Books

Indignation
By Philip Roth, Houghton Mifflin, 2007, 231 pp.

Philip Roth’s anger has never left him. Early in his career that anger was directed at family. Portnoy’s Complaint, his most notorious early work, is the apotheosis of that early Rothian anger. As he matured, Roth realized that the dysfunction he placed firmly on family was fostered by the world at large. His later works, including a brilliant trilogy published at the end of the 20th century, reflect how perceptive Roth was.

Now he returns to the beginning of his career, this time with an old man’s insight. Indignation harkens back to those early short novels like Goodbye, Columbus, in which a callow young man runs from, rather than towards, his future, all the while championing the indignation he feels about the world his family has provided and about how his family prevents his learning about the world on his own terms.

So it is with Marcus Messner during the second year of the Korean War. He’s desperate to leave his home in New Jersey for reasons he blames on his

protective, hard-working,

Kosher butcher of a father and his frequently

deferential mother. Marcus escapes, enrolling in Winesburg College; yet he immediately finds himself indignant about everything in Ohio, especially the college’s conservative, religious milieu.

What Roth has written, of course, is another account of coming of age. Yet he takes the hope we are left with at the end of, say, Huckleberry Finn, and upends it.

Marcus takes ethical stands, makes rigid pronouncements, even has scurrilous sexual adventures with an unstable Gentile student. But what he finally comes to learn is “what his uneducated father had been trying so hard to teach him all along: of the terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.”

The vantage point from which Marcus relates this disquieting truth is one of the mordant surprises in this fable to which Philip Roth has attached his plainspoken caveat. Even if Indignation is an attempt to revisit the landscape of his earlier works, Roth has managed to turn it into a sharp and deeply affecting rumination on youth, misplaced angst, and the America he has come to realize began to disappear some 50 years ago.

Indignation may be short, but it is decidedly not sweet.

Steven Whitton is a Professor of English at Jacksonville State University.