Indignation - Books (Philip Roth, Hardcover)

For full product details, view this product on Amazon.

Customer Reviews of Indignation

mikethescottish
Glasgow, Scotland
8th January 2009

A Misconstrued Gem
'Indignation' is not a bad novel, but it's certainly a change in direction from the maudlin novellas we've been expecting from Philip Roth of late. Which, annoyingly, makes it difficult to describe.

This is a coming-of-age novel that refuses to let its character come of age. This is a novel that takes constantly changes from one linear path to another, before committing the literary equivalent of sticking one's middle finger up at the reader. Indignation? More like infuriation...

At it's core, 'Indignation' is a tragi-comic farce, more reminiscent of earlier works like 'The Great American Novel' than the straight-laced realism we've come to expect. Or is it? It's not as straightforward as it might like you to think- there's the sense of plot playfulness we see in 'Deception' and 'Operation Shylock', the man-apart realism of the American triology, all overlaid with heady youthful idealism that harks back to Roth's debut, 'Goodbye Columbus'. But it makes its style its own.

The essentials: the novel is easy to read. It's got a well-constructed lead character, a wonderfully inverted 'Jewish Mother' (played by the character's father), some wholly unappetising sex scenes and a college riot that Animal House would be proud of. But all that is beside the point. What makes 'Indignation' more the messy collage of ideas it appears at first is its masterful intertwining of fatalist defeatism and comedy. Somehow, this bleak yell at societal conventions is remarkably funny. Weird, I know- but Roth pulls it off.

If you come to this novel expecting a simple realist tale, and read it as such, it might not grab you. But take a step back and the novel shows its true colours- a messy, confrontational and immensely readable slice of postmodern fun.

Ultimately, the novel's 'flaw' is its best feature- that it refuses to satisfy. Roth may be poking fun at his readers, but when it's this enjoyable, who cares?

Ray
Norway
20th November 2008

Masterly
While this may not rank against the American trilogy this is nevertheless a masterpiece. The writing is faultless and the narrative is constantly engaging. Above all Roth is, as ever, capable of creating a state of mind that is coherent and compelling.

Ethan Cooper
Big Apple
1st November 2008

Another Must-Read from Roth
INDIGNATION is a fascinating novel, albeit difficult to read except in 20 page bursts. The reason is that the intense Marcus Messner, Roth's young protagonist and narrator, finds little joy, but much angst and guilt, in his life. He is the master of nothing. Everything is a challenge. His world is an ordeal. At one moment, Marcus is surprised to be told by his college Dean that he is shouting and pointing angrily. But throughout, Marcus seems on the verge such hysterical expression. This makes INDIGNATION a book to enjoy in small doses.

INDIGNATION is the story of Marcus, a studious young man and only child, who flees his overbearing father in Newark for a year at Winesburg College in rural Ohio. But when Marcus takes a step forward in his life--such as excelling in school, establishing greater independence from his parents, having new sexual experiences, and befriending the leaders in a fraternity--Roth connects that step to perilous undercurrents of guilt, principled naïveté, or treachery. In INDIGNATION, all the happy normal experiences of youth and college don't make Marcus stronger. Instead, they make him increasingly vulnerable.

The narrative skill shown in INDIGNATION is truly dazzling. Not only is there not a single word out of place. But Roth is also able to pull a surprising and profound subtext from each experience that Marcus relates. The effect is that you get every event in the novel twice: once in the seamless and interesting telling; then a second time in its surprising interpretation. Only in the very end of INDIGNATION does the meaning that Roth pulls from an experience seem obvious. (I thought we were going to learn that Marcus was doomed to recapitulate the tragic meshuge of his father's family.)

Of course, it's all a matter of taste. But I must say that Roth sometimes seems to overplay to make his points. Anyone remember the vomit scene in American Pastoral, which expressed revulsion? Well, INDIGNATION has a vomit scene as well. For an author who is able to find great depth in the most ordinary interactions, I wonder why these extreme physical expressions need to occur.

