Another Must-Read from Roth, 01 Nov 2008
INDIGNATION is a fascinating novel, albeit difficult to read except in 20 page bursts. The reason is that the intense Marcus Messner, Roth's young protagonist and narrator, finds little joy, but much angst and guilt, in his life. He is the master of nothing. Everything is a challenge. His world is an ordeal. At one moment, Marcus is surprised to be told by his college Dean that he is shouting and pointing angrily. But throughout, Marcus seems on the verge such hysterical expression. This makes INDIGNATION a book to enjoy in small doses.

INDIGNATION is the story of Marcus, a studious young man and only child, who flees his overbearing father in Newark for a year at Winesburg College in rural Ohio. But when Marcus takes a step forward in his life--such as excelling in school, establishing greater independence from his parents, having new sexual experiences, and befriending the leaders in a fraternity--Roth connects that step to perilous undercurrents of guilt, principled naïveté, or treachery. In INDIGNATION, all the happy normal experiences of youth and college don't make Marcus stronger. Instead, they make him increasingly vulnerable.

The narrative skill shown in INDIGNATION is truly dazzling. Not only is there not a single word out of place. But Roth is also able to pull a surprising and profound subtext from each experience that Marcus relates. The effect is that you get every event in the novel twice: once in the seamless and interesting telling; then a second time in its surprising interpretation. Only in the very end of INDIGNATION does the meaning that Roth pulls from an experience seem obvious. (I thought we were going to learn that Marcus was doomed to recapitulate the tragic meshuge of his father's family.)

Of course, it's all a matter of taste. But I must say that Roth sometimes seems to overplay to make his points. Anyone remember the vomit scene in American Pastoral, which expressed revulsion? Well, INDIGNATION has a vomit scene as well. For an author who is able to find great depth in the most ordinary interactions, I wonder why these extreme physical expressions need to occur.


In the world of the righteous, beware of what the plumber says, 23 Oct 2008
An American teenager storms off to his room. Unlikely as it sounds, this is uncharacteristic behaviour on the part of Marcus Messner, the first-person narrator of Philip Roth's latest novel. Already, within a dozen pages, we think Marcus has a point. Enrolled at the local college, he looks back to the "wonderful time" he had ("wonderful except when it came to eviscerating chickens") helping his father out at the butcher's store on Lyons Avenue in Newark, New Jersey. He remembers the way they would deal with the demanding customers, and, of course, he remembers the blood, the buckets of blood. On the other side of the world the Korean war is underway, and blood is being spilled by bullet and bayonet.

Then, one day, his father flips and begins wondering when his only son is going to go off and get himself killed. Why this sudden change? Being at college means avoiding the draft, avoiding danger. "The questions were ludicrous... I had been a prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student" whose main ambition was to be the first Messner to attend university. He storms off to his room when he finds out that his father has been "driven crazy by the chance remark of a plumber". He's incensed that his father has chosen to believe, not what he has seen with his own eyes for an entire lifetime, but what he's been told by a plumber "on his knees fixing the toilet in the back of the store!"

For me, this brings to mind the image of a priest on his knees before the altar, making people believe things that are not true, that defy a lifetime of experience of how the world goes, that contradict reason and logic and evidence. We don't know it yet, but Marcus Messner's intellectual hero is Bertrand Russell. Later, when he gets into trouble at college with Dean Caudwell ("the biggest Christer around"), we learn just how hard life can be for an American atheist in "the world of the righteous". There are parallels between Marcus and the British mathematician G. H. Hardy (who was at Trinity with Russell): both were unbelievers who bridled at the thought of attending college chapel, indignant at "putrefied primitive superstition" and the "disgrace of religion", and both resisted taking the advice of more sophisticated friends. Hardy too had to face the dean of his college, but there the parallel ends: while Hardy went on to enjoy a long and renowned academic career, Marcus sadly does not. (In the spirit of the novel, it was pure luck I happened to be reading Hardy at the same time as Roth.)

Marcus admires those who seem to be in control. At Winesburg College in Ohio he meets Olivia and this time chance works in his favour - he gets lucky in a very pleasant if perplexing way. To him, she is poised, an expert, in control. To herself, nothing could be further from the truth. Her rebuke is stinging: "I, who have eight thousand moods a minute... am 'under control'?" When his mother visits, she remembers the time her husband locked him out, and admits, "I couldn't control him, and this is the result."

This brilliant novel is set midway through the twentieth century, at a time of war and when world war was just-lived history. It was also a significant moment in intellectual history, one that might itself come to be seen as a tipping point in human knowledge. Our understanding of complex systems like national economies and the weather had rested upon the fundamental assumption that small changes in the initial values would get washed out over time. The discovery of the butterfly effect in the early sixties - in which tiny changes in those values result in huge divergence - began a rethink that is continuing to this day. Take any catastrophe and it may be that the seeds of its destructive power were there all along, slowly growing from small beginnings.

While we are now used to the idea that world events are not always or even often under the control of governments, on the scale of the individual we haven't yet shaken off the educated view of the world as a deterministic place. We are too attached to the idea that a person's success or failure is down to their intrinsic qualities rather than to luck. (Even lottery winners sometimes attribute their success to their "positive" attitude!) Roth's achievement is to tell a story that keeps you riveted to every word while also sparking off some of these ideas. In the end, it is the uneducated father who puts it best and teaches Marcus his most important lesson: "the terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieves the most disproportionate result."


