When She Was Good (41 page)

On the third night after Lucy’s disappearance two kids from the high school drove out to Passion Paradise to be alone. Near midnight, at which hour the girl had to be home, they tried to start back to town and found that the tires of the car had sunk into the snow. At first the boy pushed from behind while his companion sat at the wheel pumping on the accelerator. Then he took a shovel from the trunk, and in the dark, while the girl held her gloves against her ears and begged him to hurry, he started to dig his way out.

In this way the body was found. It was fully clothed; in fact, the undergarments were frozen to the skin. Also, a sheet of lined paper was frozen to her cheek, and her hand was frozen to the paper. An early hypothesis, that the hand might have been raised to ward off a blow, was rejected when the coroner reported that aside from a small abrasion on the knuckle of the right hand, the body bore no wounds, bruises, or punctures, no marks of violence at all. Nor was there any indication that she had been sexually molested. Of pregnancy nothing was said, either because the medical examiner found no evidence, or because the investigation included only routine laboratory tests. The cause of death was exposure.

As to how long she had been lying there undiscovered, the medical examiner could only guess; the freezing temperatures had preserved the body intact, but judging from the depths of snow above and below the body, it was surmised that the young woman had probably been dead about thirty-six hours when she was found. If that was so, she had managed to survive up in Passion Paradise through a day and a night and on, somehow, into the following morning.

It was some months after the funeral, during one of those cold, fresh, wet springs such as they have in the middle of America, that the letters from the prison began to come directly to the house.

“The uncontested master of comic irony.”
—Time

OPERATION SHYLOCK

In this tour de force of fact and fiction, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because
someone
with that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting a bizarre exodus in reverse, Roth decides to stop him—even if that means impersonating his impersonator.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-75029-0

THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE

As Philip Roth follows Professor David Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage à trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates an intelligent, affecting, and hilarious novel about the dilemma of pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we struggle to make a truce between dignity and desire.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-74900-4

THE BREAST

Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into a 155-pound female breast. What follows is an exploration of the full implications of Kepesh’s metamorphosis—a daring, heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-74901-2

MY LIFE AS A MAN

At the heart of Philip Roth’s novel on sexual obsession is a portrait of the marriage between Peter Tarnopol, a gifted young novelist, and Maureen, the woman who wants to be his muse but functions as his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and sustained by moral blackmail but is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen’s death, Peter is still trying futilely to write his way out of it.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-74827-X

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS
AND FIVE SHORT STORIES

In Philip Roth’s National Book Award-winning first novel, Radcliffe-bound Brenda Patimkin initiates Neil Klugman of Newark into a new and unsettling society of sex, leisure, and loss.

Also included in this volume are five classic short stories.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-74826-1

PORTSOY’S COMPLAINT

Philip Roth’s classic novel with a new afterword by the author for the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition. “Simply one of the two or three funniest works in American fiction.” —
Chicago Sun-Times

Fiction/Literature/0-679-75645-0

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