Indignation

Review by New York Times Review

In his new novel, "Indignation," Philip Roth withholds a crucial piece of information - and that's an understatement - until about a quarter of the way through. This placement seems to me right on the borderline of fair game for reviewers, and not to tell it would misrepresent the book. (A more alert reader than I was might figure it out simply by looking at the table of contents.) Still, it seems mean to spoil a strategic surprise for folks who like that kind of thing. So in case you want to head for the exit now, I'm going to vamp for a couple of paragraphs of harmless generalities and evasive plot summary before getting specific. Roth has a couple more surprises, too (which you might see coming but probably won't), and I promise not to get anywhere near those. Anyhow, isn't it surprising enough that Roth, now 75, has just published his third novel in three years? Well, at this point, maybe not. Roth has been burning up the track for well over a decade now. Since "Sabbath's Theater" in 1995, Roth has written eight novels, including two general-consensus masterworks - "American Pastoral" (1997) and "Everyman" (2006) - the conclusion of his long Zuckerman saga (last year's "Exit Ghost") and a half-dozen other exceptionally strong books. And in "Indignation," his power and intensity seem undiminished. I generally prefer Roth's short, devastating sex-and-mortality novels - "Everyman," "Exit Ghost," "The Dying Animal" (2001) - to his larger social/ political/historical excursions - "American Pastoral," "The Human Stain" (2000), "The Plot Against America" (2004) - although I admit the big books are more fun to read, since they offer a richer menu of topical distractions from what's ultimately in store for each of us. "Indignation," set during the Korean War in a small, conservative Ohio college - hat-tippingly named Winesburg - has something in common with both Rothian modes. It evokes a nasty period of America's social history (you know, as opposed to all those idyllic ones), but like Roth's two previous novels, it's also ruthlessly economical and relentlessly deathbound. The narrator, a college sophomore named Marcus Messner, who says he used to be "the nicest boy in the world," is the Everyteen of his superficially innocent era. "In my high school years, I had been a prudent, responsible, diligent, hard-working A student who went out with only the nicest girls, a dedicated debater and a utility infielder for the varsity baseball team." The summer after high school, Marcus worked 60-hour weeks in his father's kosher butcher shop in Newark - yet another of Roth's lovingly researched workplaces, like the glove factory in "American Pastoral." And at Winesburg, Marcus studies all week and waits tables all weekend. "I wanted to do everything right," he says. "If I did everything right, I could justify to my father the expense of my being at college in Ohio rather than in Newark. I could justify to my mother her having to work full time in the store again." His goal is to become valedictorian, and since he's only human - as well as a Philip Roth character - "to have intercourse before I died." At 19, Marcus is just beginning to distill a self out of all this slop of generic niceness: to his surprise, if not to ours, he finds a quality for which Roth's title, with its implication of justified outrage at violated dignity, is the mot juste. Back when Marcus was in grade school, during World War II, he and his classmates had to learn what they were told was the national anthem of China, America's Pacific Theater ally: "Arise, ye who refuse to be bondslaves! / ... Indignation fills the hearts of all of our countrymen,/ Arise! Arise! Arise! " Now, during a war in which China has become the enemy, Marcus sings this call to arms in his head when forced to attend chapel, with Christian hymns and sermons about "Christ's example" - objecting "not because I was an observant Jew but because I was an ardent atheist." As Marcus's troubles and his defiance mount neither of them especially high - he's called into the office of a cartoonishly offensive dean and again sings to himself "the most beautiful word, in the English language: 'In-dig-na-tion!'" What has the nicest boy in the world done? Changed dorm rooms, twice, to get away from roommates who were driving him crazy. Neither this nor his subsequent infractions, linked from one to another with a horrible inexorability, would amount to anything today, and not one does a bit of harm. But in a novel set in 1951, this series of dinky moments is more than enough to bring on the denouement. Everything in "The Human Stain," you may remember, turns on Coleman Silk's use of a single word; for Marcus Messner, it takes two to change his life forever. Roth holds back his final surprise - those two words, and all that they lead to, until a few pages before the end; that's the one we won't touch. Marcus, though, has gotten us only from Newark to Winesburg, and into a car for his first date with a delightful basket case named Olivia, when he stops his narrative at a cliffhanging point - during an episode more astonishing to him than it is to us - and imparts something as astonishing to us as it is to him. Which is simply ... ah, but let's cliffhang for a minute ourselves, O.K.? How does Roth get away with this stuff? The cliffhanger, the obscure portent, the withholding of essential information? He doesn't use these antiquated devices ironically. And those occasional descents into boilerplate prose? It's no Barthelme-like feat of postmodernist ventriloquism that leads him to use such a phrase as "the turbulent decade of the 1960s." Roth's secret, I think, is his supreme confidence as a storyteller - and, paradoxically, a supreme humility. His writing is at the service of his story and characters; he's a pragmatist, not a belletrist. If certain conventions of plot and language do the job, why get fancy? He can break out the fine writing when the occasion requires. As it does when Marcus delivers his revelation: which is simply ... that he is dead, and has been "for I don't know how long." For three pages of eloquently discomfiting monologue, Roth makes Marcus sound like a more lucid and connected version of Samuel Beckett's Unnamable: "Even now (if 'now' can be said to mean anything any longer), beyond corporeal existence, alive as I am here (if 'here' or 'I' means anything) as memory alone (if 'memory,' strictly speaking, is the all-embracing medium in which I am being sustained as 'myself'), I continue to puzzle over Olivia's actions. ... Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component? ... There is no letup - for the afterlife is without sleep as well. ... There are no doors. There are no days. ... And the judgment is endless, though not because some deity judges you, but because your actions are naggingly being judged for all time by yourself." Then again, this state may be "merely the anteroom to oblivion." There, feel better? The unnamed protagonist of "Everyman" at least gets a joyous flash of himself as a boy at the ocean before the lights go out; "Indignation" makes even that terminally grim book seem sentimental. "Everyman" and "Exit Ghost" both have a mood of sorrowful resignation; this book goes about its grieving savagely. And of all Roth's recent novels, it ventures farthest into the unknowable. In his unshowy way, with all his quotidian specificity and merciless skepticism, Roth is attempting to storm heaven - an endeavor all the more desperately daring because . he seems dead certain it's not there. How does Roth get away with this stuff? The cliffhanger, the portent, the withholding of information? David Gates's most recent book is "The Wonders of the Invisible World," a collection of stories.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In Roth's provocative new novel (his twenty-ninth book) which, in a quieter, more personal fashion, is as provocative as his astonishing Plot against America (2004) the setting and the main character are plucked from traditional Roth country: a nice Jewish boy living in Newark in the early 1950s, the son of a kosher butcher. The Korean War rages halfway around the word, but Marcus Messner, conscious though he is of the war and his possible forced participation in it, has a more fundamental concern: staying away from his father, to whom he is extremely close but who has recently become neurotically overprotective. Marcus had been attending a local Newark college, but his father's new craziness over safety compelled him to transfer to bucolic Winesburg College in Ohio, in a conservative Midwest that is foreign country to Marcus. He continues to earn good grades, but the rest of Winesburg life has him befuddled. Not so much because he's Jewish but because he's a free thinker, he wonders, Why do I have to attend chapel? Why should he have to put up with inordinately noisy roommates? And how to fathom the strange but perversely alluring psychological dimensions of the unbalanced girl he's interested in? During this time, male college students walk a tightrope: flunk out of school or be expelled for any reason, and the draft will snap you up. Read this fast-paced, compassionate, humorous, historically conscious novel to learn what that means for Marcus.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Roth's 29th book tells the tale of young Marcus Messner, a boy forced to attend a pastoral, conservative college because of his father's apprehensions about life in 1951 New Jersey. Narrator Dick Hill delivers a sturdy performance that manages to bring Messner to life, but never really captures the listeners attention as he normally does. As talented as Hill is, there's something lacking in his characterization. He reads with a droning, slightly whiny voice that sometimes grates. Hill always seems on the verge of losing himself into the tale only to yank himself back from the edge at the last moment. He has a knack for bringing characters to life, but here he sounds tired. A Houghton Mifflin hardcover (Reviews, May 12). (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In 1951, Marcus Messner flees his father's steadily debilitating dementia and the overwhelming constraints of family life in Newark, NJ, to the greener and more pastoral setting of Winesburg College in Ohio. After years of working in his father's butcher shop, where he learned to do everything well no matter how much he hated it, he steps into a Kafkaesque setting in which such a lesson is useless in the face of the demands of the college's authority figures. After encounters with arrogant and lazy roommates who won't allow him to study, confrontations with the college dean, and the heartbreak of a failed sexual affair, Marcus learns that he can best survive various challenges in his life--even the book's most surprising challenge--by acting indignantly in the face of them. A meditation on love, death, and madness, Roth's new novel combines the comic absurdity of his early novels like Portnoy's Complaint with the pathos of his later novels like Everyman and Exit Ghost. All libraries will want to add this to their collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/08.]--Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Evanston, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

In a plot that evokes the author's earlier work, Roth (Exit Ghost, 2007, etc.) focuses on a young man's collegiate coming of age against the deadly backdrop of the Korean War. The book has a taut, elegant symmetry: A nice Jewish boy named Marcus Messner from Newark, N.J., reaches the turbulent stage where he inevitably clashes with his parents, his butcher-shop father in particular. After continuing to live at home for his first year of college, Marcus, the novel's narrator as well as protagonist, feels the need to emancipate himself by enrolling in a college as unlike urban New Jersey as possible, one that he finds in Winesburg, Ohio. Whatever of his Jewishness he is trying to escape, he discovers that his ethnicity provides the stamp of his identity on the pastoral campus, where he is first assigned to room with two of the school's few other Jewish students and soon finds himself courted by the school's lone Jewish fraternity. There's resonance of the culture clash of Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and the innocence of The Ghost Writer (1979) in the voice of this bright young man, who isn't quite experienced enough to know how much he doesn't know. The novel reaches its climax--in a couple of senses--when the virginal Marcus becomes involved with the more experienced Olivia, whose irresistible sexuality seems intertwined with her psychological fragility. Can Marcus be Olivia's boyfriend and still be his parents' son? Can he remain true to himself--whatever self that may be--while adhering to the tradition and dictates of a college that shields him from enlistment in a deadly war? Is Winesburg a refuge or an exile? A twist in narrative perspective reinforces this novel's timelessness. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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About two and a half months after the well-trained divisions of North Korea, armed by the Soviets and Chinese Communists, crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea on June 25, 1950, and the agonies of the Korean War began, I entered Robert Treat, a small college in downtown Newark named for the city's seventeenth-century founder. I was the first member of our family to seek a higher education. None of my cousins had gone beyond high school, and neither my father nor his three brothers had finished elementary school. "I worked for money," my father told me, "since I was ten years old." He was a neighborhood butcher for whom I'd delivered orders on my bicycle all through high school, except during baseball season and on the afternoons when I had to attend interschool matches as a member of the debating team. Almost from the day that I left the store-- where I'd been working sixty-hour weeks for him between the time of my high school graduation in January and the start of college in September--almost from the day that I began classes at Robert Treat, my father became frightened that I would die. Maybe his fear had something to do with the war, which the U.S. armed forces, under United Nations auspices, had immediately entered to bolster the efforts of the ill-trained and underequipped South Korean army; maybe it had something to do with the heavy casualties our troops were sustaining against the Communist firepower and his fear that if the conflict dragged on as long as World War Two had, I would be drafted into the army to fight and die on the Korean battlefield as my cousins Abe and Dave had died during World War Two. Or maybe the fear had to do with his financial worries: the year before, the neighborhood's first supermarket had opened only a few blocks from our family's kosher butcher shop, and sales had begun steadily falling off, in part because of the supermarket's meat and poultry section's undercutting my father's prices and in part because of a general postwar decline in the number of families bothering to maintain kosher households and to buy kosher meat and chickens from a rabbinically certified shop whose owner was a member of the Federation of Kosher Butchers of New Jersey. Or maybe his fear for me began in fear for himself, for at the age of fifty, after enjoying a lifetime of robust good health, this sturdy little man began to develop the persistent racking cough that, troubling as it was to my mother, did not stop him from keeping a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth all day long. Whatever the cause