Brilliant short novel, 18 Oct 2008
This is one of Philip Roth's best novels, the funny and poignant story of a young man's journey to adulthood in the 1950s. Although short, it manages to pack so much in - stifling mid-Western conformity, New Jersey Jewishness, first love and the horrors of war. It is a shame the critics now take Roth for granted because he is so prolific.He is still at the top of his game.

exasperation, 18 Oct 2008
I struggled last year to swallow the premise of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach; the depiction of a time when sex was still something barely discussed, and that the events of the couple's honeymoon could have such devastating consequences. In this similarly slim novel Philip Roth is keen to depict a very specific time (and as the college President will ask later, 'Do you have any idea that you belong to a time at all?'). He was quoted himself recently, saying "This will come as a great shock to young people, but in 1951 you could make it through college unscathed by oral sex." I obviously went to the wrong college. What he also wants to show is 'the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.' The very articulation of that and the important word there, comical, makes Roth's a far more successful book.

In the period during the Korean War we meet Marcus Messner, son of a kosher butcher and straight A student. His only wish is to do well not only to justify the expense of the education which has forced his mother back behind the counter to work once again with her husband but also of course to avoid the draft. It's difficult not to draw parallels with today when Roth describes the messy and costly war abroad and the very real fear of death for any young soldier going out there. The Communist forces with their bayonets and bugle calls are shown to be an army from a different age, and yet their deadly effectiveness is all to clear. There is another driving force at work however, 'At the heart of my ambition was the desire to be free of a strong, stolid father suddenly stricken with the uncontrollable fear for a grown-up son's well-being.' Marcus' father sees the potential for his son's ruin everywhere. When late home he assumes he is in a whorehouse or pool hall and his increasing hysteria pushes Marcus to attend a college hundreds of miles away in Ohio.

Here at Winesburg he eschews both the Jewish and secular fraternities, preferring to keep his head down and work hard. Because Roth reveals where Marcus is narrating his story from we know where all this is heading and can see how each decision he makes drives him closer and closer to his fate. Marcus himself picks up on his father's fatalism and '...despite the trammels of convention still rigidly holding sway on the campus of a middling little midwestern college in the years immediately after World War Two, I was determined to have intercourse before I died.' This comes after his meeting and first date with Olivia Hutton, who will send him into a tailspin after performing that act we have mentioned before. Marcus' confusion is where much of the humour comes from, something that even I, someone born after the sexual revolution, can understand.

In the quite brilliant American Pastoral, Philip Roth describes in vivid detail the manufacture of a pair of women's gloves. Never before had I considered how it was the done let alone the care, the detail and indeed the love that used to go into making a simple pair of gloves. Now, I think, I will never forget. In his latest novel the trade he spotlights is butchery, kosher butchery to be precise and with the same skill he shows the ritual efficiency of the shochet as he slaughters chickens with a quick flick of his knife. Roth contrasts this with the scar Marcus sees on Olivia's wrist, the result of her attempt to 'ritually slaughter herself' but there's something laboured about the comparison which stops it from quite hitting the mark. The rage with which Roth has written in many of his finest works is replaced here by the titular exasperation of a student in conflict with his male authority figures.

The writing is of course excellent throughout, the humour welcome and the period evoked with skill but it's very size makes it feel like a minor work, one which fails to quite match the ambition of earlier small books such as The Ghost Writer. Another short book is on its way (dealing with suicide) and in a recent interview with Robert McCrum, Roth explained his frustration, 'Starting a new book is hell. You just flail around until something happens. It's miraculous. It comes to you out of nothing and nowhere. That's the problem with writing short books. You finish them too quickly. And that's what's wonderful about a long book. So I've decided I've got to find a big project that will take me right through to the end. Finish the day before, and - exit ghost.' That's the book I want to read.

Another Roth classic, 17 Oct 2008
The isn't, of course, the only Roth novel that will still be read in 50 years time, but its brevity and accessibility might make it one of the most popular. A young Jewish student is crushed between his upbringing, his intellect and life at a provincial college. Meanwhile, The Korean War, the humanist's hell, waits for him to fail. Oh yes, make no mistake, this is certainly grim stuff but Indignation is also full of humour with some genuinely hilarious moments. Work that one out. Better still, read this marvellous, short novel at one sitting. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Another Must-Read from Roth, 01 Nov 2008
INDIGNATION is a fascinating novel, albeit difficult to read except in 20 page bursts. The reason is that the intense Marcus Messner, Roth's young protagonist and narrator, finds little joy, but much angst and guilt, in his life. He is the master of nothing. Everything is a challenge. His world is an ordeal. At one moment, Marcus is surprised to be told by his college Dean that he is shouting and pointing angrily. But throughout, Marcus seems on the verge such hysterical expression. This makes INDIGNATION a book to enjoy in small doses.

INDIGNATION is the story of Marcus, a studious young man and only child, who flees his overbearing father in Newark for a year at Winesburg College in rural Ohio. But when Marcus takes a step forward in his life--such as excelling in school, establishing greater independence from his parents, having new sexual experiences, and befriending the leaders in a fraternity--Roth connects that step to perilous undercurrents of guilt, principled naïveté, or treachery. In INDIGNATION, all the happy normal experiences of youth and college don't make Marcus stronger. Instead, they make him increasingly vulnerable.

The narrative skill shown in INDIGNATION is truly dazzling. Not only is there not a single word out of place. But Roth is also able to pull a surprising and profound subtext from each experience that Marcus relates. The effect is that you get every event in the novel twice: once in the seamless and interesting telling; then a second time in its surprising interpretation. Only in the very end of INDIGNATION does the meaning that Roth pulls from an experience seem obvious. (I thought we were going to learn that Marcus was doomed to recapitulate the tragic meshuge of his father's family.)

Of course, it's all a matter of taste. But I must say that Roth sometimes seems to overplay to make his points. Anyone remember the vomit scene in American Pastoral, which expressed revulsion? Well, INDIGNATION has a vomit scene as well. For an author who is able to find great depth in the most ordinary interactions, I wonder why these extreme physical expressions need to occur.


In the world of the righteous, beware of what the plumber says, 23 Oct 2008
An American teenager storms off to his room. Unlikely as it sounds, this is uncharacteristic behaviour on the part of Marcus Messner, the first-person narrator of Philip Roth's latest novel. Already, within a dozen pages, we think Marcus has a point. Enrolled at the local college, he looks back to the "wonderful time" he had ("wonderful except when it came to eviscerating chickens") helping his father out at the butcher's store on Lyons Avenue in Newark, New Jersey. He remembers the way they would deal with the demanding customers, and, of course, he remembers the blood, the buckets of blood. On the other side of the world the Korean war is underway, and blood is being spilled by bullet and bayonet.

Then, one day, his father flips and begins wondering when his only son is going to go off and get himself killed. Why this sudden change? Being at college means avoiding the draft, avoiding danger. "The questions were ludicrous... I had been a prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student" whose main ambition was to be the first Messner to attend university. He storms off to his room when he finds out that his father has been "driven crazy by the chance remark of a plumber". He's incensed that his father has chosen to believe, not what he has seen with his own eyes for an entire lifetime, but what he's been told by a plumber "on his knees fixing the toilet in the back of the store!"

For me, this brings to mind the image of a priest on his knees before the altar, making people believe things that are not true, that defy a lifetime of experience of how the world goes, that contradict reason and logic and evidence. We don't know it yet, but Marcus Messner's intellectual hero is Bertrand Russell. Later, when he gets into trouble at college with Dean Caudwell ("the biggest Christer around"), we learn just how hard life can be for an American atheist in "the world of the righteous". There are parallels between Marcus and the British mathematician G. H. Hardy (who was at Trinity with Russell): both were unbelievers who bridled at the thought of attending college chapel, indignant at "putrefied primitive superstition" and the "disgrace of religion", and both resisted taking the advice of more sophisticated friends. Hardy too had to face the dean of his college, but there the parallel ends: while Hardy went on to enjoy a long and renowned academic career, Marcus sadly does not. (In the spirit of the novel, it was pure luck I happened to be reading Hardy at the same time as Roth.)

Marcus admires those who seem to be in control. At Winesburg College in Ohio he meets Olivia and this time chance works in his favour - he gets lucky in a very pleasant if perplexing way. To him, she is poised, an expert, in control. To herself, nothing could be further from the truth. Her rebuke is stinging: "I, who have eight thousand moods a minute... am 'under control'?" When his mother visits, she remembers the time her husband locked him out, and admits, "I couldn't control him, and this is the result."

This brilliant novel is set midway through the twentieth century, at a time of war and when world war was just-lived history. It was also a significant moment in intellectual history, one that might itself come to be seen as a tipping point in human knowledge. Our understanding of complex systems like national economies and the weather had rested upon the fundamental assumption that small changes in the initial values would get washed out over time. The discovery of the butterfly effect in the early sixties - in which tiny changes in those values result in huge divergence - began a rethink that is continuing to this day. Take any catastrophe and it may be that the seeds of its destructive power were there all along, slowly growing from small beginnings.

While we are now used to the idea that world events are not always or even often under the control of governments, on the scale of the individual we haven't yet shaken off the educated view of the world as a deterministic place. We are too attached to the idea that a person's success or failure is down to their intrinsic qualities rather than to luck. (Even lottery winners sometimes attribute their success to their "positive" attitude!) Roth's achievement is to tell a story that keeps you riveted to every word while also sparking off some of these ideas. In the end, it is the uneducated father who puts it best and teaches Marcus his most important lesson: "the terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieves the most disproportionate result."


Brilliant short novel, 18 Oct 2008
This is one of Philip Roth's best novels, the funny and poignant story of a young man's journey to adulthood in the 1950s. Although short, it manages to pack so much in - stifling mid-Western conformity, New Jersey Jewishness, first love and the horrors of war. It is a shame the critics now take Roth for granted because he is so prolific.He is still at the top of his game.

exasperation, 18 Oct 2008
I struggled last year to swallow the premise of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach; the depiction of a time when sex was still something barely discussed, and that the events of the couple's honeymoon could have such devastating consequences. In this similarly slim novel Philip Roth is keen to depict a very specific time (and as the college President will ask later, 'Do you have any idea that you belong to a time at all?'). He was quoted himself recently, saying "This will come as a great shock to young people, but in 1951 you could make it through college unscathed by oral sex." I obviously went to the wrong college. What he also wants to show is 'the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.' The very articulation of that and the important word there, comical, makes Roth's a far more successful book.

In the period during the Korean War we meet Marcus Messner, son of a kosher butcher and straight A student. His only wish is to do well not only to justify the expense of the education which has forced his mother back behind the counter to work once again with her husband but also of course to avoid the draft. It's difficult not to draw parallels with today when Roth describes the messy and costly war abroad and the very real fear of death for any young soldier going out there. The Communist forces with their bayonets and bugle calls are shown to be an army from a different age, and yet their deadly effectiveness is all to clear. There is another driving force at work however, 'At the heart of my ambition was the desire to be free of a strong, stolid father suddenly stricken with the uncontrollable fear for a grown-up son's well-being.' Marcus' father sees the potential for his son's ruin everywhere. When late home he assumes he is in a whorehouse or pool hall and his increasing hysteria pushes Marcus to attend a college hundreds of miles away in Ohio.

Here at Winesburg he eschews both the Jewish and secular fraternities, preferring to keep his head down and work hard. Because Roth reveals where Marcus is narrating his story from we know where all this is heading and can see how each decision he makes drives him closer and closer to his fate. Marcus himself picks up on his father's fatalism and '...despite the trammels of convention still rigidly holding sway on the campus of a middling little midwestern college in the years immediately after World War Two, I was determined to have intercourse before I died.' This comes after his meeting and first date with Olivia Hutton, who will send him into a tailspin after performing that act we have mentioned before. Marcus' confusion is where much of the humour comes from, something that even I, someone born after the sexual revolution, can understand.

