Indignation

I LOVE Philip Roth, but this is hardly the great book that some people on here have made it out to be. The characters in this book are extremely weakly drawn, especially the father who is supposed to have a crucial role in the plot, but who lacks nuance completely. The love interest, Oliva, seems like she could be interesting, but again the sketch is lightly drawn. We get hints about a troubled past, but no explanations, and we're never given any real insight into her character, or what Marcus sees in her, other than the obvious sexual appeal. Then we are told she's had a nervous breakdown and she dissapears, and that's that. No climactic scene between them, no confrontation or insight, just the plot chugging along.

Compare these characters with the father from the Plot Against America, or with Micky Sabbath, for that matter. I mean, this book isn't bad, but I just think of Sabbath's Theater, or American Pastoral, or The Plot Against America, or The Human Stain, or even Patrimony, and the humor and tragedy in those books, and this one really feels uninspired to me.

The writing in this book, too, is really mechanical. Too much summary, too little scene making. There's hardly ever a scene that goes on more than a couple of pages. There are some writers, like Balano, who can get away with that, but Roth's real strength is sticking with scenes for a long, sometimes a VERY LONG, time, so that the tension just becomes excrutiating, and you can feel the characters being ripped apart. Think of Sabbath's Theater again, this time Mickey sittin on the sofa in the old man's house, trying to get the old man to remember him, and how long Roth plays that scene out, and how we feel Mickey's desire to be remembered becoming overwhelming.

Oh, and the thing about the guy being dead. I understand Roth's obsession with death, and I think it's one of his greatest strengths, but I don't quite get what the fact that the guy is speaking from beyond the grave adds to the book thematically? If someone could explain that to me, I'd actually apreciate it.

There are a couple nice moments--I think someone else mentioned the moment when the mother explains that someone's weakness can be their strength, and that really rang true for me. And the details from the butcher shop are fascinating, and the moment when he thinks of Olivia making herself koscher by trying to drain her own blood is pretty haunting. And there are a few others, but really this book left me cold.

Roth at the peak of his powers. This book stayed with me for days after I finished it.

INDIGNATION, is a coming of death story by Phillip Roth. Built around the idea that Little things have a suprisingly large consequences (the butterfly exponential perhaps?) the characters move along towards finality. Constantly Jewish in nature, the dialog lacks the slap of Portnoy's - oy, I kvetch too much (too much I kvetch?). Kosher butchering shepherds the often bloody story along . . .a hardworking New Jersey family, a good son, a good father, a saintly mother, the unsuitable shikse, a war, a repressive Midwestern (Winesburg Ohio make a cameo appearance). In a few pages a tangible world takes shape, what more should a novel offer?
Ideal to read as I did: in a late October Indian Summer on a park bench behind a university library in Ohio....

Roth's protagonist, Marcus Messner, is filled with enough of his own youthful and idealistic indignation to justify the book's title. But the title word could just as easily apply to Marcus's butcher father, to the Winesburg college dean and president and a number of other minor characters, as well as to the Chinese Communist hordes swarming down through North Korea in that frigid and often nearly forgotten conflict of the fifties, which forms an ominous and omnipresent background to the story. Indignation, which is a surprisingly slight book, nearly a novella, marks a return to the kind of stories that made Roth famous over forty-some years ago. Like Good-Bye Columbus, it looks at college life and all the excitement, mysteries and sexual frustrations that accompany it. Winesburg College is, of course, an obvious nod (or perhaps eye-rolling shaking of the head) to Sherwood Anderson's classic collection of interconnected stories, Winesburg, Ohio - a book which I first read in my own college days in the sixties. I was reading Anderson, in fact, around the same time I first discovered Philip Roth, in his then-bestselling and then-scandalous novel, Portnoy's Complaint. A novel which finally put the sin of Onan right out there in the open. I thought it was about time too, as I nodded and chuckled my way through Alex's adventures with milk bottles, a slab of liver, and, finally, the Monkey. In fact, I was naive and stupid enough to adopt that book as required reading in one of the first Lit classes I taught in 1970. And I actually got away with it. I have read many other Roth books since then. My favorite is one of Roth's earliest novels, Letting Go, which I have re-read several times and would highly recommend. More recently, The Human Stain is, I think, one of Roth's best realized works, and its film version, with Sir Anthony Hopkins, is equally good. (Which makes me remember Richard Benjamin and Ali McGraw in the classic film, Good-Bye Columbus. Benjamin also brought Alex Portnoy to life on screen, an effort which was less successful.) Indignation, with its showers of semen high into the air, stained socks and the unstable but beautiful "Olivia the Expert" does indeed mark a kind of restrained return to the Portnoy days, albeit under a shadow of war and imminent death. I read this book in just two sittings. It's funny, it's disturbing, and it's immediate, despite its setting of over fifty years ago. A real page-turner, entertaining and real. - Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy: At Play in the ASA

INDIGNATION is a fascinating novel, albeit difficult to read except in 20 page bursts. The reason is that the intense Marcus Messner, Roth's young protagonist and narrator, finds little joy, but much angst and guilt, in his life. You see, everything is a challenge to Marcus and his existence is, well, an ordeal. As a result, he always seems on the verge of hysterical expression. Indeed, he is, at one moment, surprised to be told by his college Dean that he is shouting and pointing angrily. This emotional tone makes INDIGNATION a book to enjoy in small doses.

INDIGNATION is the story of Marcus, a studious young man and only child, who flees his overbearing father in Newark for a year at Winesburg College in rural Ohio. But when Marcus takes a step forward in his life--such as excelling in school, establishing greater independence from his parents, having new sexual experiences, and befriending the leaders in a fraternity--Roth connects that step to perilous undercurrents of guilt, principled naïveté, or treachery. In INDIGNATION, all the happy normal experiences of youth and college don't make Marcus stronger. Instead, they make him increasingly vulnerable.

The narrative skill shown in INDIGNATION is truly dazzling. Not only is there not a single word out of place. But Roth is also able to pull a surprising and profound subtext from each experience that Marcus relates. The effect is that you get every event in the novel twice: once in the seamless and interesting telling; then a second time in its surprising interpretation. Only in the very end of INDIGNATION does the meaning that Roth pulls from an experience seem obvious. (I thought we were going to learn that Marcus was doomed to recapitulate the tragic meshuge of his father's family.)

Of course, it's all a matter of taste. But I must say that Roth sometimes seems to overplay to make his points. Anyone remember the vomit scene in American Pastoral, which expressed revulsion? Well, INDIGNATION has a vomit scene as well. For an author who is able to find great depth in the most ordinary interactions, I wonder why these extreme physical expressions need to occur.

Regardless, this is another fine novel from a great American writer.