Indignation

By Philip Roth

Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life’s unimagined chances and terrifying consequences.

It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad -- mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy.

As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father’s fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.

Indignation, Philip Roth’s twenty-ninth book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Sep 16, 2008
• ISBN: 9780547345307

Philip Roth

PHILIP ROTH (1933–2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004” and the W.H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year, making Roth the first writer in the forty-six-year history of the prize to win it twice. In 2005 Roth became the third living American writer to have his works published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. In 2012 he won Spain’s highest honor, the Prince of Asturias Award, and in 2013 he received France’s highest honor, Commander of the Legion of Honor.

Book preview

Copyright © 2008 by Philip Roth

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Roth, Philip.

Indignation / Philip Roth.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-547-05484-1

I. Title.

PS3568.0855153 2008

813'.54—dc22 2008011431

eISBN 978-0-547-34530-7

v4.1216

For K. W.

Acknowledgments

The Chinese national anthem appears here in a World War Two translation of a song composed by Tian Han and Nieh Erh after the Japanese invasion of 1931; there are other translations of the song extant. During World War Two it was sung around the world by those allied with China in their struggle against the Empire of Japan. In 1949 it was adopted as the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China.

Much of the dialogue attributed to Marcus Messner on pages 101–103 is taken almost verbatim from Bertrand Russell’s lecture Why I Am Not a Christian, delivered on March 6, 1927, at Battersea Town Hall, London, and collected by Simon and Schuster in 1957 in a volume of essays of the same name, edited by Paul Edwards and largely devoted to the subject of religion.

The quotations on pages 167–168 are taken from chapter 19 of The Growth of the American Republic, fifth edition, by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager (Oxford University Press, 1962).

Olaf (upon what were once knees)

    does almost ceaselessly repeat

        there is some shit I will not eat

—E. E. Cummings,

    i sing of Olaf glad and big

Under Morphine

ABOUT TWO AND A HALF MONTHS after the well-trained divisions of North Korea, armed by the Soviets and Chinese Communists, crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea on June 25, 1950, and the agonies of the Korean War began, I entered Robert Treat, a small college in downtown Newark named for the city’s seventeenth-century founder. I was the first member of our family to seek a higher education. None of my cousins had gone beyond high school, and neither my father nor his three brothers had finished elementary school. I worked for money, my father told me, since I was ten years old. He was a neighborhood butcher for whom I’d delivered orders on my bicycle all through high school, except during baseball season and on the afternoons when I had to attend interschool matches as a member of the debating team. Almost from the day that I left the store—where I’d been working sixty-hour weeks for him between the time of my high school graduation in January and the start of college in September—almost from the day that I began classes at Robert Treat, my father became frightened that I would die. Maybe his fear had something to do with the war, which the U.S. armed forces, under United Nations auspices, had immediately entered to bolster the efforts of the ill-trained and underequipped South Korean army; maybe it had something to do with the heavy casualties our troops were sustaining against the Communist firepower and his fear that if the conflict dragged on as long as World War Two had, I would be drafted into the army to fight and die on the Korean battlefield as my cousins Abe and Dave had died during World War Two. Or maybe the fear had to do with his financial worries: the year before, the neighborhood’s first supermarket had opened only a few blocks from our family’s kosher butcher shop, and sales had begun steadily falling off, in part because of the supermarket’s meat and poultry section’s undercutting my father’s prices and in part because of a general postwar decline in the number of families bothering to maintain kosher households and to buy kosher meat and chickens from a rabbinically certified shop whose owner was a member of the Federation of Kosher Butchers of New Jersey. Or maybe his fear for me began in fear for himself, for at the age of fifty, after enjoying a lifetime of robust good health, this sturdy little man began to develop the persistent racking cough that, troubling as it was to my mother, did not stop him from keeping a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth all day long. Whatever the cause or mix of causes fueling the abrupt change in his previously benign paternal behavior, he manifested his fear by hounding me day and night about my whereabouts. Where were you? Why weren’t you home? How do I know where you are when you go out? You are a boy with a magnificent future before you—how do I know you’re not going to places where you can get yourself killed?

