what he believes is his daughter having sex downstairs. Soon, all the cracks in his apparently happy life are exposed. His lack of attention to his family causes rifts, his relationship with his brother, Sol, is nonexistent, and the little time he spends with his daughter is contentious. Lou loves his family, but as he ages, he loses sight of what is important. His marriage is not what it once was, and he finds himself longing for the more youthful body his wife had when they first married: “What once could be pinched, what once was small and tight, now could be poked and pulled. […] He had shut his eyes while she had dressed for sleep and had tried to remember the Goldie of 1927 and the Lou Epstein of 1927” (204). Lou feels lost, searching in the past for a life he knows has disappeared. While many stories in this collection illustrate the Strength of Relationships in Jewish Families, this one instead demonstrates how the impossible promises of American consumer capitalism—eternal youth, permanent happiness, a new and more perfect life always there for the taking—can destabilize the relationships that give life its meaning. Lou suffers in “Epstein” because he neglects his family relationships, favoring his business over his family, dismissing his daughter for her beliefs, and forsaking his wife for his neighbor. As each of these relationships crumbles, Lou falls apart himself, demonstrating how important these relationships are to his health and happiness.
Lou’s contentious family life began prior to the events of “Epstein” but hinges on his business, Epstein Paper Bag. Lou once ran the store with his brother, Sol, but their disagreements and Sol’s departure from the business ended their relationship. Sol’s son, Michael, came to stay with Lou and his family, and Lou cannot help but look at the boy and wonder what his father thinks: “Epstein knew that the boy must think just as his father did: that Lou Epstein was a coarse man whose heart beat faster only when he was thinking of Epstein Paper Bag” (206). In thinking this, Lou reveals what led to the dissolution of his relationship with his brother. It was not poor business decisions or a failing store but the store’s influence over Lou and the ways in which it has impacted his life. Sol believes that Lou’s heart beats first for the store and second for his family, making it difficult to separate the two or prioritize his family over the store. The importance of the Strength of Relationships in Jewish Families is clear throughout Goodbye, Columbus, but in “Epstein,” Lou’s inability to prioritize these relationships over his store leads to catastrophe. With the store coming first, Lou’s attention is often split, and his inability to discuss the store in a healthy way led to his belief that Sol finds him coarse.
Despite his many flaws and misdeeds throughout the story, Lou believes that his career is for his family. He recognizes his mistake of having an affair, although he blames his fractured family relationships (and his wife’s aging body) for pushing him to it, but he believes he always acts with his family in mind. When his affair is discovered and he is banished to Michael’s room, he tries to justify his actions to Michael to no avail. In the midst of his ramblings, he asserts that he only ever worked for the betterment of his family: “All my life I tried. I swear it, I should drop dead on the spot, if all my life I didn’t try to do right, to give my family what I didn’t have” (218). Lou admits to running his store to give his family a good life but fails to recognize how that has impacted them as a family unit. His commitment to his business for the benefit of his family is his tragic flaw. His focus is on money and security, and the energy and time needed to achieve them have kept him from his family. It occupied so much of his mind that even when he is with them, he is absent. Throughout the collection, the Strength of Relationships in Jewish Families depends on personal interactions and loving commitments to each other. They are relationships built on trust and love over a long time. Lou’s emphasis on his business has created a weak foundation with his family, and as a result, when his mistakes put pressure on them, only his near-death experience opens a door for them to be mended.
Related Titles
By Philip Roth
