Indignation

I recently picked up this little book--my first exposure to Philip Roth--and was completely blown away. Someone described Roth as writing "perfect novels," and I think that this might just have been perfect. Short, concise, yet rich and descriptive. When you read this book, you are carried away into a different time, when things were simpler, yet so much more complex. You connect with the narrator because we've all been where he is--or at least, we've all experienced similar things--horrible roommates, rocky relationships with parents and authority figures, first love, first break-ups, and crazy adolescents. The ending caught me by surprise--and the sheer irony of it all reminded me of life itself--no matter what happens, or what we do, life just marches on... Sometimes in the way we least expect it. Great book, would certainly recommend.

One of the best of 2008 for sure. Philip Roth provides the reader with an example of how to write a novel with perfect economy so rarely seen in modern overblown fiction- no matter how entertaining. In this little book are all the essentials: history past and present in vivid color, characters one can see inside and out, psychology of choice, life's vicissitudes, humor, pathos, reflection. Nothing is unnecessary here- all moves with perfect and interesting cadence. One is rooting for these people, while fearing the glint of the knife and the red of blood which surely will follow. Perfect.

Do we each have a turning point or series of turning points in our lives that lead us to our fate? Or do we simply have things happen to us, in combination with our childhoods, our makeup, our genetics and the world events which catch us up, which in all their minutiae add up to "fate?" This is a small perfect book about which one should say nothing so that its progression and its surprises are not telegraphed in advance!

Roth's protagonist, Marcus Messner, is filled with enough of his own youthful and idealistic indignation to justify the book's title. But the title word could just as easily apply to Marcus's butcher father, to the Winesburg college dean and president and a number of other minor characters, as well as to the Chinese Communist hordes swarming down through North Korea in that frigid and often nearly forgotten conflict of the fifties, which forms an ominous and omnipresent background to the story. Indignation, which is a surprisingly slight book, nearly a novella, marks a return to the kind of stories that made Roth famous over forty-some years ago. Like Good-Bye Columbus, it looks at college life and all the excitement, mysteries and sexual frustrations that accompany it. Winesburg College is, of course, an obvious nod (or perhaps eye-rolling shaking of the head) to Sherwood Anderson's classic collection of interconnected stories, Winesburg, Ohio - a book which I first read in my own college days in the sixties. I was reading Anderson, in fact, around the same time I first discovered Philip Roth, in his then-bestselling and then-scandalous novel, Portnoy's Complaint. A novel which finally put the sin of Onan right out there in the open. I thought it was about time too, as I nodded and chuckled my way through Alex's adventures with milk bottles, a slab of liver, and, finally, the Monkey. In fact, I was naive and stupid enough to adopt that book as required reading in one of the first Lit classes I taught in 1970. And I actually got away with it. I have read many other Roth books since then. My favorite is one of Roth's earliest novels, Letting Go, which I have re-read several times and would highly recommend. More recently, The Human Stain is, I think, one of Roth's best realized works, and its film version, with Sir Anthony Hopkins, is equally good. (Which makes me remember Richard Benjamin and Ali McGraw in the classic film, Good-Bye Columbus. Benjamin also brought Alex Portnoy to life on screen, an effort which was less successful.) Indignation, with its showers of semen high into the air, stained socks and the unstable but beautiful "Olivia the Expert" does indeed mark a kind of restrained return to the Portnoy days, albeit under a shadow of war and imminent death. I read this book in just two sittings. It's funny, it's disturbing, and it's immediate, despite its setting of over fifty years ago. A real page-turner, entertaining and real. - Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy: At Play in the ASA

I think this book will be read for decades, maybe longer. It's succinct and fiercely written. The centerpiece clash between Marcus Messner and Dean Caudwell is a brilliant verbal boxing match that speaks to assimilation, organization, power, faith, ignorance and, yes, indignation. There's nothing extraneous here. The writing is taut and boiled-down to its essence. "Indignation" made me think about people's attitudes towards their own self-worth and how much a role that plays in their character - from would-be girlfriend Olivia to Messner's mother, from the dean to Sonny Colter. This book is about entitlement in a very powerful way. It's about oppression by organization, whether it's frat boys or the college superstructure itself. It's about the people in the trenches (not giving anything away) doing the messy work of life. It's about societal norms and niceties--and everything, in the end, that's not so nice. Brilliantly conceived, well executed and power in every page. For the return on investment (in other words, this won't take you long to read) this is one of the best.