The questions were ludicrous since, in my high school years, I had been a prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student who went out with only the nicest girls, a dedicated debater, and a utility infielder for the varsity baseball team, living happily enough within the adolescent norms of our neighborhood and my school. The questions were also infuriating—it was as though the father to whom I’d been so close during all these years, practically growing up at his side in the store, had no idea any longer of who or what his son was. At the store, the customers would delight him and my mother by telling them what a pleasure it was to watch the little one to whom they used to bring cookies—back when his father used to let him play with some fat and cut it up like a big butcher, albeit using a knife with a dull blade—to watch him mature under their eyes into a well-mannered, well-spoken youngster who put their beef through the grinder to make chopped meat and who scattered and swept up the sawdust on the floor and who dutifully yanked the remaining feathers from the necks of the dead chickens hanging from hooks on the wall when his father called over to him, Flick two chickens, Markie, will ya, for Mrs. So-and-So? During the seven months before college he did more than give me the meat to grind and a few chickens to flick. He taught me how to take a rack of lamb and cut lamb chops out of it, how to slice each rib, and, when I got down to the bottom, how to take the chopper and chop off the rest of it.

And he taught me always in the most easygoing way. Don’t hit your hand with the chopper and everything will be okay, he said. He taught me how to be patient with our more demanding customers, particularly those who had to see the meat from every angle before they bought it, those for whom I had to hold up the chicken so they could literally look up the asshole to be sure that it was clean. You can’t believe what some of those women will put you through before they buy their chicken, he told me. And then he would mimic them: "‘Turn it over. No, over. Let me see the bottom.’" It was my job not just to pluck the chickens but to eviscerate them. You slit the ass open a little bit and you stick your hand up and you grab the viscera and you pull them out. I hated that part. Nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done. That’s what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.

Our store fronted on Lyons Avenue in Newark, a block up the street from Beth Israel Hospital, and in the window we had a place where you could put ice, a wide shelf tilted slightly down, back to front. An ice truck would come by to sell us chopped ice, and we’d put the ice in there and then we’d put our meat in so people could see it when they walked by. During the seven months I worked in the store full time before college I would dress the window for him. Marcus is the artist, my father said when people commented on the display. I’d put everything in. I’d put steaks in, I’d put chickens in, I’d put lamb shanks in—all the products that we had I would make patterns out of and arrange in the window artistically. I’d take some ferns and dress things up, ferns that I got from the flower shop across from the hospital. And not only did I cut and slice and sell meat and dress the window with meat; during those seven months when I replaced my mother as his sidekick I went with my father to the wholesale market early in the morning and learned to buy it too. He’d be there once a week, five, five-thirty in the morning, because if you went to the market and picked out your own meat and drove it back to your place yourself and put it in the refrigerator yourself, you saved on the premium you had to pay to have it delivered. We’d buy a whole quarter of the beef, and we’d buy a forequarter of the lamb for lamb chops, and we’d buy a calf, and we’d buy some beef livers, and we’d buy some chickens and chicken livers, and since we had a couple of customers for them, we would buy brains. The store opened at seven in the morning and we’d work until seven, eight at night. I was seventeen, young and eager and energetic, and by five I’d be whipped. And there he was, still going strong, throwing hundred-pound forequarters on his shoulders, walking in and hanging them in the refrigerator on hooks. There he was, cutting and slicing with the knives, chopping with the cleaver, still filling out orders at seven P.M. when I was ready to collapse. But my job was to clean the butcher blocks last thing before we went home, to throw some sawdust on the blocks and then scrape them with the iron brush, and so, marshaling the energy left in me, I’d scrape out the blood to keep the place kosher.

I look back at those seven months as a wonderful time—wonderful except when it came to eviscerating chickens. And even that was wonderful in its way, because it was something you did, and did well, that you didn’t care to do. So there was a lesson in doing it. And lessons I loved—bring them on! And I loved my father, and he me, more than ever before in our lives. In the store, I prepared our lunch, his and mine. Not only did we eat our lunch there but we cooked our lunch there, on a small grill in the backroom, right next to where we cut up and prepared the meat. I’d grill chicken livers for us, I’d grill little flank steaks for us, and never were we two happier together. Yet only shortly afterward the destructive struggle between us began: Where were you? Why weren’t you home? How do I know where you are when you go out? You are a boy with a magnificent future before you—how do I know you’re not going to places where you can get yourself killed?

During that fall I began Robert Treat as a freshman, whenever my father double-locked our front and back doors and I couldn’t use my keys to open either and I had to pound on one or the other door to be let in if I came home at night twenty minutes later than he thought I ought to, I believed he had gone crazy.

And he had: crazy with worry that his cherished only child was as unprepared for the hazards of life as anyone else entering manhood, crazy with the frightening discovery that a little boy grows up, grows tall, overshadows his parents, and that you can’t keep him then, that you have to relinquish him to the world.

I left Robert Treat after only one year. I left because suddenly my father had no faith even in my ability to cross the street by myself. I left because my father’s surveillance had become insufferable. The prospect of my independence made this otherwise even-tempered man, who only rarely blew up at anyone, appear as if he were intent on committing violence should I dare to let him down, while I—whose skills as a cool-headed logician had made me the mainstay of the high school debating team—was reduced to howling with frustration in the face of his ignorance and irrationality. I had to get away from him before I killed him—so I wildly told my distraught mother, who now found herself as unexpectedly without influence over him as I was.

One night I got home on the bus from downtown about nine-thirty. I’d been at the main branch of the Newark Public Library, as Robert Treat had no library of its own. I had left the house at eight-thirty that morning and been away attending classes and studying, and the first thing my mother said was Your father’s out looking for you. Why? Where is he looking? He went to a pool hall. I don’t even know how to shoot pool. What is he thinking about? I was studying, for God’s sake. I was writing a paper. I was reading. What else does he think I do night and day? He was talking to Mr. Pearlgreen about Eddie, and it got him all riled up about you. Eddie Pearlgreen, whose father was our plumber, had graduated from high school with me and gone on to college at Panzer, in East Orange, to learn to become a high school phys-ed teacher. I’d played ball with him since I was a kid. I’m not Eddie Pearlgreen, I said, I’m me. But do you know what he did? Without telling anybody, he drove all the way to Pennsylvania, to Scranton, in his father’s car to play pool in some kind of special pool hall there. But Eddie’s a pool shark. I’m not surprised he went to Scranton. Eddie can’t brush his teeth in the morning without thinking about pool. I wouldn’t be surprised if he went to the moon to play pool. Eddie pretends with guys who don’t know him that he’s only at their level of skill, and then they play and he beats the pants off them for as much as twenty-five dollars a game. He’ll end up stealing cars, Mr. Pearlgreen said. "Oh, Mother, this is ridiculous. Whatever Eddie does has no bearing on me. Will I end up stealing cars? Of course not, darling. I don’t like this game Eddie likes, I don’t like the atmosphere he

Reviews for Indignation

[indygo88 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Marcus, a young man living in New Jersey in the 1950's, lives at home and is attending a local college. When his father's behavior becomes a bit erratic and overprotective, Marcus decides it's time to escape, and he enrolls himself into a small private college in Ohio, where he is one of only a few Jewish students. As Marcus attempts to navigate college life away from home, he discovers more about his own personality, as well as his ability to establish new relationships with those who fall outside his comfort zone. I'd not read any Philip Roth before, so wasn't sure what to expect when I started this. I initially enjoyed Roth's writing style -- he seems to develop his characters quite well. But there were times when the writing became tedious and overdone, and I felt additional editing may have been beneficial. Parts of this short novel were very funny, and other parts were very sad. The ending kind of came out of nowhere for me, and the rather abrupt transition may have been accentuated by listening on audio rather than reading on paper. Regardless, I was left scratching my head a bit, and unsure how I felt about the story's resolution. I wasn't previously aware that there was a movie adaptation, but I'm quite curious to see it now.

[jigarpatel-6 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Well, this is just brilliant. On the surface a first-person Bildungsroman, this is a multi-faceted novel with the Korean War as a backdrop. Don't be duped, this is not about war, but about human weakness and how the minutiae of our lives can have far-reaching consequences. Heart-wrenching at times, this novella takes you down what seems a well-trodden road, until it reaches a denouement that leaves you reassessing all that's been, possibly even your attitude to life.Its climactic twist ranks alongside the memorable conclusions to Schlink's The Reader, McEwan's Atonement, Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. All short poignant novels which sow impressions that only grow on you.

