Review: 'Indignation' by Philip Roth

In recent reviews of Indignation, critics seem to be exhausted by the prospect of another novel engaging those now well-worn tropes of Philip Roth's fiction since his watershed Portnoy's Complaint: sex, violence, & identity. It's a pretty fair reaction. Roth exhibits the obvious and utterly mundane influence of his psychotheraputic and counter-cultural wellsprings, as well as his own uncompromising, predominantly male distractions. The word "pigeonholed" comes to mind – any author that has been accused of being a one-trick pony, as Roth has, becomes an easy one for a reviewer to phone in.

But these themes, common to Roth's books, are not in fact Roth's own obsessions, at least not exactly, and Indignation is not the introverted observations of an ego looking in at itself (although it is certainly the narrative of just such a character). If that were the case in this or in many of his novels then his plots would not be so compelling, or his insights into the human condition so moving. That Roth is able to retread the same ideas with some success – to a greater or lesser degree, of course – shows that there must be more going on in his books as a group and in each particular book than the rolling out of old tropes.

Sex, identity, and violence. If the points seem belabored at all, perhaps that is exactly Roth's point. One could argue, after an overview of his work, that he sees in these ideas a key that, if turned just right (as in, for example, American Pastoral), reveals something truly meaningful about our culture; something obscured by the melodrama and rhetoric and distractions that consume our banal, mundane, everyday lives. Roth returns to these themes again and again not because they are his own obsessions (although they are), but because they're the symptoms of a sick culture.

In Portnoy's Complaint, the narrator is distracted by these illnesses from his "normal life." He is trying to work through them, searching for a way out of their colors – it spoke to the optimistic if frenetic condition of America at the time. American Pastoral looks at the dark side of the counter-culture, the self-destruction that springs from self-righteous rebellion, and the desperation behind the American dream. But in Indigantion, we find a character that is altogether compelled to self-destruction by his subconscious drives, one who stokes his own childish petchulance by singing the very word "Indignation!" to himself.

Modeled, it seems, after such fictive cultural critiques as Dostoyevsky's Underground Man and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Indignation is separated into two sections: a narrative of one middle-class Jewish boy, Marcus Messner, and his spiraling self-destruction, followed by a reflection on that decline from the afterlife. I tend to view this kind of literature-conscious modelling as a statement of intent: this is about all of us, it is about the culture right now. As if that weren't clear in all of Roth's fiction. Maybe it has been overlooked lately, taken for granted. I prefer not to.

In what is by far the strongest passage of the novel, Roth conjures Marcus' innate revulsion to blood (his father is a Kosher butcher) and metasticizes that feeling into a fear or hatred of the war, a connection between bloodletting in all its forms. "Then Abe, Muzzy's son and heir apparent, was killed at Anzio, and Dave, Shecky's son and heir apparent, was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Messners who lived on were steeped in their blood." It is an implicit indictment of the ritual killing that makes people "indifferent," in Marcus' words, to blood, whether they be religious rituals as with the kosher chickens and beef, or military, or even, perhaps, sexual. In the end, the revulsion could not be displaced by his father's training, "he could never teach me to like the blood or even to be indifferent to it."

This sets the tone for the work, as Marcus the boy who can never become indifferent becomes a young man who is suspicious of all social rituals: fraternities, sports, comraderie, dating, even the required weekly chapel. In some way, they all become connected to the blood of his childhood, the war and certain death. But his personal indignation becomes as subversive to his own desires as his father's aggressive paranoia does to his work and home life. They both decline to self-destruction.

Roth elegantly casts Marcus as a monastic academic, dedicating days and nights to his work, training to study the law: a religious figure, in Jewish terms. It is the sort of secular religious path that is not uncommonly cast as a possible redemption in Roth's fiction. However, Marcus is a dedicated non-believer, and he refuses to see the laws of social ritual as having any importance. The facts of judicial law overwhelm the spirit of the law itself as orderer of culture and society. One could say that Marcus – and many of Roth's more tragic protagonists – pathalogically eschews the golden mean, the middle road. Indignation consumes him, the word taken by Marcus from the Chinese national anthem: it is no accident that he dies in Korea, killed by the Chinese. What is his obsession becomes his fate.

This is not a masterpiece work. Too much of the dialogue is written as if it were fantasy role-playing, each character setting themselves up a bit too easily at times for foregone retorts – those Rothian speeches are somewhat less natural, and less effective, than in his better works, especially those between Marcus and the Dean. The conceit of a narration from beyond the grave is entirely ineffective, calling into question many spiritual issues that seem entirely beside the point. But it is a strong work besides for the several surprising moments of clarity, not least the dazzling interaction between Marcus and his mother in the hospital. Indignation is also, importantly, written out of our moment in time, right now, when a refusal to bend can too easily turn into self-destruction. We see it all around us, the way indignation becomes incurable and overwhelms. There are no well-worn tropes here, only another novel about America belaboring its own old obsessions: one only hopes our obsessions do not also become our fate.