Sphex
London
23rd October 2008

In the world of the righteous, beware of what the plumber says
An American teenager storms off to his room. Unlikely as it sounds, this is uncharacteristic behaviour on the part of Marcus Messner, the first-person narrator of Philip Roth's latest novel. Already, within a dozen pages, we think Marcus has a point. Enrolled at the local college, he looks back to the "wonderful time" he had ("wonderful except when it came to eviscerating chickens") helping his father out at the butcher's store on Lyons Avenue in Newark, New Jersey. He remembers the way they would deal with the demanding customers, and, of course, he remembers the blood, the buckets of blood. On the other side of the world the Korean war is underway, and blood is being spilled by bullet and bayonet.

Then, one day, his father flips and begins wondering when his only son is going to go off and get himself killed. Why this sudden change? Being at college means avoiding the draft, avoiding danger. "The questions were ludicrous... I had been a prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student" whose main ambition was to be the first Messner to attend university. He storms off to his room when he finds out that his father has been "driven crazy by the chance remark of a plumber". He's incensed that his father has chosen to believe, not what he has seen with his own eyes for an entire lifetime, but what he's been told by a plumber "on his knees fixing the toilet in the back of the store!"

For me, this brings to mind the image of a priest on his knees before the altar, making people believe things that are not true, that defy a lifetime of experience of how the world goes, that contradict reason and logic and evidence. We don't know it yet, but Marcus Messner's intellectual hero is Bertrand Russell. Later, when he gets into trouble at college with Dean Caudwell ("the biggest Christer around"), we learn just how hard life can be for an American atheist in "the world of the righteous". There are parallels between Marcus and the British mathematician G. H. Hardy (who was at Trinity with Russell): both were unbelievers who bridled at the thought of attending college chapel, indignant at "putrefied primitive superstition" and the "disgrace of religion", and both resisted taking the advice of more sophisticated friends. Hardy too had to face the dean of his college, but there the parallel ends: while Hardy went on to enjoy a long and renowned academic career, Marcus sadly does not. (In the spirit of the novel, it was pure luck I happened to be reading Hardy at the same time as Roth.)

Marcus admires those who seem to be in control. At Winesburg College in Ohio he meets Olivia and this time chance works in his favour - he gets lucky in a very pleasant if perplexing way. To him, she is poised, an expert, in control. To herself, nothing could be further from the truth. Her rebuke is stinging: "I, who have eight thousand moods a minute... am 'under control'?" When his mother visits, she remembers the time her husband locked him out, and admits, "I couldn't control him, and this is the result."

This brilliant novel is set midway through the twentieth century, at a time of war and when world war was just-lived history. It was also a significant moment in intellectual history, one that might itself come to be seen as a tipping point in human knowledge. Our understanding of complex systems like national economies and the weather had rested upon the fundamental assumption that small changes in the initial values would get washed out over time. The discovery of the butterfly effect in the early sixties - in which tiny changes in those values result in huge divergence - began a rethink that is continuing to this day. Take any catastrophe and it may be that the seeds of its destructive power were there all along, slowly growing from small beginnings.

While we are now used to the idea that world events are not always or even often under the control of governments, on the scale of the individual we haven't yet shaken off the educated view of the world as a deterministic place. We are too attached to the idea that a person's success or failure is down to their intrinsic qualities rather than to luck. (Even lottery winners sometimes attribute their success to their "positive" attitude!) Roth's achievement is to tell a story that keeps you riveted to every word while also sparking off some of these ideas. In the end, it is the uneducated father who puts it best and teaches Marcus his most important lesson: "the terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieves the most disproportionate result."

jerard1

18th October 2008

Brilliant short novel
This is one of Philip Roth's best novels, the funny and poignant story of a young man's journey to adulthood in the 1950s. Although short, it manages to pack so much in - stifling mid-Western conformity, New Jersey Jewishness, first love and the horrors of war. It is a shame the critics now take Roth for granted because he is so prolific.He is still at the top of his game.