In the quite brilliant American Pastoral, Philip Roth describes in vivid detail the manufacture of a pair of women's gloves. Never before had I considered how it was the done let alone the care, the detail and indeed the love that used to go into making a simple pair of gloves. Now, I think, I will never forget. In his latest novel the trade he spotlights is butchery, kosher butchery to be precise and with the same skill he shows the ritual efficiency of the shochet as he slaughters chickens with a quick flick of his knife. Roth contrasts this with the scar Marcus sees on Olivia's wrist, the result of her attempt to 'ritually slaughter herself' but there's something laboured about the comparison which stops it from quite hitting the mark. The rage with which Roth has written in many of his finest works is replaced here by the titular exasperation of a student in conflict with his male authority figures.

The writing is of course excellent throughout, the humour welcome and the period evoked with skill but it's very size makes it feel like a minor work, one which fails to quite match the ambition of earlier small books such as The Ghost Writer. Another short book is on its way (dealing with suicide) and in a recent interview with Robert McCrum, Roth explained his frustration, 'Starting a new book is hell. You just flail around until something happens. It's miraculous. It comes to you out of nothing and nowhere. That's the problem with writing short books. You finish them too quickly. And that's what's wonderful about a long book. So I've decided I've got to find a big project that will take me right through to the end. Finish the day before, and - exit ghost.' That's the book I want to read.

Another Roth classic, 17 Oct 2008
The isn't, of course, the only Roth novel that will still be read in 50 years time, but its brevity and accessibility might make it one of the most popular. A young Jewish student is crushed between his upbringing, his intellect and life at a provincial college. Meanwhile, The Korean War, the humanist's hell, waits for him to fail. Oh yes, make no mistake, this is certainly grim stuff but Indignation is also full of humour with some genuinely hilarious moments. Work that one out. Better still, read this marvellous, short novel at one sitting. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Most Over-rated Author In History, 12 Oct 2008
Other reviewers, even ones who got the fundamental point that this book is simply boring, still seem to say absurd things like how great the writing is and how complicated and intense the prose is and so on...

That this book is dull and tepid is clear. But what I wish to point out is how poorly written it is. We are bashed over the head again and again with exact and clear descriptions of the emotional, moral, spiritual and historical import of what is happening. Characters experience things in complete clarity and tell us all about it. Young children have the most amazing insight into what they experience and what it signifies. Pure tripe.

Roth makes the most elementary mistakes as an author, even as basic as constantly telling rather than showing. His prose is unexciting and lacks even the subtlest hint of subtlety. He is without doubt the most over-rated author in history. He comes across to me as someone who desperately wanted to be an author and who overcame his complete lack of creativity and intelligence to achieve his ambitions in spite of a total absence of native talent. The resulting works are the irrelevant products of someone trying real hard.

Once the hype and marketing campaigns are over Roth will be remembered as an embarrassment to literature. Don't waste your valuable reading time on Roth. There are thousands of other better reads.

tiring, 04 Oct 2008
This book is very boring to read. Roth really seems to believe that anything thing he writes is interesting. The result is a terrible lack of concision and lack of structure.

Result- tedium

Verbose, 15 Sep 2008
An interesting premise all but destroyed by the verbose ranting and railing of the author. I know that plot is just a vehicle around which the central message of a novel is based but did it all need to be excluded in favour of page-after-tedious-page of invective analysis on the loss of the American dream?


Very disappointing, 24 Apr 2008
Having discovered the brilliance of Roth after reading The Human Stain I was very much looking forward to American Pastoral, the first in the Nathan Zuckerman Trilogy.
If I had read this book first I would not have read another! After a very promising start the storyline drifts off at the point Skip Zuckerman invents the life story of Swede Levov.
At that point the prose becomes unbearably tedious to the very end of the book without any respite. If there was a point to it then it was completely over my head - very very boring and wouldnt recommend it.

American obsessional, 29 Feb 2008
American Pastoral is the first of a trilogy so loosely connected that even the publisher draws no attention to it. It wasn't until I had read the third volume - The Human Stain - that I realised I had come in at the end, and went back to the beginning with this book (the second volume is I Married A communist).

But reading The Human Stain first does throw American Pastoral into relief. The writing in American Pastoral is as magnificent, but the combination of plot and polemic far less satisfying. Whereas The Human Stain races along in a taut tension between the uncovering of secrets and the unmasking of humanity, American Pastoral is an obsessional, almost pathologically forensic, dissection of the American Way, with the plot acting only as a frustratingly episodic driver.

On the face of it this is a tale of how a man who is the perfect embodiment of the American Dream is blighted by the sheer simplicity of his perfection. He is undone by deviancy right on his doorstep. It's a deviancy he is powerless to prevent because it comes from the person to whom he is most devoted: his daughter.

It's a brilliant premise - so brilliant you long for more of the book to focus directly on it. Yet much of what you get instead is gloves. Yes, gloves. Your knowledge of the glovemaking process will be mightily improved by this book. And though it works as a device for a while, it comes eventually to feel as if you are being beaten to death by metaphor.

And that is true of many of the other meticulous digressions too. Roth scratches at the itch of Americana with a relentlessness that borders on autism. Since he is such a brilliant writer this mania is not without its insights - and humour. But it makes for a tough read. And when you finally reach the shocking drama of the final pages you are left feeling robbed of the more direct - but perhaps no less effective - narrative that might have been.