[maryreinert · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Having once unsuccessfully plowed part way through a Roth book, I decided to try again now that he is so in the news following his death. I picked this one solely due to it small size, but was not disappointed. Marcus Messner is a young Jewish man attending a midwestern conservative college during the 1950's. He is the only son of a kosher butcher in Newark, but heads to Ohio in order to distance himself from his over protective, yet loving, father.Marcus is smart, and he has always done the right thing; he has never been in trouble. First he finds himself sharing a room with an obnoxious student; he changes room only to discover that he can't get along with the second roommate either. He is more interested in studying than dating but finds himself attracted to a young woman, Olivia, who on their first date "treats him" to oral sex. Confusion, shame, exhilaration, fascination, and guilt are a muddle of Marcus' feelings. Life gets even more confused as he is called to the Dean's office due to his lack of socialization at the college. Never before has Marcus been in such a circumstance and fears he will be expelled which would leave him open to the draft of the Korean War. One of the requirements of the college is for students to attend a once a week chapel service. Marcus being first a Jew and secondly an atheist finds a proxy to take his place. Following a panty raid/riot on the campus, life changes. The story is told from by Marcus from the dead.Was he foolish, did he stand for what he supposed he believed in, did circumstances well beyond his control shape his life? Absolutely. An interesting and rather thought-provoking novel.

[moonshineandrosefire · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In 1951, during the second year of the Korean War, an intensely studious young man has just transferred from Newark, New Jersey to begin his sophomore year on the highly conservative campus of Winesburg College in Ohio. As the son of a kosher butcher, Marcus Messner finds that he can no longer take his father's attitude towards him. It would seem as if Marcus' father - the once-sturdy, hardworking neighborhood butcher - has become increasingly fearful for his beloved son. While Marcus' harried, long-suffering mother claims that his father's apprehension only stems from his immense love and pride in Marcus and his many accomplishments, the young man can no longer deny that his father's treatment of him has produced too much tension in their relationship.To Marcus, the once jovial and diligent store-owner seems to have changed almost overnight. His inexplicable anxiety seems to stem primarily from the man's misperceptions about the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers that he imagines lurks around every corner for his beloved boy. It is this eccentric behavior that finally forces Marcus to move far away from his parents; as he believes that he can no longer endure their stifling behavior. So Marcus leaves the local college where he is originally enrolled and transfers to the pastoral, illustrious and elite campus of Ohio's Winesburg College.It is in this midwestern college, where Marcus has to find his own way among the customs and constrictions of a completely different world. Philip Roth's twenty-ninth novel Indignation, is a remarkable departure from his more recent books; this is a story of inexperience, foolishness, sexual discovery, intellectual resistance, courage, personal integrity, and error. It is a powerful story told with all the inventiveness and wit that the author has at his command.I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book; although I cannot adequately explain what I liked most about the story. In my opinion, it was a easy read for me, and quite a unique story. I found myself avidly wanting to know what would happen next and how the story would eventually develop. I would certainly give this book an A+!

[phoibee-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book can be read in one sitting but I just finish it now because I got this thing called school. I finally got the time.

Without reading any reviews, I thought the book will be about war. It is about the life of Marcus Messner, a son of kosher butcher, during the time of war. Messner is a guy who does not yield to anyone or anything...until the end. If this trait is a strength or a weakness, you may be the judge. He lives a monotonous life and he wants it to be that way. He wouldn't like to adapt to changes and leave anything that disturbs him. And when he needs to step up, he doubts himself.

I see myself in him somehow. Like him, I don't really give a shit on how people will see me as long as I go on with my own thing. I also do not like being controlled. I don't mind being alone. I am a person with wrong choices. However, I don't want to be Marcus in the end part because he became really oblivious and indifferent.

[katherinegregg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It is 1951 and Marcus Messner is a smart, hard working Jewish boy who leaves his overbearing parents in Newark to attend a conservative college in Ohio. Messner is a good kid and wants to do is lose his virginity and graduate class valedictorian. However college life is not so easy for Messner and he becomes rebellious. He has roommate problems and he gets in trouble for skipping mandatory chapel. Ultimately he gets expelled and because the Korean War is going on, he gets drafted.

