Philip Roth’s Indignation (2008): First Extended Review

I’ve come across an advanced reader’s copy of Philip Roth’s forthcoming novel Indignation. The book is not due for publication until September 16. Here is, as far as I know, the first extended review to appear online. Spoilers included.

In 1962 the New Yorker published a Philip Roth story called ‘Novotny’s Pain’. It was included (revised) in the now out-of-print Philip Roth Reader, but has been excluded from the ostensibly canonical Library of America series. This quiet but compelling story concerns a young soldier’s possibly psychosomatic back pain while dreading combat duty in Korea.

Indignation, a story of sexual survelliance in God-fearing America, revisits the same war and the same fear. Fear, in fact, underlies the actions of nearly every character. The prospect of a bloody death on the Korean battlefield motivates Marcus Messner’s severe academic discipline; by staying in college he can avoid the draft. Fear for Marcus’s safety puts Marcus’s father, a kosher butcher, in a state of paranoia and mounting rage. To escape his father, Marcus transfers from a local college in Newark to distant Winesburg College (I haven’t read Sherwood Anderson’s story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, so I don’t know what led Roth to borrow the setting for his book). For some reason Roth skips the potentially fiery scene of Marcus telling his father he is leaving Newark; it is also not very believable that the obsessively protective Mr Messner would allow his son to flee. Marcus, in Winesburg, nevertheless continues to enjoy the financial support of his parents.

Roth employs the unusual technique of letting Marcus narrate his story from death, while “lurking disembodied” in a “memory grotto.” Marcus is another “prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student” in the Roth universe. He is perhaps the most sensible of Roth’s protagonists, not at all interested in transgression. Even forbidden sex is not really sought; it falls into his lap, so to speak, when a college girl named Olivia Hutton surprises him with fellatio in a parked LaSalle. She performs the act with “diligence [that word again!] and concentration.” Marcus is a nice young man who had little to rebel against in Newark; he has a mother whose “bedrock dependability, whose sensible words and coherent thoughts, had filled me with confidence throughout a childhood that was unembattled.” Roth loves to mass the adjectives of virtue, in anticipation of whatever unjust shitstorm is to follow, but I’m tired of reading the same ones in every new book. They blur the characters into indistinct types rather than make them come alive.

At Winesburg Marcus has trouble with his roommates. The first is a noisy homosexual Jewish bohemian, the second a humourless gentile. He goes to live alone in an abandoned and uncomfortable room. There is institutionalised anti-semitism in the form of exclusive fraternities and compulsory chapel attendance. The gripping centrepiece of the novel is an argument in the office of Dean Hawes D. Caudwell. The ever-serious Marcus is questioned on his failure to socialise and to seek spiritual sustenance in chapel. Marcus asserts his right to privacy and his admiration of Bertrand Russell, whose ‘Why I Am Not A Christian’ he paraphrases at length. “Rationalist blasphemies,” responds Caudwell, “spouted by an immoralist.” Marcus, a high school debater, cannot resist declaring this a worthless ad hominem attack. The scene concludes with Marcus throwing up over Caudwell’s desk.

Obstacles to free and guiltless sex are often the spark to fire the indignation of Roth’s extremely serious men – we see it as far back as Goodbye, Columbus (1959). The sexual mores of Winesburg College in 1951 are far removed from contemporary American life. Young women must sign in and out of their dormitories. Curfews are enforced. Police cars patrol for lovemakers in the alleyway behind the local inn and on the outskirts of the town cemetery. The men suffer “the searing, stabbing, cramping pain of the widespread testicular torture known as blue balls.” The eventual, and perhaps inevitable, eruption of frat boy misbehaviour on a snowy night prompts the college president, a Red-baiting Republican politician, to denounce the male students. Marcus reflects that “President Lentz had pronounced the words ‘thoughtless fun’ as scornfully as if they were a synonym for ‘premeditated murder’.”

Olivia Hutton is a remarkable character in this environment. She is sexually confident and very easygoing – after a hospital room handjob she quotes Longfellow’s “I shot an arrow into the air/It fell to earth I knew not where” – and defies the standards of “proper” behaviour. Another of her dates declares her “The Blowjob Queen of 1951.” Marcus is initially too naive to understand her liberated attitude. Women are not thought of as having such a thing as sexual desire. Perhaps it has something to do with her being the daughter of divorced parents? She is like a transplant from a different time and place. But ultimately we get too little of Olivia in this short book, mere hints at her history (scars on her wrists, electro-shock treatment) when she seems to merit much more attention as Marcus’s accomplice in a tiny sexual rebellion.

“History is not the background – history is the stage!” cries President Lentz. He is talking about the fight against “godless Soviet Communism,” but in a way this novel, like the second Zuckerman trilogy of the late nineties, dramatises the powerlessness of individuals to escape the wave of history, and the power of politics to destroy lives. Indignation is a sad and bloody book, and even if it delivers nothing particularly new – indeed, most of Roth’s books could be retitled Indignation – it is a fine supplement to Roth’s late achievements. And we learn a lot about kosher butchery.

See my review of Philip Roth’s previous novel Exit Ghost

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