`Indignation` starts strong but ends weak

Indignation

By Philip Roth

233 pages

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Available at What The Book (33,000 won, hardcover)





Now 75, Philip Roth must feel lucky. He has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Book Award (twice). He is the only living American author whose comprehensive work has been published in the Library of America.

After a literary career spanning six decades, though, much of Roth`s recent work has turned a reflective eye to prior decades, when younger man such as himself might not have escaped from the traps of the 1940s and 1950s.

His "The Plot Against America" in 2004 received widespread attention for imagining an alternate history in which noted aviator and accused Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt for the U.S. presidency in 1940. Roth made himself the young boy the central figure in that story, as a member of a Jewish family struggling to get by in an America growing ever-more hostile toward their race.

"Indignation," his latest work, is set during the Korean War. While less autobiographical, in the sense that the author is not the main character, the book`s protagonist is Jewish, is from Roth`s native New Jersey, and is attending college at about the same time Roth would have been. While main character Marcus Messner does encounter anti-Semitism along the way, his main obstacles are the draft, his university`s religious requirements and oppression of the kind most likely to make a teenage male indignant.

Marcus, while Jewish by ancestry, is a strident atheist, not to mention an incorrigible wiseass. He has completed his freshmen year at a college near his home, but his loving father has suddenly turned unbearably paranoid. Marcus has gotten nothing but A`s thus far in his scholastic career, is the first in his family to go to college, and is expected to become a lawyer.

However, an ominous warning from a friend, plus the memory of Marcus` two cousins who died in World War II, convinces his father that the world lurks behind every corner, ready to snatch young men and steal whatever promise they had. Ultimately, the elder Messner could teach the parents of Oedipus something about self-fulfilling prophecies, as Marcus transfers to the fictional Winesburg College in Ohio, and into a world he will not survive.

Roth, recalling the fears of young men his age during the Korean War, repeatedly mentions his protagonist`s worries that he will be tossed out of school, drafted and subsequently killed by the Red Chinese Army, in one of their fearsome nighttime attacks on U.S. troops. His fears are quieter, yet just as persistent as his father`s, but Marcus` nature will not permit him to play it safe. He avoids fraternities and nearly all other forms of socializing because they might conflict with his studies. Despite this, he`s still a teenager desperate for sexual experience, a dangerous prospect in a 1950s college where interactions between the genders are closely monitored.

He also cannot tolerate his school`s required worship services, as he is an admirer of Bertrand Russell who has huge portions of "Why I Am Not a Christian" committed to memory.

About 50 pages into the book, Marcus has his first date with Olivia, a seductive classmate with a troubled past. With Olivia in the car he has borrowed from his autophile roommate, a pair of surprising things occurs. One is startling to Marcus, but will be far less so to anyone who has attended a Western college or university in the decades subsequent to the 1950s.

Perhaps due to this generation gap, Roth chooses to unveil something much more surprising about Marcus` status: he is dead and recounting this story from the beyond. This is a prompt revelation less than one-fourth of the way into the book, but it detracts little from seeing how his story will progress; instead of being about what happens, it is about how it reaches that end

Marcus at times shows bad judgment, but remains an earnest, hard-working and painfully honest young man. However, how many hard-working young Americans in this time period had their lives cut short because luck was not on their side? How many were sent to their end because they could not find a way around the draft?

Like with "Plot," the book`s finale is its weakest point, in which events are put on fast forward narration that robs them of their resonance. "Indignation" suffers more because of this, as the story`s events necessitate and sudden change in narration away from Marcus, up to then the book`s only perspective, is suddenly brushed aside so that events he cannot have witnessed can be described. It is necessitated by the book`s bleak take on the metaphysical, in which a person, once dead, must relive his or her memories in a continuous loop for all time.

Roth is certainly closer to the end of his life than to his youth. Does he agree more with the atheism of Marcus` youth, or with the fate that he has written for the young man? If the latter were true, hopefully he would spend most of eternity reliving the way his books are written, rather than they way they tend to end.

By Rob York



(rjamesyork@heraldm.com)