The intersection between the political and the personal has proved to be the defining theme of late-period Philip Roth. In American Pastoral (1997), the author served up a stinging elegy for ’60s-era idealism turned sour, as refracted through the lives of one very ordinary middle-class family. The Human Stain (2000) offered a twisty meditation on our country’s obsessions with race, class and sexuality, set against the backdrop of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Even one of Roth’s less politically-minded works like last year’s Exit Ghost features a group of characters who, as much as they try, can’t seem to escape the larger realities of the post-9/11, Bush-era world in which they’re inexorably stuck.
Roth’s latest novel, Indignation, isn’t exactly in the class of those other books—it certainly lacks the far-ranging ambition and feeling of American Pastoral or The Plot Against America (2004), the author’s harrowing alternative history that imagined an anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh becoming president and driving American Jews into exile. But anyone who thinks Roth’s somehow resting on his literary laurels clearly isn’t paying close attention.
The hero and narrator of his latest tale is Marcus Messner, a studious young man who, like so many of Roth’s heroes, can’t quite get along with his parents. Living at home and attending Robert Treat College in Newark, New Jersey in the months after the start of the Korean War, Marcus bristles beneath the increasingly watchful and obsessive eye of his father, a kosher butcher convinced that his son is going to make a tragic misstep and ruin his future. Desperate to get away, Marcus decides to enroll in Winesburg College in Ohio, where all of his parents’ worst fears are about to be realized.
The uncontainable Jewish spirit set loose in a WASP haven is an idea that Roth has been exploring since Goodbye, Columbus (1959), and here it’s given an intriguing, unexpectedly self-critical new twist. Marcus is steadily revealed to be something of a pill, so busy being indignant at everyone around him—the roommate who plays Beethoven at all hours of the night, the fellow Jews who try to coax him into joining the all-Jewish fraternity, even the pretty-but-troubled young woman who performs oral sex on him on their first date—that he sends himself into deep isolation.
Is it better to be righteous and true to your principles, even if your principles are woefully misguided? (At one point, while arguing with the dean of students, Marcus quotes Bertrand Russell: “Conquer the world by intelligence. . .and not by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from living in it.”) Or is it better to swallow your pride and just get along with the blowhards and glad-handlers all around you (especially if, by swallowing said pride, you get to stay at college and avoid getting killed in the Korean War)? In perhaps the ultimate Roth flourish, the answer to these questions—not to mention Marcus’ very existence—comes to hinge on whether or not this atheistic Jew is willing to attend mandatory chapel services at his nonsectarian college.
In its final pages, Indignation introduces a whopper of a twist, one that’s both exceedingly sly and moving. It’s a final reminder that Roth couldn’t write an ordinary book if he tried. Indeed, what makes this book so affecting is that it’s a classic coming-of-age tale, complete with unwanted pregnancies, disapproving parents and teachers, and fraternity hijinks gone awry, that also understands how real world realities intrude on even the most emotionally remote and geographically isolated individual lives, and how everyday decisions can sometimes alter the course of world history.
One last note about this splendid novel: Indignation is set in the same fictional town created by Sherwood Anderson in his classic book of connected stories, Winesburg, Ohio (1918). Roth doesn’t borrow any of Anderson’s characters, but some of the streets and places he writes about are ones Anderson invented nearly a hundred years ago. It’s a bold and indeed deeply political gesture: An iconic Jewish writer communing with one of the 20th century’s WASP literary gods—and, in effect, writing Jews into a category of American literature from which they have been previously excluded. Anderson might be spinning in his grave knowing that Roth has made such an unseemly mess of his quirky, God-fearing, little burg. But the rest of us are very grateful.
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