Here's a reliable, though
overworked, story idea: A good kid moves from a small town to the big city and
is overwhelmed, and possibly undone, by his new environment. Indignation, the latest in Philip
Roth's recent shower of short novels, convincingly reverses that plot's
traditional course. Set in 1951—at the height of the brief, bloody Korean
War—it follows Marcus Messner, a Newark butcher's kid, from a happy stint
at community college near his parents' home to Winesburg College, a small Ohio
school governed by codes and mores alien to him.
Roth never reveals what,
if any, relationship his Winesburg has with the blighted town of Sherwood
Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, but for Marcus, it similarly becomes a place of
thwarted hopes. For him, it takes far less than a lifetime. Transferring to
Winesburg to escape his father's toxic overprotectiveness, Marcus soon finds a
different kind of paternalism at work. Conspicuously placed with three of the
school's few Jewish students, Marcus encounters one distraction after
another—noisy roommates, pushy fraternities, mandatory chapel sessions
praising "Christ's example"—as he attempts to focus on his studies. But
the greatest distraction is largely of his own choosing: a tumultuous
relationship with Olivia, a fellow student whose sexual adventurousness fascinates
and scares him.
With Indignation, Roth creates a punchy
illustration of how repression works like a slow poison. Penned in by
restrictions and expectations—some from those around him, others rooted
in his own psyche—Marcus feels driven to rebel, even though he knows he
risks expulsion, shame, and war service.
From this, Roth builds to
a pair of remarkable setpieces; one involves a debate on Bertrand Russell, the
other a snowbound explosion of consequences from the campus' pent-up sexual
energy. If there's a problem with the book, it's that the rest of it sometimes
feels loosely gathered around these moments. With Roth's unsparing gift for
observation, however, that isn't much of a problem, and Indignation works beautifully as a
vivid depiction of the far side of the '60s, when war raged and a conservative
atmosphere threatened to dampen the freedom that's supposed to be an American
birthright. Whether that past remains happily irretrievable, Roth lets readers
answer for themselves.