"I had never read Goodbye, Columbus, and as I got back into bed with it I remarked, in its lyric and conversational style, its evocation of an Eastern summer, its consciously hyperbolic presentation of the mythic Brenda Patimkin and her family of healthy, dumb, fruit-eating Jews, and its drawing of large American conclusions from small socio-erotic situations, how influenced Roth had clearly been by his own youthful reading of the Fitzgerald novel. That gave me encouragement: it made me feel as if I were preparing to sail to Cathay along a route that had already proven passable and profitable for others."Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Across the Borderlands. (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008) 139-140.
