When She Was Good by Philip Roth

From “a giant of American literature” (The Atlantic), a funny and chilling novel, set in a small town in the 1940s Midwest, and its 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, Philip 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.

“High, careful tragedy, nasty as life, and Roth emerges…as a Dreiser who can write!” —Stanley Elkin