Athena College was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman Silk--formerly "Silky Silk", undefeated welterweight pro-boxer--strode in and shook the place awake. This faculty dean sacked the deadwood, made lots of hot new hires, including Yale-spawned literary-theory wunderkind Delphine Roux, and irritated so many people for so many decades that now, in 1998, they have all turned on him. Silk's character assassination is partly owing to what the novel's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, calls "the Devil of the Little Place--the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the lies".

But shocking, intensely dramatised events precipitate Silk's crisis. He remarks of two students who never showed up for class, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" They turn out to be black, and lodge a bogus charge of racism exploited by his enemies. Then, at 71, Viagra catapults Silk into "the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication", and he ignites an affair with an illiterate janitor, Faunia Farley, 34. She's got a sharp sensibility, "the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble", and a melancholy voluptuousness. "I'm back in the tornado", Silk exults. His campus persecutors burn him for it--and his main betrayer is Delphine Roux.

In a short space, it's tough to convey the gale-force quality of Silk's rants, or the odd effect of Zuckerman's narration, alternately retrospective and torrentially in the moment. The flashbacks to Silk's youth in New Jersey are just as important as his turbulent forced retirement, because it turns out that for his entire adult life, Silk has been covering up the fact that he is a black man. (If this seems implausible, consider that the famous New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard did the same thing.) Young Silk rejects both the racism that bars him from Woolworth's counter and the Negro solidarity of Howard University. "Neither the they of Woolworth's nor the we of Howard" is for Coleman Silk. "Instead the raw I with all its agility. Self-discovery--that was the punch to the labonz.... Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?"

Silk's contradictions power a great Philip Roth novel, but he's not the only character who packs a punch. Faunia, brutally abused by her Vietnam vet husband (a sketchy guy who seems to have wandered in from a lesser Russell Banks novel), scarred by the death of her kids, is one of Roth's best female characters ever. The self-serving Delphine Roux is intriguingly (and convincingly) nutty, and any number of minor characters pop in, mouth off, kick ass, and vanish, leaving a vivid sense of human passion and perversity behind. You might call it a stain. --Tim Appelo Athena College was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman Silk strode in and shook the place awake. This faculty dean sacked the deadwood, made lots of hot new hires, including Yale-spawned literary-theory wunderkind Delphine Roux, and pissed off so many people for so many decades that now, in 1998, they've all turned on him. Silk's character assassination is partly owing to what the novel's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, calls "the Devil of the Little Place--the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the lies". But shocking, intensely dramatised events precipitate Silk's crisis. He remarks of two students who never showed up for class, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" They turn out to be black, and lodge a bogus charge of racism exploited by his enemies. Then, at 71, Viagra catapults Silk into "the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication", and he ignites an affair with an illiterate janitor, Faunia Farley, 34. She's got a sharp sensibility, "the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble," and a melancholy voluptuousness. "I'm back in the tornado," Silk exults. His campus persecutors burn him for it--and his main betrayer is Delphine Roux.

The flashbacks to Silk's youth in New Jersey become just as important as his turbulent-forced retirement when he reveals a secret that he has been hiding his entire adult life and Silk's contradictions power a great Philip Roth novel, but he's not the only character who packs a punch. Faunia, brutally abused by her Vietnam vet husband, scarred by the death of her kids, is one of Roth's best female characters ever. The self-serving Delphine Roux is intriguingly (and convincingly) nutty, and any number of minor characters pop in, mouth off and vanish, leaving a vivid sense of human passion and perversity behind. You might call it a stain. --Tim Appelo

Another Must-Read from Roth, 01 Nov 2008
INDIGNATION is a fascinating novel, albeit difficult to read except in 20 page bursts. The reason is that the intense Marcus Messner, Roth's young protagonist and narrator, finds little joy, but much angst and guilt, in his life. He is the master of nothing. Everything is a challenge. His world is an ordeal. At one moment, Marcus is surprised to be told by his college Dean that he is shouting and pointing angrily. But throughout, Marcus seems on the verge such hysterical expression. This makes INDIGNATION a book to enjoy in small doses.

INDIGNATION is the story of Marcus, a studious young man and only child, who flees his overbearing father in Newark for a year at Winesburg College in rural Ohio. But when Marcus takes a step forward in his life--such as excelling in school, establishing greater independence from his parents, having new sexual experiences, and befriending the leaders in a fraternity--Roth connects that step to perilous undercurrents of guilt, principled naïveté, or treachery. In INDIGNATION, all the happy normal experiences of youth and college don't make Marcus stronger. Instead, they make him increasingly vulnerable.

The narrative skill shown in INDIGNATION is truly dazzling. Not only is there not a single word out of place. But Roth is also able to pull a surprising and profound subtext from each experience that Marcus relates. The effect is that you get every event in the novel twice: once in the seamless and interesting telling; then a second time in its surprising interpretation. Only in the very end of INDIGNATION does the meaning that Roth pulls from an experience seem obvious. (I thought we were going to learn that Marcus was doomed to recapitulate the tragic meshuge of his father's family.)

Of course, it's all a matter of taste. But I must say that Roth sometimes seems to overplay to make his points. Anyone remember the vomit scene in American Pastoral, which expressed revulsion? Well, INDIGNATION has a vomit scene as well. For an author who is able to find great depth in the most ordinary interactions, I wonder why these extreme physical expressions need to occur.


In the world of the righteous, beware of what the plumber says, 23 Oct 2008
An American teenager storms off to his room. Unlikely as it sounds, this is uncharacteristic behaviour on the part of Marcus Messner, the first-person narrator of Philip Roth's latest novel. Already, within a dozen pages, we think Marcus has a point. Enrolled at the local college, he looks back to the "wonderful time" he had ("wonderful except when it came to eviscerating chickens") helping his father out at the butcher's store on Lyons Avenue in Newark, New Jersey. He remembers the way they would deal with the demanding customers, and, of course, he remembers the blood, the buckets of blood. On the other side of the world the Korean war is underway, and blood is being spilled by bullet and bayonet.

