Philip Roth's When She Was Good (1967)

 "And what's wrong with my family that isn't with yours, Roy?  Look, you, if you don't want to marry me," she said, "because someone has begin to tell you that I'm not good enough for you, well, believe me, you don't have to."

Lucy Nelson in Philip Roth's When She Was Good (Random House, 1967) 

When She Was Good takes place in the Midwest during the 40's and 50's and there's nothing Jewish about it.  How much, if anything, Roth knew about the Midwest is unclear, though he did attend graduate school at the University of Chicago, but I found that his satirization of small-town America in that era (when I was growing up in a small town) is eerily accurate, from the social standing of an assistant postmaster to family quarrels, out-of-wedlock pregnancies and chronic alcoholism.  The main characters are Lucy Nelson (apparently based on Margaret Martinson Williams, Roth's first wife), her mother Myra, her father Whitey, her eventual husband Roy Bassart and his parents and uncle.

The novel has an impressive structure, flashing back to Lucy's death and following her through school and to a local college, until she returns home in the first year, pregnant.  She gradually grows mad as she learns that her long-absent father is now in jail in Florida and starts feeling that everyone is against her, as she flees into a snowstorm,  In other word, it's a melodrama -- via Dreiser out of Henry James -- that would have made a good Douglas Sirk film; unfortunately Roth considered Sirk's films to be "Hollywood dreck," according to Roth's friend Benjamin Taylor.