Indignation

Fans of Philip Roth will cleave to the familiar in his latest novel Indignation. The themes of sex and death, and the story – a confused male protagonist is caught between sexual abandonment and familial repression against the background of the Jewish immigrant experience in  claustrophobic Newark, New Jersey – are all reassuringly Roth. However, these familiarities do not mean that this is ground too well trod to be original.

Roth takes a calculated risk with his narrator Marcus Messner, an exceptional student who moves away from his overbearing neurotic Jewish family to pursue his education at Winesburg College. By revealing the death of the narrator (shot down in the Korean War at the age of 19) a quarter of the way in, he is able to set his story in the hinterland of oblivion.

Unsurprisingly for an author who has always (but more deeply since the 2006 publication of Everyman) ruminated on what it means to die, Roth places Death at the forefront of Indignation from the outset. Death is inescapable for Marcus and the reader, suspending the novel in a state which ‘wasn't an endless nothing but consisted instead of memory, cogitating for eons on itself’.

The great themes of sex and death loom so large in the novel that it takes a reader some time to see that in terms of plot at least, very little actually happens. A sexual encounter between Marcus and fellow student Olivia is replayed endlessly, as Marcus questions what it means about her, about himself, about sexual fantasy, jealousies and his attempt to align the virginal naiveté of his own upbringing with the imminemt sexual revolution of the 1960s.

By developing this tender relationship, Roth makes Marcus appealing and accessible to the reader and combats the remoteness which the knowledge of his death inevitably implies. The relationship which tips Marcus from his schoolboy sexual desires to an appreciation of Olivia’s  vulnerability and fragility is telling: his indignation at what he perceives to be her debased promiscuity is misplaced – having to change his point of view is as frustrating to his rigidly held beliefs as attempting to challenge his father’s paranoia about his safety.  

Where then does indignation take us? Marcus bristles with resentment – against his father, his irritating roommates, the college Dean, and the required weekly visit to chapel. Indeed, he revels in these feelings, as he recounts during a conversation with the Dean: ‘I inwardly sang out the most beautiful word in the English language: In-dig-na-tion!'

Marcus cleaves to what he was taught was the national anthem of China ‘Arise, ye who refuse to be bondslaves! . . . Indignation fills the hearts of all of our countrymen, Arise! Arise! Arise!’ Consumed by such indignation, Marcus dies in Korea, killed by the Chinese.

One could conjecture that with Marcus’s death, Roth seek to challenge the misplaced free-floating indignation that is so prevalent in the modern world. While the novel has been criticized for being slight, I can think of no better compliment for this work; Roth captures the sense that it is only with the slightest shift that indignation turns to self-destruction. It is not through the looming and familiar themes of Roth’s work that we gain a greater understanding of the human condition but through the sparks of human flaws.