Indignation

Starred review from May 12, 2008
To celebrate the publication of Roth's 10,000th book, Houghton is proclaiming September 16 as “Indignation Day.”
Indignation
Philip Roth
. Houghton Mifflin
, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-0-547-05484-1

Roth's brilliant and disconcerting new novel plumbs the depths of the early Cold War–era male libido, burdened as it is with sexual myths and a consciousness overloaded with vivid images of impending death, either by the bomb or in Korea. At least this is the way things appear to narrator Marcus Messner, the 19-year-old son of a Newark kosher butcher. Perhaps because Marcus's dad saw his two brothers' only sons die in WWII, he becomes an overprotective paranoid when Marcus turns 18, prompting Marcus to flee to Winesburg College in Ohio. Though the distance helps, Marcus, too, is haunted by the idea that flunking out of college means going to Korea. His first date in Winesburg is with doctor's daughter Olivia Hutton, who would appear to embody the beautiful normality Marcus seeks, but, instead, she destroys Marcus's sense of normal by surprising him after dinner with her carnal prowess. Slightly unhinged by this stroke of fortune, he at first shuns her, then pesters her with letters and finally has a brief but nonpenetrative affair with her. Olivia, he discovers, is psychologically fragile and bears scars from a suicide attempt—a mark Marcus's mother zeroes in on when she meets the girl for the first and last time. Between promising his mother to drop her and longing for her, Marcus goes through a common enough existential crisis, exacerbated by run-ins with the school administration over trivial matters that quickly become more serious. All the while, the reader is aware of something awful awaiting Marcus, due to a piece of information casually dropped about a third of the way in: “And even dead, as I am and have been for I don't know how long...” The terrible sadness of Marcus's life is rendered palpable by Roth's fierce grasp on the psychology of this butcher's boy, down to his bought-for-Winesburg wardrobe. It's a melancholy triumph and a cogent reflection on society in a time of war.

Starred review from September 1, 2008
In 1951, Marcus Messner flees his father's steadily debilitating dementia and the overwhelming constraints of family life in Newark, NJ, to the greener and more pastoral setting of Winesburg College in Ohio. After years of working in his father's butcher shop, where he learned to do everything well no matter how much he hated it, he steps into a Kafkaesque setting in which such a lesson is useless in the face of the demands of the college's authority figures. After encounters with arrogant and lazy roommates who won't allow him to study, confrontations with the college dean, and the heartbreak of a failed sexual affair, Marcus learns that he can best survive various challenges in his lifeeven the book's most surprising challengeby acting indignantly in the face of them. A meditation on love, death, and madness, Roth's new novel combines the comic absurdity of his early novels like "Portnoy's Complaint" with the pathos of his later novels like "Everyman" and "Exit Ghost". All libraries will want to add this to their collections. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 5/15/08.]Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Evanston, IL

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2008
In Roths provocative new novel (his twenty-ninth book)which, in a quieter, more personal fashion, is as provocative as his astonishing Plot against America (2004)the setting and the main character are plucked from traditional Roth country: a nice Jewish boy living in Newark in the early 1950s, the son of a kosher butcher. The Korean War rages halfway around the word, but Marcus Messner, conscious though he is of the war and his possibleforced participation in it, has a morefundamental concern: staying away from hisfather, to whom he is extremelyclose but who has recently become neurotically overprotective. Marcus had been attending a local Newark college, but his fathers new crazinessoversafetycompelled him to transfer to bucolic Winesburg College in Ohio, in a conservative Midwest that is foreign country to Marcus.He continues toearn good grades, but the restof Winesburg life has him befuddled.Not so much because hes Jewish but because hes afree thinker, he wonders, Why do I have to attend chapel? Why should he have to put up with inordinately noisy roommates? And how tofathom the strange but perversely alluring psychological dimensions of the unbalanced girl hes interested in? During this time, male college students walk a tightrope: flunk out of school or be expelled for any reason, and the draft will snap you up. Read this fast-paced, compassionate, humorous, historically conscious novel to learn what thatmeans forMarcus.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)