As good a place to begin as any: on a bench, on the campus of fictional Winesburg College in real Ohio, with our hero ruminating on the new clothes he bought for college—in large part because he has just vomited all over them in the dean’s office—which clothes he bought in the first place so as to resemble the collegiate fellow from the picture in the course catalog. You know the one. Marcus Messner, then, ostensibly staring at his shoes:
Those were the clothes that I wore while I sat in chapel trying how not to learn to lead a good life in accordance with biblical teachings and singing to myself instead the Chinese national anthem. Those were the clothes I’d been wearing when my roommate Elwyn had thrown the punch that had nearly broken my jaw. Those were the clothes I was wearing when Olivia went down on me in Elwyn’s LaSalle. Yes, there’s the picture of the boy and girl that should adorn the cover of the Winesburg catalogue: me in those clothes being blown by Olivia and having no idea what to make of it.
What to make of it?
Philip Roth’s new novel Indignation takes its title from the lyrics to the Chinese national anthem mentioned above, in what amounts to an ironic-in-the-worst-way joke on the innocent, and therefore doomed Marcus. For that and other reasons more immediately obvious, these latest 233 pages of Roth’s published work are of surprising relevance to, well, us—the collegiate generation of the present day. Roth hasn’t written anything so apparently salient to the nineteen year-old maybe since Portnoy’s Complaint, and even there the teenage reader hears the message which echoes through Roth’s fiction of middle and old age: “You may think it’s bad now—just wait.” Well, there’s not much to wait for by the end of Indignation, and poor Marcus is indeed as innocent and doomed as they come.
Marcus Messner, age 19, sophomore transfer student, is far from his Newark home. His self-inflicted transplant amounts to a flight from his father’s suddenly overbearing reign of locked doors and fearful lectures. Mr. Messner, a kosher butcher—more on that later, notes the trained reader of Philip Roth—is more than ordinarily paranoid about the fates that may or may not await his son. It’s not entirely clear why, nor is meant to be, but for one thing it’s 1951, the Korean War is killing American men by the thousands, and the Messners have already lost two elder cousins to the Second World War. Exit Marcus.
Marcus is unprepared for everything that Roth’s young Jewish men are usually unprepared for: the Midwest, academia, authority figures and young non-Jewish women. Notably, Marcus is unusually naïve in the ways of sex and women writ large (does this have something to do with History? Perhaps naïveté in 2008 is of equivalent interest to um, intrepidness in 1969, the year of Portnoy). Never mind women, Marcus is exposed to horrors more unexpected and unprecedented—except, come to think of it, in Philip Roth’s novels. (Sabbath’s Theater and Zuckerman Unbound. Hint.) After such an exposure, Marcus is debriefed by an older boy, Sonny Cottler, Cleveland Jew:
“There are such gargoyle people, Marcus, and you have now run into one.” “But this isn’t love—that’s absurd.” “Lots about love is absurd,” Cottler told me.
That’s marvelously restrained understatement, which sounds pat, unless you know what just happened, but here I confess I have reached my prudish limit. I simply will not tell you.
It isn’t long before Marcus has met Olivia Hutton, the unsettlingly promiscuous doctor’s daughter with a scar on one wrist—that, at least, is all Marcus needs to know. Roth has a way of letting secondary characteristics supplant personhood in secondary characters—one starts a novel with the usual cast, and by the end you’re down to one or two human beings confronted with a bunch of legged and limbed synecdoches walking around. Yes, Olivia has that one scar, and it’s there for exactly the reason Marcus (and his mother) assume. But this wouldn’t be any fun unless Roth made something of that wrist you weren’t expecting, except (this is your moment, trained Rothian) that you kind of were: that Olivia tried
to kill herself according to kosher specifications by emptying her body of blood. Had she been successful, had she expertly completed the job with a single perfect slice of the blade, she would have rendered herself kosher in accordance with rabbinical law.
It would temper the horror and certainly ruin a good time to mention that no, she wouldn’t have, unless she also had a cloven hoof and chewed her cud. But Olivia is anything but kosher, which is problematic, though not nearly as much as the catalyzing happening in the roommate’s car—the night of their first date—which is the point of departure for the slide of the novel into tragedy.
But let’s leave the sex aside for a moment and wonder why it’s still fun to read Philip Roth. Surely his winding, booming voice is still there, and so is his attention to the smallest detail you never thought any sane person would take up (and wouldn’t). When Roth shouts in that voice it’s hard not to listen. In a novel with Indignation for a title you might expect more rather than less of that sort of thing, and there’s plenty of it, but there are moments like this, too:
It takes muscle to be a butcher, and my mother had muscles, and I felt them when she took me in her arms while I cried.
