Roth’s latest novel has all the ingredients that seem to make a good Roth novel: shockingly graphic sex scenes, detailed historical research, Jews in New Jersey.  However, Indignation, unlike most Roth novels, reads like a skeleton of a novel, with unfinished sketches of characters.  It is much too easy to put down.

The novel starts off in Newark, where Marcus Messner lives and works with his kosher butcher father and dutiful housewife mother, attends a local college, and plays on the baseball team.  However, as his home life starts to become intolerably stifling, he makes the drastic decision to transfer to a college in Winesburg, Ohio.  There he gets involved with (and gets his first blowjob from) a sexually experienced, suicidal girl, reads the newspaper daily to keep up with news about the draft for the Korean War, discovers Bertram (Bertrand?) Russell, and vomits on the desk of the Dean.

All of this is told in retrospect, with ample theory about the brevity of (his nineteen-year-old) life, the workings of memory, and the afterlife:

If you ask how this can be — memory upon memory, nothing but memory — of course I can’t answer, and not because neither a “you” nor an “I” exists, any more than do a “here” and a “now,” but because all that exists is the recollected past, not recovered, mind you, not relived in the immediacy of the realm of sensation, but merely replayed.  And how much more of my past can I take?  Retelling my own story to myself round the clock in a clockless world, lurking disembodied in this memory grotto, I feel as though I’ve been at it for a million years.  Is this really to go on and on — my nineteen little years forever while everything else is absent, my nineteen little years inescapably here, persistently present, while everything that went into making real the nineteen years, while everything that put one squarely in the midst of, remains a phantasm far, far away?

As it turns out, Marcus narrates the book high (stoned?) on morphine, recalling the last year of his life from his hospital bed as he lays dying after being wounded in combat in Korea.

The most obvious and consistent literary reference throughout Indignation is Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson’s classic collection of short stories, published in 1919.  Anderson’s story follows a young George Willard as he observes the emotionally stunted yet passionate residents of the small Ohio town.  In the end, he leaves home to become a writer, to learn about the world, and to engage with others. 

And so Indignation takes up where Sherwood Anderson left off.  Marcus longs to interact with environments outside Newark, to know people other than Jews and Italians, to experience an intellectual enlightenment in college. Anderson’s stamp on Roth’s novel is clear.  The “New Willard House” takes up most of the Marcus’ college campus, the characters surrounding Marcus take on Anderson-like vignette qualities.  (We never really know any of them, Marcus’ father is simply a “butcher,” as Marcus even denies him the adjective “Kosher” on his college application, his mother is simply a “hard worker,” Olivia is simply a complicated girl who gives blowjobs.)

And this is the most frustrating thing about the novel.  Not much has changed in Winesburg, Ohio, and Roth doesn’t do justice to Anderson’s precise, loaded language.  Marcus claims to be searching for complexity, for a larger world outside of his own; but when he is confronted with complicated people (Olivia), with complicated situations (having to attend chapel), with unfamiliar lifestyles (that of his homosexual roommate), he cannot deal with them.  As the dean of the college correctly points out, “That’s how you cope with all your difficulties, Marcus — you leave.  Has that never occurred to you before?”Marcus is a confused character, a boy who doesn’t know how to deal with life and how to engage with the people around him.  But his relation to them is cold, distant, and withdrawn.  Unlike Anderson’s Winesburgians, who long for human connection and understanding, in whatever form, Marcus runs away from emotional connection. And so as he runs away again and again, he becomes cold and pathetic, and we as readers lose interest. 

He distances himself through a method of simplification, of simplifying those around him and in contrast complicating his own intellectual life.  This wouldn’t be so thematically bad if it were given more depth and energy through the writing, but Roth hocks it up with sentimentality, with so much authorial self-awareness that the story becomes no longer Marcus’.  It becomes a skeleton of a story; it reads like an unfinished book, characters left undeveloped, stories left unfinished.  What needed to tie them together was a strong narrator with a sympathetic voice.  Unfortunately, Roth has created such an dispassionate, distantly contemplative memoirist, that his characters’ emotions and complexities become lost in the explicit analysis and the at times over-expostulatory prose.

Indignation takes place historically after Anderson’s work.  Every moment is a transition — Marcus keeps moving, keeps changing.  The country is at war; Marcus is becoming a man; he transfers colleges and gets his first blowjob.  The country and the college are also experiencing revolutions of their own.  Industry is crowding out small business, and Marcus’ rants about the chapel requirement foreshadow the secularization of education systems.  This is a moment of transition for the country: people are slowly unwinding.  People are slowly opening up; but Roth’s characters are still closed tight. 

The country is still run by fear and Marcus’ intellectualism cannot overcome it.  His mother sees, “Fear, Marcus, fear leaking out at every pore, anger leaking out at every pore, and I don’t know how to stop either one.”

And yet the reader can’t seem to sympathize.  Unlike the viscerality of Anderson’s fear, Roth’s is too self-aware, too cerebral.  The people in Marcus’ life are simplified characters that circle Marcus’ life, and they are mostly unsympathetic because we see them through Marcus’ cold ambition. Themes are touched upon, but none adequately developed.  Indignation still showcases a few moments of Roth at his finest, when he turns phrases in his uniquely humorous, surprising, and aesthetically original way.  And this guy gets sex: “the rapidity with which she had allowed me to proceed — and that darting, swabbing, gliding, teeth-licking tongue, the tongue, which is like the body stripped of its skin — prompted me to attempt to delicately move her hand onto the crotch of my pants.  And again I met with no resistance.  There was no battle.” 

But the quality of the writing remains inconsistent, distanced. Marcus says, “but there is no one to speak to; there is only myself to address about my innocence, my explosions, my candor, and the extreme brevity of bliss in the first true year of my young manhood and the last year of my life.  The urge to be heard, and nobody to hear me!”  We can hear him, but he’s not saying much.

Juli Min ’09 needed a byline, but Justin Keenan ’10 took care of it.