Philip Roth and the long shadow of Saul Bellow

The second section of Philip Roth's 1962 novel, "Letting Go," concerns Paul and Libby, young couple, ostracized by both families because of the interfaith marriage, struggling to get by in poverty in 1950s Detroit - she dropped out of Cornell to marry Paul, he drops out of grad school in Michigan and takes an auto job - and then she gets pregnant, and much of the section concerns their decision about whether to abort the fetus and if so how to go about this. Thankfully, this section of the novel feels very dated, as our medical care for pregnant women has so much advanced since those dark days - still, an important period piece to read today to remind us of the possible consequences of abandoning current laws. This section shows Roth's early indebtedness to Saul Bellow: Paul is a typical early-Bellow hero, a smart young Jewish guy facing a huge life crisis and best upon from all sides by eccentric older Jewish busybodies who act as if they're his allies but are really in it for self-interest or just to destroy him - in this case, it's his two eccentric uncles who give him bad advice about marrying Libby, or not, and in the second part two elderly guys in the rooming house who embroil him in their legal quarrel. The whole section is a ghastly, harrowing account of a young, idealistic couple, struggling through urban poverty - I wonder if Roth set it in Detroit, which feels a little like alien territory for him, to get out of Bellow's long Chicago shadow. At end of section, it gets tied back to the initial narrator of the novel, Gabe Wallach, Paul's grad-school friend and rival.