Philip Roth has delivered his third short novel in as many years. But whereas Everyman (2006) and Exit Ghost (2007) dealt with aging protagonists grappling with physical decline and looming death, Indignation is a coming-of-age story about a contentious teenager. Then again, this is a teenager dealing with looming death — thus proving that, with Roth, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
In fact, this novel seems to bring us back full circle to Goodbye, Columbus, Roth’s first book from 1959. Almost a half-century has elapsed, but Roth is again taking on 1950s morality, the travails of young love (and sexuality), university life, the U.S. military, and generational tensions. These are Roth’s specialties, and reeling off the list makes me feel like a waiter talking about the chef’s classic dishes made available again as tonight’s menu additions. But the piquant flavor of the 1950s, which merely stood as the status quo for Roth in Goodbye, Columbus, is now a familiar ingredient in the type of modern American period fiction that has gradually become another Roth trademark. So much so, that I now wait for the President of the United States to figure in every Roth novel I read, much like Hitchcock making a cameo appearance in his movies, even if (as in Lifeboat) it is only via a newspaper passing through the narrative.
Yet Roth’s strangest twist here is his introduction of a dead protagonist. This is always an unsettling device, whether it emerges in the second sentence (as in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones), or at the end of the story (as in the film American Beauty). My favorite example is Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, where the reader gradually realizes over the course of the novel that most of the main characters might be dead. Roth, in contrast, is not quite so dramatic. He handles the disclosure that his narrator is deceased almost as an aside, about a quarter of the way into the book.
Article comments
1 - Steven Augustine
"Yet Roth’s strangest twist here is his introduction of a dead
protagonist."
Protag isn't dead, he's dying.
2 - Ted Gioia
Roth told an interviewer, after the book was published, that his protagonist is in a coma and not really dead. But this is not made clear in the book. In fact, the narrator tells the readers that he is dead. There is no mention of a coma, dying, etc. I can only review the novel Roth wrote, and don't really know how to address additional plot details added in interviews after publication.
3 - Steven Augustine
Read the next-to-last chapter in the actual book. Starts on page 225.
4 - Ted Gioia
There is no mention on p. 225, or anywhere else in this novel, that the story is narrated while the protagonist is in a coma. Instead, we find:
Page 54: "dead as I am and have been for I don't know how long."
Page 200: "I knew without a doubt . . . would turn out to be the angel of death."
Page 226: "Now he was well and truly dead."