Philip Roth’s Indignation can be read as an antiwar novel, an indirect attack on U.S. President George W. Bush’s America, and at war indefinitely. Roth places the action of Indignation in 1951, when a young man lacking an education deferment could be called for service on the Korean front, where thousands of American were dying in Chinese offensives.
Roth’s narrator is Marcus Gessner, a college-age, New Jersey-raised son of a kosher butcher, who tries to escape his father’s watchful eye by enrolling at idyllic “Winesburg, a small liberal arts and engineering college in the farm country of north central Ohio.” Winesburg represents to Marcus all that is safe, secure and “square” about the home front, though his year it is haunted by the threat of death on a battlefield far away.
Indignation (Viking Canada) might be considered a dark second act to Roth’s breakthrough fiction of 50 years ago, the brilliant novella Goodbye, Columbus, which opposed downtown Jewish Newark to the lives of suburban strivers who could afford nose jobs for their daughters and the cost of sending their sons to Ohio State. In that early work, the key themes are young love and the suburban-urban divide in postwar Jewish life. Indignation is a novel of death and madness. Crisply paced, itself a short work built of cinematic scenes, Indignation, like Roth’s recent Everyman, hurtles toward death as the final inevitable fact.
Marcus, in the tumultuous year of his life that Roth describes for us, thinks of himself as a kind of dupe, an unknowing victim of chance and error. He makes decisions that, with hindsight, make little sense, and indignation, a rage for principled action, contributes to his undoing.
Marcus is among Roth’s most extreme characters. There is humour in Indignation, but it is resolutely dark, as in the conclusion of an argument that breaks out when Winesburg’s dean invites Marcus into his office: “I vomited then, though luckily not onto the dean or his desk. Head down, I robustly vomited onto the rug. Then, when I tried to avoid the rug, I vomited onto the chair in which I’d been sitting and, when I spun away from the chair, vomited onto the glass of one of the framed photographs hanging on the dean’s wall, the one of the Winesburg undefeated championship football team of 1924.”
In Indignation, even sex, a source of humour in much of Roth’s fiction, is linked with death. Marcus’ object of desire at Winesburg is the elusive Olivia Hutton, on whose wrist he notices the telltale “gash” of a suicide attempt. Drawing a willfully perverse connection between this and his father’s trade, Marcus considers “what Olivia had tried to do, 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. Olivia’s telltale scar came from attempting to perform her own ritual slaughter.”
Even college life, so idyllically evoked in Goodbye, Columbus, breaks down into bizarre violence, as naive pranks in the midst of a record-breaking snowstorm end with “drunken boys, their garments, their hands, their crew-cut hair, their faces smeared blue-black with ink and crimson with blood.” This is the home front as carnival, unknowingly making itself ready for the horrors of the enemy assault on a “spiny ridge in central Korea,” where the novel shudders to a halt.
Indignation provides breathless, eye-opening reading. It is a vital burlesque of youth and the waste of war. As a bookend to the shelf of work that Roth began with Goodbye, Columbus, it is among the finest writing about post-World War II America.
Norman Ravvin’s books include the story collection Sex, Skyscrapers and Standard Yiddish and A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory. He is chair of the Concordia University Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies.