Book Review: Indignation by Philip Roth

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.

His oh-by-the-way manner of revealing this is surprising, despite its casual delivery. But even more surprising is how little Roth makes use of this unusual narrative perspective. He offers up a description of the afterlife that is so sparse and succinct, that he might as well be describing a room at Motel 6. (Clean, comfortable, quiet... what more is there to say?) Marcus Messner, our hero, merely lets it drop that he is dead, shares a few meager details, then goes on with his story.

This tale turns on Messner’s struggles to release himself from the controlling instincts of his father, a kosher butcher who can’t seem to accept that his college-age son has a life of his own. Finally the youngster decides that he needs to leave his New Jersey home, and arranges for a transfer to a small college in Ohio. The college is called Winesburg, but this is not Sherwood Anderson territory. Roth plays masterfully with all his familiar themes: the impinging of historical events (the Korean War, in this instance) on day-to-day realities; Jewish identity in American life; getting laid; tempers running out of control; and other matters that we have seen in his previous novels.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is editor of jazz.com, and also writes on books at Great Books Guide and The New Canon

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