[lunarreader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A bombshell. I must admit, i was scared. I bought this book years ago and it stayed on my "to be read" list because i didn't like at all Deception by the same author. How wrong was i? Terribly wrong. This book, Indignation is like a high speed train rushing through your veins. Roth describes the coming of age of Marcus Messner, son of a Jewish butcher and trying to get independant, trying to do university in a catholic small town, while he comes from the already more open New York atmosphere.The backdrop of the terrible Korean war, the "indignation" on injustice, the low self esteem combined with the high intellectual powers, the mistrust, the .... everything an 18 year old sholar goes through: girls, sex, humiliation,.... it all culminates in a few furious last months.I have seldom ever read a book at the speed i did with this one, it's vivacious, it's a rush and it seems to me like one big dealing with the past. Is Roth dealing with his own past? Probably. The engagement is too high to be purely fictional. I only see now, googling on Roth's life that this book has been transformed into a movie only recently. The book is anti-religious with some beautiful quotes and statements, so that is already a little shock even in the USA of today. But the movie will need to be very hard boiled to reach the adrenaline level of the book. Let's see.A passionate and repetitive writing style make this book a top notch read. Do it.

[suesbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was my favorite Philip Roth book of the ones I read. I cared very much about many of the characters and was very interested to see what would happen. It brought up many important issues that are still relevant today.

[aziz_zabidi-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The writing style of Philip Roth always fascinate me, a way he drew a characters and a way he put these characters into situations which they can't resist - always in tragic end - but still, humor and beauty of life fills a full cup of his story.

Indignation is one of them.

The main character died in a Korean War. His dreams shattered. His father prophetic anxiety and paranoia over his son's future became true. His brilliance, free spirit and good values of life comes to nothing but tragedies. All the hope we shared with this character are shattered in front of our eyes, enough to make this reading experience is traumatic ones, but still we enjoy the story, enjoy all the details of fragments of life represented to us, enjoy the way characters represent themselves. They are life in there, life full of spirit of a man and woman who the main anchor of their life is hope. And for me, this alone makes this book is a lovely reading, either for an enjoyment of reading or an enjoyment of discovering a life a.k.a literature at fullest.

[the_nice_bookworm · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A small masterpiece. To those of you who have never read Philip Roth, now is the time to do it. You're in for a treat.

[viviennestrauss · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant. One that I'm sure I'll re-read at a later date.

[dulcinea14-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The story arc was well-paced, with a couple nice twists, but the message was muddled for me. Was Roth trying to point out the futility of "indignation," through a character who essentially bounced from one offending situation to another, never to really find peace (both figurative and literal)? If so, was his message then to keep quiet and accept life as it comes? It seems that way when you look at the protagonist alone, but there was such a strong focus on the mistreatment of women and biases toward homosexuals or others who didn't fit the school's WASP-ish expectations, that how could Roth be saying it's better to shut up and put up than to stand up? I certainly don't think he is, but taking into consideration the ending, the message lacked clarity, and therefore "umph" at the end. Maybe he was trying to use the protagonist as an example of someone who should quit whining and put things behind him, when there are actual injustices going on.

It is a book that will make you think long after you finish it, asking yourself such questions, if you tend to be that type. It is dark, uncomfortable, and bleak. Not a warm fuzzies book.

Currently available in the Kindle Lending Library if you have a Amazon Prime account (I find that decent literature is rare there, so this was "a good one.")

[polaris4_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This brief novel was one that I found poignant and irresistibly compelling. Set in 1951 with the spectre of the distant Korean War overshadowing events, Marcus Messner is a 19 year old sophomore from Newark. A good Jewish boy, and the only child in a family of butchers, he is desperate to escape the cloying claustrophobia yet well meant concerns of his somewhat neurotic father - whose greatest fear is that his son, so clever and full of promise, will do something to land himself in immense danger. After his first year, Marcus switches from his local New Jersey college to a conservative former seminary, Winesburg, out in distant Mid-Western Ohio.Determined to avoid social frivolities, work hard at his studies and graduate as Valedictorian, the plan is to make sure he gets drafted as an officer in the Intelligence Corps, rather than as a misfortunate Private in the front line. And so, much to his consternation, and accompanied in his head by the Chinese national anthem's dramatic intonation of "In-dig-na-tion, in-dig-na-tion", Marcus' troubles begin... Unable to settle in with his room-mates, unwilling to join in with fraternity life, and unprepared for falling in love with the beguiling and complex Olivia Hutton - the once suicidal and hospitalised 'blow-job princess'- the 'expert'; he struggles to refrain from walking away from it all and heading back to Newark. What with Winesburg's compulsory chapel attendance, the Dean of Men making him physically sick, and the cigar-chomping Republican college President, at least back home he'd only have his father to make his life a misery!But this is no simple coming-of-age tale, or rite of passage story. Roth's great skill lies with disguising the difficult and the thought-provoking as a basic story, familiar to many of us. There is a cruel twist here that I won't mention, but when it came I was at once both fascinated and saddened. The wonderfully rich portrayal of Marcus' parents is in itself a study of what love means.After first enjoying Philip Roth when I was about the same age as the young protagonist here (I loved 'Goodbye Columbus'), I'm really enjoying my unplanned for rediscovery of his books in the last year or so. After previously giving 'Zuckerman Unbound' the full five stars, I plan on completing the whole 'Zuckerman Bound' series in due course.

