Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life's unimagined chances and terrifying consequences. It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad -- mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy. As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father's fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world. Indignation, Philip Roth's twenty-ninth book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008: Enter once again into the echo chamber of Philip Roth's memory and imagination. In the second year of the Korean War, a butcher's son--a straight-A student wound tight with aspiration--flees Newark and his father's increasingly unhinged fears for his safety. Heading midwest, he finds a strange collegiate land of fraternities, football heroes, V-neck pullover sweaters and white buckskin shoes, panty raids, and mandatory chapel services, and, most startlingly, a young woman with desires of her own. Like another fiction grandmaster of his generation, Alice Munro, Roth seems able to spin infinite surprising tales from a few familiar building blocks, and in Indignation, his 25th novel, he has constructed a taut, haunting (and, as always, funny) story that ranks among his best. Reading at times like a buttoned-down Portnoy's Complaint (if it's possible to imagine such a thing), Indignation records a series of small explosions against '50s propriety and the dire consequences they lead to, capturing the misery of desire amid repression, along with the greater terror of being trapped in endless, relentless memory. --Tom Nissley
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
perplexing and entertaining:
This is my fourth Roth book (I was just exposed to him a year or so ago) and while I did not enjoy it as much as American Pastoral or The Human Stain, I did like it. For me, I think the softness and lovely Zuckerman descriptions was missing as it was for my in Operation Shylock. The book uses Newark as it's jumping off pint (do they all?) and artfully describes a young, smart, indignant 19-year-old who desperately does not want to become his father. It is a short book, but unnerving when, on page 57 we find... more info
one more from good 'ol Philip!:
Well, I'll be darned! Philip Roth did it again. The guy keeps churning out astounding novels at an impressive rate, and he ain't no spring chicken no more. This one is relatively short, but very intense. It starts out innocently enough as the superficially commonplace story of a young lad going to college to escape his family, but there is one major turn in the middle (I will not spoil it for you), and an even bigger one right at the end. The latter will make you want to go back to the beginning and re-read... more info
Blood, Sweat, Tears, More Blood:
I am always amazed at Philip Roth's ability to say a great deal with few words. This small book, almost a novella, illustrates that ability very well. The imagery and symbolism of blood, tears, semen, along with the constants of fear,as well as emotional pain and yearning, pervade almost every page. The young protagonist looks back at a life he tried so very hard to live in the "right" way -- a "good boy," he followed the rules and the example set forth by his Jewish parents, Kosher butchers who worked hard... more info
Indignation - my take:
Do we each have a turning point or series of turning points in our lives that lead us to our fate? Or do we simply have things happen to us, in combination with our childhoods, our makeup, our genetics and the world events which catch us up, which in all their minutiae add up to "fate?" This is a small perfect book about which one should say nothing so that its progression and its surprises are not telegraphed in advance!