or mix of causes fueling the abrupt change in his previously benign paternal behavior, he manifested his fear by hounding me day and night about my whereabouts. Where were you? Why weren't you home? How do I know where you are when you go out? You are a boy with a magnificent future before you--how do I know you're not going to places where you can get yourself killed?The questions were ludicrous since, in my high school years, I had been a prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student who went out with only the nicest girls, a dedicated debater, and a utility infielder for the varsity baseball team, living happily enough within the adolescent norms of our neighborhood and my school. The questions were also infuriating--it was as though the father to whom I'd been so close during all these years, practically growing up at his side in the store, had no idea any longer of who or what his son was. At the store, the customers would delight him and my mother by telling them what a pleasure it was to watch the little one to whom they used to bring cookies--back when his father used to let him play with some fat and cut it up like "a big butcher," albeit using a knife with a dull blade--to watch him mature under their eyes into a well-mannered, well-spoken youngster who put their beef through the grinder to make chopped meat and who scattered and swept up the sawdust on the floor and who dutifully yanked the remaining feathers from the necks of the dead chickens hanging from hooks on the wall when his father called over to him, "Flick two chickens, Markie, will ya, for Mrs. So-and-So?" During the seven months before college he did more than give me the meat to grind and a few chickens to flick. He taught me how to take a rack of lamb and cut lamb chops out of it, how to slice each rib, and, when I got down to the bottom, how to take the chopper and chop off the rest of it.And he taught me always in the most easygoing way. "Don't hit your hand with the chopper and everything will be okay," he said. He taught me how to be patient with our more demanding customers, particularly those who had to see the meat from every angle before they bought it, those for whom I had to hold up the chicken so they could literally look up the asshole to be sure that it was clean. "You can't believe what some of those women will put you through before they buy their chicken," he told me. And then he would mimic them: "'Turn it over. No, over. Let me see the bottom.' " It was my job not just to pluck the chickens but to eviscerate them. You slit the ass open a little bit and you stick your hand up and you grab the viscera and you pull them out. I hated that part. Nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done. That's what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.Our store fronted on Lyons Avenue in Newark, a block up the street from Beth Israel Hospital, and in the window we had a place where you could put ice, a wide shelf tilted slightly down, back to front. An ice truck would come by to sell us chopped ice, and we'd put the ice in there and then we'd put our meat in so people could see it when they walked by. During the seven months I worked in the store full time before college I would dress the window for him. "Marcus is the artist," my father said when people commented on the display. I'd put everything in. I'd put steaks in, I'd put chickens in, I'd put lamb shanks in--all the products that we had I would make patterns out of and arrange in the window "artistically." I'd take some ferns and dress things up, ferns that I got from the flower shop across from the hospital. And not only did I cut and slice and sell meat and dress the window with meat; during those seven months when I replaced my mother as his sidekick I went with my father to the wholesale market early in the morning and learned to buy it too. He'd be there once a week, five, five-thirty in the morning, because if you went to the market and picked out your own meat and drove it back to your place yourself and put it in the refrigerator yourself, you saved on the premium you had to pay to have it delivered. We'd buy a whole quarter of the beef, and we'd buy a forequarter of the lamb for lamb chops, and we'd buy a calf, and we'd buy some beef livers, and we'd buy some chickens and chicken livers, and since we had a couple of customers for them, we would buy brains. The store opened at seven in the morning and we'd work until seven, eight at night. I was seventeen, young and eager and energetic, and by five I'd be whipped. And there he was, still going strong, throwing hundred-pound forequarters on his shoulders, walking in and hanging them in the refrigerator on hooks. There he was, cutting and slicing with the knives, chopping with the cleaver, still filling out orders at seven p.m. when I was ready to collapse. But my job was to clean the butcher blocks last thing before we went home, to throw some sawdust on the blocks and then scrape them with the iron brush, and so, marshaling the energy left in me, I'd scrape out the blood to keep the place kosher. Excerpted from Indignation by Philip Roth All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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