When She Was Good by Philip Roth [FIRST BOOK CLUB EDITION / 1967]
When She Was Good by Philip Roth
FIRST BOOK CLUB EDITION [1967] RANDOM HOUSE
Hardcover with dust jacket in excellent condition.
Dust jacket is very good; shelf wear and some chipped / creased edges. One sealed near bottom of spine.
Book itself looks and reads like new.
In this funny and chilling novel, the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, and the subject is the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young woman, one of those implacable American moralists whose "goodness" is a terrible disease.
When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning, and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.