“My mother had muscles” is nearly enough, but (forgive the pun) it’s Roth’s muscles I find compelling here—small ones, less a butcher’s than a typist’s.
There is plenty of the former in the novel, and those big muscles are still the ones to watch. If we turn back to History for a moment, and note that this is a novel of wartime published in wartime, at a moment when the nation’s college campuses that most resemble Winesburg (Hint.) are sheltered from the bloodbath overseas by fortune and good fortune, we’ll hear a blast from the pulpit that could as easily be delivered from Johnson Chapel as page 217 of Indignation. Speaking is the president of Winesburg College, Albin Lentz, and whether you attribute his thoughts to the author or not, the voice is Roth and in full throat:
…history will catch you in the end. Because history is not the background—history is the stage! And you are on the stage! Oh, how sickening is your appalling ignorance of your own times! Most sickening of all is that it is just that kind of ignorance that you are purportedly at Winesburg to expunge. What kind of a time do you think you belong to, anyway? Can you answer? Do you know? Do you have any idea that you belong to a time at all?
This is late in the novel, which by now is accelerating. As the novel swells by sleight of hand to its close, and even though we’re told repeatedly of the looming disaster, and for all the talk of the Korean War, even experienced readers of Roth’s fiction might find themselves a little surprised to be taken there. One sad last butcher joke and then the last pararaph of Indignation inflames things to where they often end in Roth’s hands. Read it slowly.
Where does that leave us? It might be (here comes History) that we’re in Roth’s Late Period—his recent novels bear some of the traits of Minor Tragedies, and this one recaptures the mood that made Roth great in Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral, albeit in a smaller portion: the despairing realization that one’s internal composition is inescapable, and with it one’s parents, one’s people and one’s predilections. What Roth does to Marcus in Indignation is akin to what he does to Coleman Silk, to Nathan Zuckerman, Mickey Sabbath, Swede Levov—the heroes of his major tragedies. And as for them as well as plenty in Indignation—Olivia’s wrist, Mr. Messner’s sanity, Elwyn’s car, Marcus—it’s all ritual slaughter, offered up on the altar of the ineludible past. No less than those four Rothian heroes is Marcus Messner a victim of his misguided romp away from home. Ritual slaughter—that’s the easy pun that’s also the easy thing to say about Indignation and Philip Roth.
Broad statements about Philip Roth usually embrace a few major qualities, of which most attract nowadays (as ever, though the targets have moved) plenty of scorn and belittling criticism. Roth is male, Roth is provincial, Roth is Jewish, Roth is an exhibitionist. As far as saying anything useful about his talents or failures as a novelist, it might be helpful to dispense with all that. Is Roth’s fiction Jewish? Only to whatever extent we would call Homer an author in the Pagan school. Is Roth’s fiction male? Well, so are about half of us, a respectable percentage when it comes to identifiable traits exposed in fiction, but I think too that on closer inspection a lot of the qualities that get criticized for “maleness”—insecurity, desire, frustration—aren’t, and deserve better from those who will universalize almost anything. Is Roth’s fiction exhibitionist?
Well, I should hope so. Fiction would be awfully boring if it weren’t. Roth’s happens to force prurience on the reader, and it occurs to me that it’s actually helpful to operate with a kind of sustained innocence when reading Roth’s novels, sustained thoroughly enough still to register a shock when the sexually outrageous takes its turn. What seems simple restatement in Indignation of sexually adventurous spirits and corresponding terror is more than just that—it’s of another era, one before Portnoy and before the sexual revolution, when automotive trysts seem actually to have happened. They don’t much anymore, as the nearest college-age person likely can tell you, but the nerves, the discomfort—what we call “awkwardness,” awkwardly—and the obsessive attention to detail with which Marcus confronts the driver’s seat of the LaSalle have hung around long after curfews and mandatory chapel passed mildly away. Other than one discordant moment in a hospital room, of unfortunate significance to the plot, Marcus Messner is that bewildered innocent thrown up against another creature more thoroughly of Roth’s universe.
What’s hard to say about Indignation has always been hard to say about Philip Roth, which perhaps is the cause of all the interpretive crutches described (and, I fear, used) above. It isn’t just that Roth arranges his syntax a little differently from others (“I importunately…”), or that these days he uses “back of” in place of the preposition “behind” at every opportunity. Philip Roth can turn a phrase, and Philip Roth can shout, and when he does he can be read aloud to real effect. What’s more, he can tell a joke. His best are dead serious.