Indignation - Hardcover

Roth, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 054705484X ISBN 13: 9780547054841

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times.

In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004.”

Recently Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award for “a body of work…of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship” and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career…places him or her in the highest rank of American literature.”

Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.

Reviews

The prolific Roth routinely evokes the nostalgia of the post-war era in America, and Indignation should put an exclamation point on a brilliant career spanning half a century. In a passage that’s pure Roth, his protagonist, Marcus Messner, laments “the terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.” That sentence and others like it are worth a reader’s time, and many critics revel in Roth’s masterful handling of the period and his character. Others, however, wonder whether Roth gives himself enough room to breathe in this “rhetorical equivalent of a drive-by shooting” (Los Angeles Times) and fault Marcus for never experiencing any sort of personal evolution. Indignation will, however, appeal to those who like Roth short (though not sweet).
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Starred Review. Roth's brilliant and disconcerting new novel plumbs the depths of the early Cold War–era male libido, burdened as it is with sexual myths and a consciousness overloaded with vivid images of impending death, either by the bomb or in Korea. At least this is the way things appear to narrator Marcus Messner, the 19-year-old son of a Newark kosher butcher. Perhaps because Marcus's dad saw his two brothers' only sons die in WWII, he becomes an overprotective paranoid when Marcus turns 18, prompting Marcus to flee to Winesburg College in Ohio. Though the distance helps, Marcus, too, is haunted by the idea that flunking out of college means going to Korea. His first date in Winesburg is with doctor's daughter Olivia Hutton, who would appear to embody the beautiful normality Marcus seeks, but, instead, she destroys Marcus's sense of normal by surprising him after dinner with her carnal prowess. Slightly unhinged by this stroke of fortune, he at first shuns her, then pesters her with letters and finally has a brief but nonpenetrative affair with her. Olivia, he discovers, is psychologically fragile and bears scars from a suicide attempt—a mark Marcus's mother zeroes in on when she meets the girl for the first and last time. Between promising his mother to drop her and longing for her, Marcus goes through a common enough existential crisis, exacerbated by run-ins with the school administration over trivial matters that quickly become more serious.... The terrible sadness of Marcus's life is rendered palpable by Roth's fierce grasp on the psychology of this butcher's boy, down to his bought-for-Winesburg wardrobe. It's a melancholy triumph and a cogent reflection on society in a time of war. (Sept.)
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In a departure from Roths recent meditations on age, his new novel revisits the no less sexually frustrating experience of growing up. We are back in nineteen-fifties Newark, and nineteen-year-old Marcus Messner, the son of a kosher butcher, attempts to escape his fathers stifling influence by enrolling at a college in Ohio farm country. Messner is a scholarly type, while his new classmates are an unfriendly bunch of churchgoing, beer-swilling louts. Stubbornly disregarding overtures of friendship from members of the schools only Jewish fraternity, Messner devotes his attentions to a troubled Gentile named Olivia Hutton. Theres something of Portnoy in the masturbation-filled high jinks that follow, but Messner, fearful that he might wind up a rifleman in Korea, is a far darker creation. Roth, blending the bawdy exuberance of his early period and the disenchantment of his recent work, demonstrates with subtle mastery the incomprehensible way ones most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 054705484X
• ISBN 13: 9780547054841
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 233