During the course of this short novel, Roth sets up many fascinating and memorable scenes. The encounters between Messner and Dean Caudwell are engaging, as is Roth’s spirited description of a snowball fight that veers out of control until it almost takes on Day of the Locust proportions. The ensuing speech by the angry President of Winesburg is also handled with high drama. Messner’s puzzled reaction to a first date that goes too well also stands out.
Yet too many of these vibrant interludes in Indignation leave the reader hanging. In a longer novel, Roth would do so much more with Messner’s suicidal girlfriend Olivia Hutton, his eccentric Oscar-Wilde-ish roommate Bertram Flusser, the politically savvy Winesburg President Albin Leintz, and other high octane characters. At times the narrative seems rushed, and this change in pacing is all the more noticeable when Roth slows down and delivers the goods.
Yet Roth’s unflagging productivity in his mid-seventies is something to celebrate. This author may have written two dozen or so novels, but he shows no sign of slowing down or of exhausting his capacity for story-telling. There was enough gusto in Indignation to keep me primed for the next book. And with The Humbling slated for 2009 release, it seems that we can continue to count (at least for the time being) on a Philip Roth novel as an annual event.
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."