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fearsome and intense novella about a young man struggling with himself. One of Roth's stronger works that I've read so far.

[yossarianxeno · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Unlike several of Roth's more weighty tomes, this is a short, sparsely written novel. Essentially, it is the story of bright Jewish boy coming to adulthood in the USA just as the Korean War gets seriously underway in the early 1950s. Without giving too much a way, the boy's intelligence mean that he doesn't fit comfortably into his small home community, but when he gets to college, he finds his upbringing constrains his ability to fit into the new world in which he finds himself. A simply written tale, it nonetheless pulls off the trick of addressing philosophical issues in the matter of fact format (I particularly enjoyed the way he quoted from Betrand Russell's 'Why I Am Not a Christian' yet successfully did so in a way that just made it seem part of the narrative rather than pretentious, as it might easily have done).

[staffoa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It is rare that I read a book that I instantly start texting and e-mailing friends recommending they read it! I know it's an old novel, but for anyone that likes to delve into the human psyche, this is a must-read!

[realbigcat · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I won't repeat the whole story as there are many reviews of this book. I have read many of Philip Roth's books and this one is no different. Excellant writing based on many of his themes including religion and sex. Not his best work but I really enjoyed the story in particular the great meeting between Marcus and the college Dean.

[mrstreme · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Indignation is Philip Roth's 25th novel. Sit back and think about that for a moment. What an amazing writing career.I like Philip Roth because he always sweeps me into his story, and that's certainly the case in Indignation. In this short novel, we meet Markus - a straight-A Jewish kid from Newark who transfers to a small, conservative college in Ohio to escape his father's neurotic fears. Markus' dad worries that he will fall into harm's way - that one little misstep will result in great harm. While, as a reader, you shake your head at Dad's irrational thoughts, it provides an interesting foreshadowing of things to come.While at Winesburg College, Markus is knee-deep in classic American ideals ala 1950's America. Big cars, panty raids and required chapel attendance all mark Markus' college experience. Markus has a hard time adjusting to Winesburg life. He's successful at academics but entanglements with his roommates and a fling with a troubled girl all leave Markus reeling from the real-life aspects of being far from  home.With subtle social and political undertones, Indignation is a fast read that is a feast to your mind's eye. This may not be Roth's best work, but it's a good story.

[beej415 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This book was a mess. It's the story of a young, blue-collar college man, Marcus, who grows up happily working in his father's butcher shop and idolizing the old man. Then, for reasons that remain unexplained, his father succumbs to traumatic anxiety about his son's future, and ends up questioning every decision of his and Marcus's. Of course, the parental anxiety of letting go is understandable as a motive, but Marcus's father jumps far beyond the ordinary, with no explanation (and no attempt, or even seeming desire, to explain on the part of the author). To find respite from his father's infatuation, Marcus transfers to a college 500 miles from home, where he meets gentiles, homosexuals, easy, mentally tortured girls, and obnoxious fraternity guys. Yet, rather than rebelling with his newfound freedom, Marcus is wedded to his studies, and as he admits, it's all for his parents' sake (which, having detested Holden Caufield, this aspect of Marcus's personality I found quite pleasing).The characters were flat, which seemed to coincide with the lack of thematic development. Many themes were introduced, but were not fleshed out. Unfortunately, in the end, it left me wondering what was the point.While I did not enjoy this story, it is clear that Roth is an excellent writer in terms of style. The story flowed so smoothly that it felt as if I were watching a movie rather than reading a book. I am looking forward to reading another novel by Roth, hopefully one telling a better story.

