Philip Roth. Indignation

World Literature Today, Nov-Dec, 2008 by Rita D. Jacobs

Philip Roth. Indignation. Boston. Houghton Mifflin. 2008. 256 pages. $26. ISBN 978-0-547-05484-1

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Sex, in the body and the mind, has long obsessed Philip Roth's characters, beginning with Neil Klugman and Alexander Portnoy and continuing through Mickey Sabbath and Nathan Zuckerman. But his later characters bring another primal concern into the mix: death. In Indignation, his new, rather slight, novel (it's almost a novella), Roth returns to his roots and combines the two essential themes with a new twist.

The Newark-born protagonist of this first-person, posthumous narrative is Marcus Messner, son of a kosher butcher who, during the Korean War, flees his overprotective father to transfer to Ohio's Winesburg College, which he chooses because he longs to emulate the preppy photo on the catalog cover. But white bucks do not a WASP make. And Sherwood Anderson must be shifting uncomfortably in his grave as Roth's versions of his Winesburg's grotesques are played partially for laughs. Yet with Roth's ability to limn incisive character and dialogue, even the somewhat caricatured Hawes D. Caudwell, Dean of Men--a job title that identifies the era--enjoys a vibrant humanity as he counsels Messner to adhere to the values so cherished by the Winesburg community. Their disastrous interview is a hilarious but scathing indictment of both Messner's pugnacious hyperintellectualism and the dean's 1950s middle-American Christian self-satisfaction.

The Messner family would be textbook Jewish comedy but for Roth's ability to mix humor with heartbreak. From the early pages, the kosher butcher shop is as bloody as can be, underscoring the fear of violence and, by extension, of the Korean War that permeates the novel and propels Messner to stay in college. Fear and danger are everywhere, even as temptations. For example, Marcus's romantic interest, Olivia Hutton--a blond goddess who delivers sexual favors without being asked--is also deeply unbalanced, having experienced a nervous breakdown and an attempted suicide. All this, of course, offers yet another potent combination of attraction/repulsion for Marcus and his good-Jewish-boy upbringing. Her "scar" mesmerizes him.

But it's not all about sex, or fear, or even death. Roth gives us a discerning look at what it means to be the other, the outsider, with a longing to belong and the fierce indignation and anger emerging from that very longing. Through Messner, Roth examines how we do and do not understand our own sense of ourselves. At the same time, he examines the function of memory and what that does to the sense of sell even if it is a self too early extinguished.

Philip Roth is masterful at creating a not entirely likable but a very human central character, in this case an alien amid the corn--"Messner in Winesburg." Yet ultimately the reader feels that this admittedly "good read," with its neurotic, libidinous, and mostly frustrated young man, belongs with Roth's early work rather than with the fierce, large-scale cultural landmarks he has more recently given us in American Pastoral and The Human Stain.

Rita D. Jacobs

Montclair State University