Indignation (review)

Unlike the recent Exit Ghost and The Dying Animal, which focus on old age and decline, Indignation features Marcus Messner, a college boy in the 1950s. This short powerful novel has an unusual format. The long first section, "Under Morphine," is told by the protagonist while he is deeply unconscious, rather than dead as he believes. On page 54 he tells us, "And even dead, as I am and have been for I don't know how long"—as surprising a line as the one in To the Lighthouse in which the death of the very much alive Mrs. Ramsay of the first section is casually mentioned parenthetically. In the short "Out from Under" section a third person narrator describes Marcus's excruciating, gruesome wounds and death in Korea. So death is front and center again, but here the death is of a nineteen-year-old boy.

Some of Roth's major themes and motifs are present in this novel, and a reader familiar with Roth's entire body of work will find special pleasures. Newark, Roth's and Zuckerman's childhood homeland, is also Marcus Messner's. The joy a boy can experience in learning a demanding trade and especially working beside his father reminds readers of Everyman and American Pastoral. Here the boy's father is a kosher butcher whose diligence and integrity are as memorable as the fathers' work in the earlier novels. Marcus, Markie to his adoring parents, is the quintessential good Jewish boy, excellent student and dutiful son. But when his fearful father tries to control his every move, he leaves for Winesburg College to get away from him. Trying to continue his pattern of top academic achievement while remaining independent on a fraternity-dominated campus, he becomes sexually involved with a beautiful, brilliant but deeply disturbed gentile girl, Olivia Hutton, and bumps heads with the paternalistic dean.

The epigraph to the novel, e.e.cummings's "Olaf upon what were once knees/does almost ceaselessly repeat/ "there is some shit I will not eat," obviously asks the reader to consider Marcus another Olaf, because he finally stands up to the dean who insists he attend chapel and falsely accuses him of impregnating Olivia. Marcus's "fuck you"—his refusal of the "rectitude tyrannizing" his life, the "constricting rectitude" of the college—is vintage Roth, of course. But where cummings' position is an unqualified celebration of Olaf, Roth's handling of the defiant young man is more complicated. The epigraph is e.e. cummings's, but the novel's title comes from the Chinese national anthem: "Arise, ye who refuse to be bondslaves…. Indignation fills the hearts of all of our countrymen." Marcus himself says that he repeated these lines to himself fifty times during a hated sermon, no doubt fueling his own young man's indignation.

Another pleasure of the novel is the presence of powerful voices ventriloquized by the narrator, as in several Zuckerman novels. Here it is the college president's voice as he witheringly tells the college boys after a panty raid during which the "rambunctious frivolity" turns into "stunning mischief ": "Beyond your dormitories, a world is on fire, and you are kindled by underwear" and "history is not the background—history is the stage! And you are on the stage!"

Marcus's defiant indignation ends his college career and leads him directly to Korea, where his father's knives and kosher meat are replaced by bayonets and his hacked intestines and genitals.