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| Indignation | 
 enlarge | Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  44 reviews
Sales Rank: 1083
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 054705484X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780547054841
ASIN: 054705484X
Publication Date: September 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New!!! bce
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Amazon.com Review
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
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 39 more reviews...
 An odd, disagreeable little book. September 16, 2008
19 out of 29 found this review helpful
Being a Philip Roth novel, Indignation features what the scientists would primly call "an episode of receptive oral sex." Roth is rather more straightforward with his nomenclature than either the scientists or I can be (this is a family publication, after all): the novel that brought him infamy, Portnoy's Complaint, featured a chapter that we'll have to call "C-Word Crazy."
The "receptive episode," as we'll call it here, sets off a chain of disasters for Indignation's narrator -- the episode's recipient, as it were. He's already left home in New Jersey (most Roth novels take place in New Jersey) to get away from a father who appears to be going insane. Until then, Marcus and his father had been just about as close as two people could be: they worked side by side in the father's Newark kosher butcher shop, and Marcus was all that a father could ask for: well-behaved, straight-A student, working nonstop, eyes always on the prize, intense. Then, for no reason that Marcus can discern -- though it may be related to the thousands of Americans dying in Korea as this domestic disaster is happening -- dad starts suspecting the worst: he asks Marcus constantly where he's been (as it turns out, "the library" is just about as wild an answer as dad should ever expect), locks him out of the house if he gets back a moment past curfew, and generally makes his life a nightmare. So Marcus leaves home, abandons the familiar confines of college in Newark, and enters a polite Baptist college in the middle of Ohio.
You might wonder a couple things at this point: how a paranoid father would possibly release his son into the American heartland, and where the insanity came from. These are the first two of several "Huh?" moments in Indignation. Another is that receptive episode. It comes basically out of nowhere, and surprises Marcus just as much as it surprises us. Like a lot of people, the discovery of sex tears Marcus's world apart. And it couldn't come at a worse time for him: he's already moved out of one student dormroom because his intense, studious ways conflict with the antisocial habits of his roommate. After the receptive episode, he feels compelled to defend the girl's honor against his second roommate, who promptly coldcocks Marcus. So on he moves to his third room, the coldest, least-desirable pit on the entire campus.
Each of these shocks to Marcus's life seems rather unsupported by the story leading up to it. This bugged me until the final few pages, which tilt the story on its head; I'm still processing what they're about, but my sense is (I'm being careful not to give anything away here) that they change the story from a straightforward walk down memory lane to a satirized lecture on the collapse of American morals. I wish I could say more about the ending; if anyone out there reads it, email me and let me know what you think.
In any case, I think it's safe to say that the book's whole structure, in light of its ending, is a risk for Roth. At least until the end, I think the reader is likely to feel cheated by one unmotivated shift in the plot after another. Many readers would probably put it down before finishing it.
It helps Roth, then, that Indignation is a little thing -- 200ish small pages with generous spacing. It's easy to tear through in one sitting. I essentially started and finished it over the course of two 90-minute commutes. It's a fine book, but Roth shouldn't get credit for just being Roth: many authors could have written something as good as Indignation, which is not something I can say for a book of similar heft like Roth's Dying Animal. Your time is probably better spent on the latter.
 Roth's Judgment Not Equal To His Genius September 18, 2008
19 out of 34 found this review helpful
In my view, Philip Roth, despite his marked skill crafting gorgeous sentences, has suffered as a novelist in recent years owing to the absence of any vision of real depth illuminating his narratives. Increasingly, he's drawn portraits of kvetching, aged men protesting their loss of potency and inevitable mortality. If his drawings of such are meant to be satirical, there's nothing within his novels to so orient well-disposed readers. The repetitive and limited outlook of his series of tiresome, aged central characters was inadvertently captured, for my money, in an insightful New Yorker cartoon several years back which showed a gravestone featuring the inscription, "Why me?"
In his newest work, "Indignation," Roth turns instead to the trials facing a young college student of the mid-Twentieth century, just a decade before the liberation of impulse attendent upon the end of "tyrannical" strictures and parietal rules regulating student conduct. The theme of the novel, if I read it rightly, centers on the "terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result." Unfortunately, this insight, coming from the authorial voice, is awfully stale, having been more suitably expressed as long ago as the days of the undergraduate Hamlet in that fevered adolescent's observation that our choices are ours, but their consequences not necessarily of our own devising. But let the charge of banality pass, and following the advice of Henry James, let's give Roth his donee and see what he does with it. What he does with it, I'm afraid, is not very much. His central character, Marcus Messner, it is true, with a winning, precocious intellectuality combined with a mere hunger for playing school (getting all A's) emerges as a memorably feisty undergrad, but Roth puts this character repeatedly into confrontation with opponents who have no case to make against him. Flusser, Elwyn, especially Dean Caudwell are embarrassingly one-dimensional strawmen for Marcus to oppose and then be thwarted by. Seeing this kid unfairly crushed and then crushed again becomes ultimately tiresome, if not unintentionally comic. Reading Marcus' story is finally like reading an inverted fairy tale, which might be titled "Giant, the Jack Killer." Roth has done - and can do - far better work than this simplistic, anti-nostalgic look at the bad old days.
 There Will Be Blood October 2, 2008
15 out of 18 found this review helpful
Butchery and blood are recurring images in Philip Roth's scalding new novel which is probably his darkest comedy since Sabbath's Theater. The images are shocking yet appropriate since this little novel deals with a big subject: what someone once called "the meat-grinder of history." Many of Roth's familiar elements are here. The naive young Jewish hero meets up with an unstable gentile girl in the 1950's and farce ensues. But this is 1951 and the Korean War hovers over the story like a thundercloud. I wasn't very enthusiastic about Roth's last couple of novels which seemed rather flaccid to me. But this one has suspense, narrative drive and storytelling fury that recall his great "American" novels of 10 years ago, only in concentrated form. "Indignation" left me wrung out, like you hope a novel will do for you.
