At first, Philip Roth’s umpteenth novel Indignation seems a YouTube reel of familiar Rothian tropes: tradition-addled kids, annoying parents; Newark; prudes, shikses — yet it bears so many ancient grudges, so much destabilizing rage, that its fury makes it thrilling and unique.
Like almost every Roth protagonist, Marcus Messner is the son of a Newark shopkeeper — in this case, a butcher — but the violence and sheer gross-out he encounters with his father sets Indignation apart. “It was my job not just to pluck the chickens but 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…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.” The butcher, after all this stabbing and gouging, becomes obsessed with the idea that the boy will die of contact with the world, which means he must be hidden from it. The farther Marcus runs, the stronger his father gets; the boy is alienated from everything.
He flees Newark, but at tiny Winesburg College, he can belong to nothing else—not the Jewish fraternity or the bohemian fraternity, not his roommates, not the baseball team, and not the damaged WASPy dreamboat Olivia Hutton, whose eagerness to blow him leaves him as estranged as the evil hyper-Christian Dean of Men does. The Dean is a kind of stock villain whose moustache-twisting wickedness burns a hole through any kind of credible representation, but this is not a realistic book, it’s an anti-sentimental Frankenstein kept alive by its own seething. Marcus and his mother flirt with freedom — she by divorce, he with Olivia Hutton — but their fear of abandoning the crazy kosher butcher leaves them chained to the madness of convention. It won’t be long before the kid is cut up like a chicken.
And now, a word on Olivia Hutton, and her effect on the book. She is pretty much the same ruined goysche angel from all the other Roth books, with all the good and not-so-good that that implies. Marcus is alarmed by her sexual aggression, but finds himself repeatedly drawn back to her. In doing so, he perpetuates a pattern of abuse he never quite comes to recognize, which deepens both their characters, and drags them unexpectedly into pathos. It’s not the sex that’s transgressive in this book, it’s the intimacy. Had Indignation been longer, Olivia and Marcus might’ve worked it out like the sweet kids they are, but instead, she gets knocked up by someone else and disappears into a void of purest doom. Then we get the canon’s most apocalyptic panty raid. Reading it, we wonder: What the hell is Roth thinking?
To sum up: Two noble children, damaged by their fathers and an almost Kafkaesque police state of the mind, attempt to come together on their own terms, but the world will not allow it, so the children are destroyed. In other words, the best of us are fucked. Indignation lacks the cunning — and, indeed, the professional coherence — we expect from so-called great writers. Instead, it has the vehemence of a nightmare. Unlike the rest of us, Philip Roth can publish anything he wants, and uses that privilege here to scream his head off. This is a really good book. Long live the king.
Adam Novy’s first novel, The Avian Gospel, is forthcoming from Hobart.