Then, one day, his father flips and begins wondering when his only son is going to go off and get himself killed. Why this sudden change? Being at college means avoiding the draft, avoiding danger. "The questions were ludicrous... I had been a prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student" whose main ambition was to be the first Messner to attend university. He storms off to his room when he finds out that his father has been "driven crazy by the chance remark of a plumber". He's incensed that his father has chosen to believe, not what he has seen with his own eyes for an entire lifetime, but what he's been told by a plumber "on his knees fixing the toilet in the back of the store!"

For me, this brings to mind the image of a priest on his knees before the altar, making people believe things that are not true, that defy a lifetime of experience of how the world goes, that contradict reason and logic and evidence. We don't know it yet, but Marcus Messner's intellectual hero is Bertrand Russell. Later, when he gets into trouble at college with Dean Caudwell ("the biggest Christer around"), we learn just how hard life can be for an American atheist in "the world of the righteous". There are parallels between Marcus and the British mathematician G. H. Hardy (who was at Trinity with Russell): both were unbelievers who bridled at the thought of attending college chapel, indignant at "putrefied primitive superstition" and the "disgrace of religion", and both resisted taking the advice of more sophisticated friends. Hardy too had to face the dean of his college, but there the parallel ends: while Hardy went on to enjoy a long and renowned academic career, Marcus sadly does not. (In the spirit of the novel, it was pure luck I happened to be reading Hardy at the same time as Roth.)

Marcus admires those who seem to be in control. At Winesburg College in Ohio he meets Olivia and this time chance works in his favour - he gets lucky in a very pleasant if perplexing way. To him, she is poised, an expert, in control. To herself, nothing could be further from the truth. Her rebuke is stinging: "I, who have eight thousand moods a minute... am 'under control'?" When his mother visits, she remembers the time her husband locked him out, and admits, "I couldn't control him, and this is the result."

This brilliant novel is set midway through the twentieth century, at a time of war and when world war was just-lived history. It was also a significant moment in intellectual history, one that might itself come to be seen as a tipping point in human knowledge. Our understanding of complex systems like national economies and the weather had rested upon the fundamental assumption that small changes in the initial values would get washed out over time. The discovery of the butterfly effect in the early sixties - in which tiny changes in those values result in huge divergence - began a rethink that is continuing to this day. Take any catastrophe and it may be that the seeds of its destructive power were there all along, slowly growing from small beginnings.

While we are now used to the idea that world events are not always or even often under the control of governments, on the scale of the individual we haven't yet shaken off the educated view of the world as a deterministic place. We are too attached to the idea that a person's success or failure is down to their intrinsic qualities rather than to luck. (Even lottery winners sometimes attribute their success to their "positive" attitude!) Roth's achievement is to tell a story that keeps you riveted to every word while also sparking off some of these ideas. In the end, it is the uneducated father who puts it best and teaches Marcus his most important lesson: "the terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieves the most disproportionate result."


Brilliant short novel, 18 Oct 2008
This is one of Philip Roth's best novels, the funny and poignant story of a young man's journey to adulthood in the 1950s. Although short, it manages to pack so much in - stifling mid-Western conformity, New Jersey Jewishness, first love and the horrors of war. It is a shame the critics now take Roth for granted because he is so prolific.He is still at the top of his game.

exasperation, 18 Oct 2008
I struggled last year to swallow the premise of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach; the depiction of a time when sex was still something barely discussed, and that the events of the couple's honeymoon could have such devastating consequences. In this similarly slim novel Philip Roth is keen to depict a very specific time (and as the college President will ask later, 'Do you have any idea that you belong to a time at all?'). He was quoted himself recently, saying "This will come as a great shock to young people, but in 1951 you could make it through college unscathed by oral sex." I obviously went to the wrong college. What he also wants to show is 'the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.' The very articulation of that and the important word there, comical, makes Roth's a far more successful book.

In the period during the Korean War we meet Marcus Messner, son of a kosher butcher and straight A student. His only wish is to do well not only to justify the expense of the education which has forced his mother back behind the counter to work once again with her husband but also of course to avoid the draft. It's difficult not to draw parallels with today when Roth describes the messy and costly war abroad and the very real fear of death for any young soldier going out there. The Communist forces with their bayonets and bugle calls are shown to be an army from a different age, and yet their deadly effectiveness is all to clear. There is another driving force at work however, 'At the heart of my ambition was the desire to be free of a strong, stolid father suddenly stricken with the uncontrollable fear for a grown-up son's well-being.' Marcus' father sees the potential for his son's ruin everywhere. When late home he assumes he is in a whorehouse or pool hall and his increasing hysteria pushes Marcus to attend a college hundreds of miles away in Ohio.

Here at Winesburg he eschews both the Jewish and secular fraternities, preferring to keep his head down and work hard. Because Roth reveals where Marcus is narrating his story from we know where all this is heading and can see how each decision he makes drives him closer and closer to his fate. Marcus himself picks up on his father's fatalism and '...despite the trammels of convention still rigidly holding sway on the campus of a middling little midwestern college in the years immediately after World War Two, I was determined to have intercourse before I died.' This comes after his meeting and first date with Olivia Hutton, who will send him into a tailspin after performing that act we have mentioned before. Marcus' confusion is where much of the humour comes from, something that even I, someone born after the sexual revolution, can understand.

In the quite brilliant American Pastoral, Philip Roth describes in vivid detail the manufacture of a pair of women's gloves. Never before had I considered how it was the done let alone the care, the detail and indeed the love that used to go into making a simple pair of gloves. Now, I think, I will never forget. In his latest novel the trade he spotlights is butchery, kosher butchery to be precise and with the same skill he shows the ritual efficiency of the shochet as he slaughters chickens with a quick flick of his knife. Roth contrasts this with the scar Marcus sees on Olivia's wrist, the result of her attempt to 'ritually slaughter herself' but there's something laboured about the comparison which stops it from quite hitting the mark. The rage with which Roth has written in many of his finest works is replaced here by the titular exasperation of a student in conflict with his male authority figures.