[librarianshannon_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Roth is always good but sometimes he's really awesome and this is one of those times. It doesn't matterif you went to college in the 50s and 60s or just graduated, you'll get the characters and remember atime just when.There are a lot of political and social commentaries underlying this plot, but you won't feel lectured -like Marcus Messner, the main character, often does. Roth tells Marcus' story from New Jersey native toOhio college student transplant in tandem with the history and culture of 1951 and the Korean War. Itmight be fiction, but you won't feel that's what you're reading.

[theampersand · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Philip Roth's late innings have been about as productive as any writer you could name, but you can't hit a home run every time you step to the plate. To keep that analogy going, let's call "Indignation" a clean single. It's by no means a bad novel, just a familiar one, a decidedly minor novel that's shorter and slighter than one of Roth's many blockbusters. Roth puts us back in mid-century New Jersey again, where Marcus Messner, the son of a kosher butcher, is simultaneously trying to escape the tightening grip of his father's authority and fit in to a college filled with socially conservative gentiles. Roth is usually a deliciously Dostoevskian storyteller, allowing the reader to listen in as a couple of old friends, perhaps lubricated by a couple of drinks, recount events long past. In "Indignation," he changes up this tried-and-true formula, employing a curious narrative device, which I won't reveal here, to tell his story back-to-front. This novel framing device doesn't prove particularly successful. The problem isn't that the reader learns the fate of the novel's protagonist just a few pages in. Who, after all, reads Roth for the suspense? The problem is that "Indignation's" odd set-up robs Roth's writing of a great deal of the causal, tossed-off detail that usually make it such a pleasure to read. The lack of a traditional "audience" for Roth's narrator also seems to rob "Indignation" of the sense of warm familiarity that many Roth's habitual readers have come to expect from his work. No-one could accuse "Indignation" of sloppiness or faulty construction, but it's a hard book to love, and one gets the feeling Roth could have written it in its sleep. It's feels wrong to criticize a great writer for a book that's merely okay, but I'm hoping that Phil swings for the fences his next time at bat.

[epictale · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Worthy, well-written read -- but I thought the book was incomplete and left loose ends handing. Several of the characters were simply incomplete depictions, and in several places the story simply does not hang together in Roth's usual tight fashion.On the plus side, Roth offered a good exploration of the idea that a person's life can be the result of a small number of supposedly minor decisions, which in retrospect turned out to be hugely significant. Also, I appreciated the author's dabbling with the notion of how some people instinctively run away from conflict, rather than confront it. On the negative side, I was left feeling that Roth had rummaged through his catalog of partially-written stories and decided to publish it for what it was, rather than for what he could make it with additional effort.

[ccayne_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Roth revisits familiar themes - growing up Jewish in a non-Jewish setting, conflicts over sex, love and family.

[spounds_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Another short book - like "Everyman." I still love the way Roth writes, but he's definitely ticked off at religion.

[nolongeratease_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have read between one third and one half of Philip Roth's novels and Indignation rates among the best of them. Roth is at his best when his obligatory web of lust, Newark, onanism, beautiful Goyim, and half-hearted resistance to WASP culture is constrained by broader and deeper purposes rather than when it is allowed to roam free. Indignation is an instance where Roth has properly constrained his old standards and worked them into something of a backdoor homage to the stoicism of earlier generations of Americans.Roth's Marcus Messner is hoisted by his own petard in large part because he is unwilling to take the lessons of the butcher shop (where he grew up working) out into the Goyish world as such. The even-keeled, studious, well-mannered A student can disembowel a chicken without a second thought but is unable to sit through compulsory chapel service at his mildly stuffy midwestern college.Righteous anger overwhelms Marcus Messner and Roth gives us every reason to empathize with him...but Roth's genius move here is that he leaves us little time to wallow with Marcus in the warm bath of the conscious victim of wrongdoing. Instead, we come to see that Marcus's anger is not only exaggerated but a threat to his own well being. To respond to every injustice one suffers by summoning an army is to take on an insufferable existence. Thus, it's better to choose the important battles and learn to live with a certain amount of injustice in one's life. Purity is overrated, especially when the quest for purity leads, as it ever-so-often does, to oblivion. In large part the lesson of Roth's novel is not new, but it's one that must be hammered home again and again and who better than Roth, certainly no poster-child for restraint, to do so?I also think there is a subtle but no less burning sense of anger operative in these pages . Roth occupies that generation too young to have fought in WWII but too old to have been involved in the 1960s. He has, in many, instances, presented the legacy of the 1960s in a less than positive light. Part of the Faustian bargain of the 1950s was conformity for security; doing and behaving as one must rather than as one wishes. This is was the exchange Marcus Messner was unwilling to make and one that Roth has always been ambivalent about. But never down right negative. Roth's is an internal critique of mid-century American society. He accepts most of its major premises but also sees the absurdities for what they are; by pointing to them he hopes to improve upon the vision, to add a greater degree of internal coherence to a particular vision of American society. He is angry here because he participated in the Faustian exchange only to have the protest movements, the external critiques, the singular destructiveness of the baby out with the bath water mindset of the boomers effectively eviscerate the society he attempted to grudgingly conform to.

