INDIGNATION
Philip Roth
Vintage
Fiction
Hardcover: 9780547054841
Paperback: 9780307388919
INDIGNATION is a bizarre and frightening read. It’s uncomfortable. Its semi-jokes evoke mostly nervous laughter. In this surreal and deadly serious work, Philip Roth speaks of bewildered youth in the context of an even more bewildered America --- an America afraid of everything, outraged by every deviation from a cherished norm more fantasy than reality. And though set in 1951, the tragedy of ultra-naïve Marcus Messner’s adolescence is plenty contemporary; those who doubt the comparison can try to explain the ire of our country --- while drenched in the blood of its own war --- at a televised exposed nipple.
Marcus’s father, formerly a brave and proud kosher butcher, family man and community fixture, has become obsessed ad absurdum with the safety of his son. In his delusions of never-ending threats, all roads lead to doom. This maddened paternalism drives Marcus from his home --- lest his father drive him mad too --- and he journeys all the way to middle-of-nowhere Winesburg College in Winesburg, Ohio. (If you’re wondering if this is a reference to Sherwood Anderson’s WINESBURG, OHIO, a novel about individuals trapped in stasis by their own “grotesque” flaws, rest assured it is. Not only does Marcus take a job at the Willard Inn, but the thematic connections soon become obvious, and INDIGNATION benefits from the comparison.)
Winesburg is a college more concerned with protecting its deadened conservatism than educating students, and it is here that Marcus collides with a series of baffling and infuriating characters, all of whom seem to him obstacles on his road to getting straight A’s so he doesn’t get kicked out of school, drafted and killed in the Korean War. No, that’s not an exaggeration; that’s the reality of Marcus’s thought process, with more than a hint of his father’s paranoia. His neuroticism is on par with Woody Allen’s, though in INDIGNATION it is much grimmer. Completely unprepared for these confrontations, made ignorant by a society unable to educate him, he can approach his challenges only tangentially.
As a result, he becomes alienated from his life, as much of an outsider to it as we are (a point made only stronger by the realization that he is recollecting these events after his own death in a nether-space where memory is the sole dimension). He shuns socialization of any sort lest it interfere with his work. He gloriously bungles a promising romance out of more obligation than willful respect of his place in society. In short, he is an allegory for all the ways that American youth, even with everything in its favor, can spectacularly fail to learn a modicum of real truth.
Roth uses stylistic tactics similar to his recent novel, THE HUMAN STAIN, in which he slowly stokes our own righteous indignation, lets it build to a rabid blaze, and then extinguishes it with the cold realization that our emotionalism makes us no better than the characters who enrage us so. Marcus’s confrontations --- all his social interactions are pretty much confrontations --- easily let us slip into the familiar hatred of backwards, ignorant small-town 1951. The anti-sexuality protocols, the mandatory chapel college requirement and, above all, the smug conservatism --- Roth can drive the reader mad with hate for these antiquated fools, and in so doing points out that their McCarthyite indignation is well alive today, even among those who think they know better. INDIGNATION reveals one of America’s most uncommon and unsettling character traits: its unbridled fanaticism, often manifested as the righteous anger of crusaders. Only in a country so alienated from itself can such a multi-faceted outrage emerge as one of our dominant cultural emotions, as Roth’s characters painfully show us.
This alienation is furthered by the book’s peculiar tone: bleak and slightly otherworldly, surreal and self-consciously literary. Marcus’s recollections are direct but distant from the events they tell. The characters all speak in more stylized versions of natural tones (which makes some of the dialogue a little cringe-inducing, but not in a good way) that convey a sense of acting out life more than living it. In the context of college life, the novel’s events build up to a student riot cum panty raid, and it is in this moment of apeish primitivism that the students feel most at one with themselves. The college’s response is typically oblivious: “And so conspicuous was [the college president’s] abhorrence of ‘rebellious insolence’ that he might have been enunciating the name of a menace resolved to undermine not just Winesburg, Ohio, but the great republic itself.”
What may be best about INDIGNATION is its ambiguity. For such an emotionally charged book, it is almost entirely free of Roth’s stated opinions beyond his valuable nuggets of cultural analysis. He lets his America speak for itself, and while he makes no attempts to explain how our culture came to be the madness it is today, he superbly describes its effects and lets readers draw their own conclusions. INDIGNATION may not be the best of Roth’s works, but it is a masterful piece --- unusual, alarming and, most importantly, vital American reading.
--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz
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