The writing is of course excellent throughout, the humour welcome and the period evoked with skill but it's very size makes it feel like a minor work, one which fails to quite match the ambition of earlier small books such as The Ghost Writer. Another short book is on its way (dealing with suicide) and in a recent interview with Robert McCrum, Roth explained his frustration, 'Starting a new book is hell. You just flail around until something happens. It's miraculous. It comes to you out of nothing and nowhere. That's the problem with writing short books. You finish them too quickly. And that's what's wonderful about a long book. So I've decided I've got to find a big project that will take me right through to the end. Finish the day before, and - exit ghost.' That's the book I want to read.

Another Roth classic, 17 Oct 2008
The isn't, of course, the only Roth novel that will still be read in 50 years time, but its brevity and accessibility might make it one of the most popular. A young Jewish student is crushed between his upbringing, his intellect and life at a provincial college. Meanwhile, The Korean War, the humanist's hell, waits for him to fail. Oh yes, make no mistake, this is certainly grim stuff but Indignation is also full of humour with some genuinely hilarious moments. Work that one out. Better still, read this marvellous, short novel at one sitting. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Most Over-rated Author In History, 12 Oct 2008
Other reviewers, even ones who got the fundamental point that this book is simply boring, still seem to say absurd things like how great the writing is and how complicated and intense the prose is and so on...

That this book is dull and tepid is clear. But what I wish to point out is how poorly written it is. We are bashed over the head again and again with exact and clear descriptions of the emotional, moral, spiritual and historical import of what is happening. Characters experience things in complete clarity and tell us all about it. Young children have the most amazing insight into what they experience and what it signifies. Pure tripe.

Roth makes the most elementary mistakes as an author, even as basic as constantly telling rather than showing. His prose is unexciting and lacks even the subtlest hint of subtlety. He is without doubt the most over-rated author in history. He comes across to me as someone who desperately wanted to be an author and who overcame his complete lack of creativity and intelligence to achieve his ambitions in spite of a total absence of native talent. The resulting works are the irrelevant products of someone trying real hard.

Once the hype and marketing campaigns are over Roth will be remembered as an embarrassment to literature. Don't waste your valuable reading time on Roth. There are thousands of other better reads.

tiring, 04 Oct 2008
This book is very boring to read. Roth really seems to believe that anything thing he writes is interesting. The result is a terrible lack of concision and lack of structure.

Result- tedium

Verbose, 15 Sep 2008
An interesting premise all but destroyed by the verbose ranting and railing of the author. I know that plot is just a vehicle around which the central message of a novel is based but did it all need to be excluded in favour of page-after-tedious-page of invective analysis on the loss of the American dream?


Very disappointing, 24 Apr 2008
Having discovered the brilliance of Roth after reading The Human Stain I was very much looking forward to American Pastoral, the first in the Nathan Zuckerman Trilogy.
If I had read this book first I would not have read another! After a very promising start the storyline drifts off at the point Skip Zuckerman invents the life story of Swede Levov.
At that point the prose becomes unbearably tedious to the very end of the book without any respite. If there was a point to it then it was completely over my head - very very boring and wouldnt recommend it.

American obsessional, 29 Feb 2008
American Pastoral is the first of a trilogy so loosely connected that even the publisher draws no attention to it. It wasn't until I had read the third volume - The Human Stain - that I realised I had come in at the end, and went back to the beginning with this book (the second volume is I Married A communist).

But reading The Human Stain first does throw American Pastoral into relief. The writing in American Pastoral is as magnificent, but the combination of plot and polemic far less satisfying. Whereas The Human Stain races along in a taut tension between the uncovering of secrets and the unmasking of humanity, American Pastoral is an obsessional, almost pathologically forensic, dissection of the American Way, with the plot acting only as a frustratingly episodic driver.

On the face of it this is a tale of how a man who is the perfect embodiment of the American Dream is blighted by the sheer simplicity of his perfection. He is undone by deviancy right on his doorstep. It's a deviancy he is powerless to prevent because it comes from the person to whom he is most devoted: his daughter.

It's a brilliant premise - so brilliant you long for more of the book to focus directly on it. Yet much of what you get instead is gloves. Yes, gloves. Your knowledge of the glovemaking process will be mightily improved by this book. And though it works as a device for a while, it comes eventually to feel as if you are being beaten to death by metaphor.

And that is true of many of the other meticulous digressions too. Roth scratches at the itch of Americana with a relentlessness that borders on autism. Since he is such a brilliant writer this mania is not without its insights - and humour. But it makes for a tough read. And when you finally reach the shocking drama of the final pages you are left feeling robbed of the more direct - but perhaps no less effective - narrative that might have been.

Mixed feelings, 05 May 2008
Let me just start with the silliest comment: the only way to find out whether you like this book or not, is by reading it. Most reviews here and on Amazon.com reflect ambivalent feelings. After turning the last page, mine was not altogether negative, but not entirely positive either. This was also my first book by Philip Roth.

Ageing but vigorous professor Coleman Silk is accused of racism in the classroom and forcefully rejecting it (in vain), he chooses to retire after a long, fulfilling and esteemed teaching career. His tale is told by his friend, writer Nathan Zuckerman. Hardly acknowledging each other for years, a friendship begins and Zuckerman tries to understand the multiple facets defining Silk's personality. Unbeknownst to him, he will later discover a secret that Silk has kept for decades, a secret which his life had been, and still is, based on.

