Review by
NORMAN LEBRECHTPHILIP ROTH, IN HIS LAST TWO novels, appeared to be heading for the exit. Both Everyman and Exit Ghost are about a battered old man stumbling towards death and, while Roth's savage observation and narrati
ve drive were unimpeded, it did not seem as though the figure we think of as the author had left himself any way back to life.
But Roth is far too devious and resilient a writer ever to be written off on the mood of a book or two. The trick he pulls off in his new short novel, Indignation, is to have it both ways.
He lets us know on page 54 that the hero is dead and speaking from the black beyond, that he has no further part to play in the story. But the voice is that of a second-year college student, fresh with discovery and outrage, defeated less by the fact of his tragic death than by the hypocrisies of an adult world that he never dared enter.
Marcus Messner is a kosher butcher's son from Newark, New Jersey, where Roth was born and raised. He goes from high school to city college before, desperate to get away from overweening parents, he registers at an ivy-walled campus in the middle of Ohio where students are required to attend chapel and join a fraternity. Roth, as his biography confirms, followed much the same course.
The year is 1951 and the United States is involved in the first of its ill-conceived foreign interventions, the losing battle of the Korean War. The Chinese Communists think nothing of throwing a million men into a freezing night-long attack on a run of foxholes. The carnage is appalling. Some 45,000 young Americans never return home. Korea is seen as a one-way ticket. For a boy going to college in 1951, the choice is clear: graduate or get drafted, get your grades or die.
Marcus knows what he has to do. He is used to coming top of his year back home and the professors at Winesburg are nowhere near as smart as the New Yorkers who bussed out to teach in Newark. He's doing fine in class but he falls out with his roommates, which brings him to the attention of the dean, and he cannot go along with the obligation to sit in chapel and participate in an alien religion, or any religion at all. Indignation – a noun plucked from the English rendering of a Chinese anthem, is his least resistible emotion.
And then there's the girl, Olivia Hutton, exotic in her auburn curls and obviously unattainable to a kosher butcher's son from Newark. But Olivia takes a liking to Marcus on their first dinner date and later, in a car seat, fellates him beyond his wildest imaginings.
The suicide scar on her wrist is the first sign of trouble. Everything he later hears about the girl sends his antennae flailing in alarm, but he is already in too deep. Marcus is set, like Othello, on a relentless course towards doom. Except it is not the girl who is his nemesis. It is America in its archaic self-righteousness, America in its collective hysteria, America as imagined here by its greatest living writer in the era of his very own coming of age.
Roth at his best – and Indignation is very close to it – can persuade any reader to suspend disbelief and be suctioned into the inexorable momentum of his story. His eye for detail is unerring – the butcher's slab and even the slaughterhouse described with a boy's blind admiration for his father's occupation, the envy and the pity that flow back from child to parent. His account of the Ohio campus is chilling, not so much for its intellectual mediocrity as for its vision of itself as an Athens of the West, the opening of the American mind.
Yet beneath the engines of his rage, Roth cannot suppress his fierce love for the innocent – for Marcus on his road to destruction, for his father whose darkest fears are bound to be fulfilled, and for America itself, still innocent enough to dream of a better tomorrow.
Indignation ought to be made required reading for all future presidential candidates.
The full article contains 722 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
