Indignation (Vintage International)
by Philip Roth
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Book Summary Information
Author: Philip RothEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-10-06
ISBN: 0307388913
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Indignation (Vintage International)
Book Review: Indignation
Summary: 5 Stars
Although many of Philip Roth's recent novels feature elderly, aging protagonists, "Indignation" (2008) is a tragic coming of age story, a character study, and a tale of the difficulty of adjusting to change. The novel takes place in the early 1950's with the Korean War as the foreboding background. The hero and narrator of the story, Marcus Messner, is the only child of a kosher butcher and his wife from Newark, New Jersey. At the outset of the story, Marcus has just graduated from high school, where he has been a model student, earning straight A's. Marcus is studious and, self-controlled. He also plays second base on the school baseball team. Marcus is devoted to his family and diligently helps his father in the butcher shop where he works long hours, learns the trade, performs disagreable tasks, and develops a measure of tact in dealing with difficult customers.
None of the Messners had attended college and few had graduated from high school. Thus Marcus' parents are proud when their son enrolls in a local community college where he learns the joy of study and learning, excels academically, and plays to his strengths in participating on the college baseball team. Unfortunately, Marcus' father develops a fear that his son will waste his college opportunity and ruin his life by carousing with women or lounging in pool halls. His father's paranoia over many subjects increases as the novel progresses. When Marcus' father becomes overbearing in his suspicions of his son, Marcus decides to leave Newark and enroll in a small college, Winesburg, in northwest Ohio. His parents sacrifice to send Marcus to Winesburg College, and Marcus must take a job at a local pub on weekends to help meet his expenses.
At Winesburg, circumstances change from his close-knit home community in Newark. Marcus is on his own in a predominantly Protestant, conservative, and middle-class environment. Unlike other Roth characters, who frequently respond to their restrained childhood environment by seeking out frenetic sexual activity (the fear of Marcus' father), Marcus tries to be scholarly and introverted. He wants to study hard and says he doesn't mind being alone. Marcus aims to become the class valedictorian and attain success as a lawyer. But, alas, and unsurprisingly, things do not work out for Marcus. He does not understand the Winesburg Collge environment well, and his isolation helps bring him down. Marcus hits out at others, shows no tact or ability to relax, and displays a stunning naievety especially where young women and sex are concerned. The hero gets himself into irremediable trouble resulting from a series of seemingly small, manageable incidents and from a failure to adjust. Roth in his own voice observes at the conclusion of the novel about "the terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most dispproportionate result."
For all the difficulties of the story and the conflicts between life in Newark and in Winesburg, Roth shows much sympathy and nostalgia for both places. In general the many disparate characters are well-meaning. Roth admires the hard working, solid, and mostly stoic character of the Newark Jewish community and of Marcus' parents. Yet Roth and tellingly in the novel, Marcus' mother recognize that with changing times and education, Marcus cannot remain in this world and carry it forward. In its turn, Winesburg College is portrayed as staid, conservative, and stuffy in its religious and sexual restrictiveness, even for the early 1950s. Yet Roth portrays the school and its administration as fundamentally decent and wanting to do the right thing to help Marcus adjust. One of the characters in the story is Dean Caudwell, the college dean for the men students at Winesburg. Even though the Dean levels some unfounded sexual accusations against Marcus, he is on the whole more than willing to meet Marcus halfway and to help him with the difficulties he understands Marcus faces at Winesburg. The young man's own temper, intellectual dogmatism, and lack of tact and social skills will not permit accomodation. Similarly, Roth both satirizes and respects the politically ambitious, moderate republican college president, Albin Lenzt who, in his pompous manner says some perceptive things to his students after a "panty raid" gets well out of hand. In a historical note at the end of the novel, Roth seems to regret the change in the school mores -- the elimination of a small chapel attendance requirement and the loosening of dormitory visitation rules -- that resulted from a student protest in the early 1970's.
Roth moves his novel forward through many effective scenes of dialogue. Among the most effective is a scene between Marcus and his mother. She strongly counsels her son against further involvement with an unstable young woman, Olivia. The mother is more than prepared to have Marcus lead his own life, but she warns him wisely against what she sees as a dangerous involvement. The relationship between Marcus and his mother throughout the book contrasts markedly with the overbearing mother-son relationship in Roth's most famous novel, "Portnoy's Complaint." Other important and telling dialogues in the book occur between Marcus and Dean Caudwell, Marcus and his girlfriend, and Marcus and Sonny, the sociable and well-adjusted president of the campus' only Jewish fraternity who tries to befriend Marcus.
Although it comes to a tragic end, "Indignation" displays a fondness for American life at the middle of the 20th Century. There is a suggestion that that the United States may recover some of its bearings by learning from, but not by emulating, its earlier virtues. This is a thoughtful short novel by an American master in his old age.
Robin Friedman
Summary of Indignation (Vintage International)
NATIONAL BESTSELLERIn 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworking neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad?mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy. Far from Newark, Marcus has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.
Indignation, Philip Roth's twenty-ninth book, is a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in Roth?s recent books and a powerful exploration of a remarkable moment in American history.
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008: Enter once again into the echo chamber of Philip Roth's memory and imagination. In the second year of the Korean War, a butcher's son--a straight-A student wound tight with aspiration--flees Newark and his father's increasingly unhinged fears for his safety. Heading midwest, he finds a strange collegiate land of fraternities, football heroes, V-neck pullover sweaters and white buckskin shoes, panty raids, and mandatory chapel services, and, most startlingly, a young woman with desires of her own. Like another fiction grandmaster of his generation, Alice Munro, Roth seems able to spin infinite surprising tales from a few familiar building blocks, and in Indignation, his 25th novel, he has constructed a taut, haunting (and, as always, funny) story that ranks among his best. Reading at times like a buttoned-down Portnoy's Complaint (if it's possible to imagine such a thing), Indignation records a series of small explosions against '50s propriety and the dire consequences they lead to, capturing the misery of desire amid repression, along with the greater terror of being trapped in endless, relentless memory. --Tom Nissley
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