[meroof_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Well written. First Roth book I have read. I will now want to read another. The travails of Marcus Messner remind me somewhat of my own growth and development, especially, the somewhat tortured relationship with his father.

[shadowofthewind · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is a good demonstration of a young man's fight for individuality against society. It's also a good demonstration of stubborn youth. Marcus Messner is trying to make his way in the world. It is 1951 and he is desperately trying to avoid being drafted during the Korean War, yet still trying to have his own life away from his over protective father. The results are disasterous for the main character. My favorite passages:"Almost from the day I entered robert treat, from the day I graduated high school to the day I entered college, my father became obsessed with the fact that I might die. " "Maybe his fear for me stemmed from a fear for himself. At the age of 50, after enjoying a lifetime of robust good health, this sturdy little man began to develop the persistent rackIng ciugh t at troubling as it was to my mother did not stop him from keeping a lit Cigarette forever at the corner of his mouth all day long. For whatever the cause, or causes fuelIng the abrupt chae in his previously benign eternal behavior he manifested his fear by hounding me day and night about my whereabouts...it was as though the father with whom I had been so close during all these years practicallt growi up at his side at the store had no idea of who or what his son was...and crazy with the frightening discovery that a little boy grows up, grows tall ove shadows his parents, and that you can't keep him then. You have to relinquish him to the world. ""I hadn't the stomach to do battle with the dean of menanymore than I had the stomach to do battle with my fathermy roommates, yet battle I did despite myself.""Cartwell was right there will always be somethingdriving you nuts, your father, your roommate, your havingto attend chapel 40 times so stop thinking about transferringto another school and concentrate on graduating as first in your class."

[blackhornet_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not vintage Roth but better than the disappointing Exit Ghost, with flashes of his old magic. I was left indignant at what happened to the narrator, Marcus Messner, but I'm not sure the indignation planted throughout the rest of the novel was fierce enough.I do feel Roth is at his best when writing, as here, about the 1950s. Simultaneously he manages to get across the absurd hypocracies of the time with a sense that it was still a better time.A good book from a man who has written many great books.

[timbazzett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Lots of indignation here, but not from me. 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.

[davidrothman_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Although verbose in places, Indignation is witty and engrossing with wonderful caricatures.I spent time in Ohio eons ago, not that far from Sherwood Anderson's old haunts, and enjoyed Philip Roth's depictions of the mythical Winesburg College. Roth lives up to his reputation with hilarious attacks on moralists, blended in with the protagonist's libido-and-ego-driven fondness for defying them. What's more, I enjoyed his clever use of the bleeding motif. Those who've read Indignation will know exactly what I mean; Marcus Messner's story is not for readers who shy from the sight of blood. Fittingly, Marcus's father is a butcher intent on controlling the son's life; quite unintentionally and indirectly, through the events depicted in the novel, he ends it. And one other little detail: Marcus is dead or near-dead at the start of the story. No, my revealing this is not a spoiler; other reviewers have, too. You'll still want to know all the history that lead to Marcus's current condition, and like me, you may be so engrossed in Indignation's plot and characterizations that you really won't care he's already a corpse. I used a somewhat similar technique when I wrote The Solomon Scandals, my Washington newspaper novel---beginning Chapter One with mention of the suicide of one of the journalists, at the Watergate. The "Why?" counts as much as, "What'll happen?"For reasons that I won't discuss here, lest I do spoil things, Indignation should especially appeal to those who came of age during the Vietnam era--even though Korea is the war of the moment.