In 16 lines, we get the picture: young people, summer lust. In the lines that follow, the picture becomes more complex. Neil lives in Newark, with his Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max, in a crazy household where no one eats the same meal or at the same time. Brenda Patimkin lives in Short Hills --- a suburb so alien to Gladys that she uses its phone book to prop up a table.
--- he wastes nothing. That diaphragm, like a revolver in Chekhov, will return in a later act, for Brenda will leave it home when she goes back to school and her mother will find it and all hell will break loose.
-Yes, in 140 pages, the question has moved far beyond summer love to the real thing --- terrible pun, and forgive me, but the rubber meets the road. The story gets resolved as we know it must. And more, it points to a future that Roth could barely imagine and that we know all about: the evolution of Neil into other first-person narrators who explore religion and status and striving in a remarkable body of work.-