Marcus Messner announces on page 54 that he is dead (this is no great spoiler, believe me.) The dead narrator is a time-honored narrative strategy in film noir (see Sunset Boulevard (Special Collector's Edition) and the novels of Jim Thompson, especially Savage Night) and it's interesting to see how Roth uses it. Although there may be an alternative explanation for Marcus' state; check the chapter titles. As he tells his story we learn how he came to die. Practically driven out of his home by his loving but suddenly paranoid kosher butcher father, he flees to go to college in the same town as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (Signet Classics). The smart but inexperienced boy finds himself way over his head. He is flummoxed by a beautiful girl he dates and is unable to tolerate either a flamboyant gay roommate or the strictly conservative college administration with its Christian affiliation. Instead of laughing it off and making the best of it, as apparently Roth in real life was able to at Bucknell, Marcus goes to war with his surroundings. His private mantra becomes the Chinese national anthem he learned in grade school with its refrain "indignation, arise!" And in a hideous irony it is the Chinese army that butchers Marcus on a hill in Korea some months later.
This is a remarkable book: a terrible tragedy with farce, a funny book where the laughs catch in your throat. It once again displays Roth's famous psychological toughness; no one is let off the hook here. And Roth plays fair; although he displays what is coming to be his obvious disdain for religion of all kinds, he shows Marcus playing a role in his own destruction through the kid's own intolerance and pride. Although the president of the college is a Republican political hack (as Roth sees it), the author lets him deliver the theme of the novel in a thunderous speech near the end of the book: you may try to hide from history: but like Jonah inside the whale, it will find you.
Roth Has Written Yet Another Great Novel September 18, 2008
13 out of 25 found this review helpful
Indignation might be slight if novels are measured by the numbers of words they contain, but if instead one judges a novel by its ability to rearrange the workings of the reader's mind, then it might be better to say that Indignation is one of the weightier books in Roth's already quite weighty oeuvre.
Formally, the book is very ambitious. Here we have a story within a story within a story, but not one that is given to us in nested frames, as in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." Instead we get a delicate unfolding of revelations about the matter of who speaks, and each revelation is calculated not to shock or titillate, but rather to expand upon the novel's thematic concerns.
I say theme rather than character not because we don't get fully realized characters here -- we do; in spades. I say theme because at its core, Indignation is an old-fashioned didactic novel of ideas that accomplishes its ends while simultaneously and scrupulously doing all of the character work we require of contemporary psychological realist works, and also using a highly sophisticated contemporary structure of the sort Roth's readers have come to expect because he has spent the last twenty years teaching himself to be a new kind of writer, book by book.
It is necessary to reveal some of the book's surprises in order to talk about it at greater length, so be warned:
What the reader learns by book's end is that the book is constructed by an old-fashioned third-person omniscient narrator who has access to the morphine-addled mind of a dying young man who thinks he is already dead and has found himself in an afterlife in which he is left with only his memories, and in which he is concerned mostly with the matters that would seem to others to be mere minutiae, but which to him are the most important things in the world.
The book is also deeply concerned with the ways that seemingly arbitrary exercises of power can unknowingly become matters of life-and-death to those upon whom the power is inflicted. In the context of the book, we're talking about a young man who dies in Korea because of a chain of events set into motion because he resisted his father's obnoxious demands that he lay low, but the reader is also invited to consider the exigencies and coincidences history imposes upon the individual, particularly upon the young and powerless, and also the ways in which noble and ignoble choices can both lead to disastrous outcomes despite the best (or worst) intentions of all involved.
That summary is truly an oversimplification of the book's themes, and quite inadequate, especially because the book's themes are most strongly amplified at the story's end, in a moment in which the reader is receptive to them because Roth has done such a thorough job of immersing the reader in the focal character's consciousness that the reader is truly devastated when the focal character meets his end.
The New York Times reviewer unfairly criticized Indignation for lacking the ambition of Roth's American Trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain.) It is true that the American Trilogy (along with Sabbath's Theater, which she also wrongly trashed) is Roth's greatest accomplishment, but just as (as another Amazon reviewer noted) it might be unfair to elevate a novel simply because Roth wrote it, it is also unfair to dismiss a very good novel simply because its writer has also written three of the very greatest novels of our time.
Make no mistake about it: Indignation is a very good novel, one well worth the time of any thoughtful and receptive reader, and a worthy addition to the life's work of a writer who will surely be read two hundred years from now.
Not Up to Rothian Standards September 19, 2008
9 out of 15 found this review helpful
Philip Roth has raised a high bar for himself in terms of artistic achievement. Just in the last 25 years alone he has written some masterpieces of modern American fiction. The Counter Life, Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain, all belong in the pantheon of great American novels. Unfortunately, his last three novels have fallen well below the high level of artistic accomplishment which most Roth readers expect. Everyman, Exit Ghost, and now Indignation are slim books, both in size, execution, and end product. In overall emotional quality and tone, Indigation is the best of the three. There is a certain draw Roth is able to create, making the novel seem necessary and important. Yet all three seem rushed, compressed: the mere footnotes of a novel. The major problem is of depth and girth. Roth is churning these out every year, and the margins are purposefully oversized (perhaps to make the reader feel he or she is getting their $15 worth) and consequently in that small space the prose power is diminished. Roth is confining himself, and the outcome is flat. For his loyal readers, Roth brings a great deal of expectation to his works. Unfortunately and sadly, Indignation meets them only about half way -- and for a writer as good as Roth, this isn't enough.
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