Looping around the main theme, there are other characters who are connected with Silk and bear relevance. In the background, Coleman's parents and siblings. Their beginnings, the struggles to send all their children to proper schools for the best education possible. We then have his wife, a strong, independent personality who died during the `racism ordeal', and their four adult children (it's 1998 by then). Silk's bursting rage and pain towards these two -to him- related events (the accusations and his wife's death), find a degree of comfort through the acquaintance -later developing into something much more- of Faunia, a janitor in the Athena college where he used to teach. Faunia, a tormented soul herself, does not seem to be left alone by her ex-husband, Les, who keeps stalking her after a terrible tragedy struck at their home some years previously. Some other characters from the past who are irretrievably connected with Coleman, pop into the picture. His former girlfriend, Steena, met and loved in his twenties. The young French dean at Athena, Dolphine Roux, who supported the racism accusations. Zuckerman himself finds a niche for some of his personal details.

So many people, so many different personalities, so many tragedies. This book explores a variety of themes -race, rape, depression, death, loneliness- which make it certainly for a substantial, full-of-texture read. It also speaks of love, love for a profession, for a person, for life in general, but the intricacy with which the author interpolates this concept is open to debate. This is why I cannot define in full its identifying quality, or, for that matter, what exactly I did not like about this book. Perhaps a certain dislike for the structure of some of the chapters: sentences which do not see a full stop, a pause, for an entire page for example. This rendered the read a bit tedious. Also, I found the numerous references to the Clinton/Lewinski's `interlude' somewhat irrelevant to the core of the story and if the purpose was to pinpoint that Silk's own story began to unfold back then, in 1998, well, it was clear enough already. Not to mention the final paragraphs -and this is not a spoiler- when an incredible and unrealistic conversation ensues in a cemetery. I mean, was that to supply the reader with some final `answers' -which could not have been `real' anyway since it was all a mental image?- .

And yet. Coleman Silk is a personage. And his secret, the secret from which we are often distracted due to a number of superimposed, unnecessary (to me) details, is the central theme of this book. Like it or not, mixed feelings or not, I've never written such a long review before. There must be a reason, although I myself am not sure what that is. What I am sure about is that this tale is so imbued with wrenching issues that it cannot fail to dazzle, provoke and stimulate conversations.


Very putdownable, 28 Mar 2008
The premise and the promise is great, but the book fails to impress. This book has two of Roth's favourite preoccupations - sex and the experience of the Jewish man in America - in abundance. This was also very important material for Everyman, whereas the latter is an absolute tour de force this is a tour to nowehere, via a fairly dull and lengthy scenic route that I did not even wish to complete. One of the main problems with this book is the detachment I experience from its central character Coleman Silk. I would rather that he had delivered this narrative first hand. Instead it is delivered by Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Another problem is the huge amount of words and energy invested in to building character and "backstory" (that awful new expression) for characters that really turn out to be not very important. Dare I accuse the great Roth of this (and he IS sometimes great) but much of this seems to be padding. Indeed, you get the feeing that Roth is writing too much and that half of his output of the last 10 years would be more than sufficient. Everyman is wonderful and so to supposedly, is American Pastoral. Both are enough to secure his reputation in the pantheon of great American novelists - as if he needed anyone to reassure him - and that's not mentioning Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint and the 20 plus other novels he has written. Although this book has plenty of interesting things to say about political correctness gone mad and issues of race and racism, I found that I was left wanting to get properly inside the head of Coleman Silk but with the narrative stucture and device employed, this proved impossible.

Remarkably captivating, 15 Feb 2008
Here are sentences like paragraphs and paragraphs like chapters which have a tendency to exasperate. That said, this is actually a great read. Zuckerman, the writer again, has an assignment of profound consequence. An association with Coleman allows us to see a retrospective unfolding scene to the inevitable. There is no especial mystery, yet the novel is remarkably captivating. Some characters are witnessed second hand, but this does not matter, for that is part of the well developed construction. Ideas are aplenty with lots of rich pages of impressive brilliance.


A primer for the soul, 22 Nov 2007
I've long since learned to be sceptical of the hyberbolic quotes that decorate the covers of books. So when I read the Sunday Telegraph's summary of The Human Stain as 'The work of a genius at full throttle' I anticipated disappointment. But within only a few pages their assessment became a statement of fact rather than opinion.

It would have been absurd for Roth to call his novel 'The Human Condition', and yet he reasonably could have. In these three hundred and fifty or so pages he describes with cruel precision the human need to tell stories and lies about ourselves and each other - stories and lies which together ensure that all human interaction is at cross purposes. 'Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning?' he writes. 'All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.'

Through the story of Coleman Silk, a man whose anger at being wronged is amplified to the point of near madness by the knowledge of his own secret wrongs, Roth shines a bitterly bright spotlight on the assumptions we make about others, and on the assumptions we try to make others have of us. The Human Stain is a tragedy of epic proportions - with all the pain, irony, misunderstanding and revelation that suggests. The twists of the plot are like the twists of the knife as he skewers human frailty, prejudice and self-deception.

I read this book very slowly - not because it is hard work (it is in fact an electrifying page-turner) - but because the brilliance of the prose and the richness of the insight makes it sometimes feel like a primer for the soul - and to miss a sentence might be to miss an insight one should never forget. So, for example, buried deep mid-paragraph, in the middle of the book, Roth almost casually encapsulates the thesis of the novel: '...we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen - there's no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It's in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.'

Lately I have felt weary of the over conceptualised and plodding earnestness of so much contemporary literary fiction, and this book singlehandedly made me fall in love again with the act and purpose of reading. It is a book that makes you want to gasp at the beauty of language in the hands of a master-craftsman, and that leaves you feeling wiser about yourself, and everyone else - even if that wisdom is deep, dark and desperate.

Identity politics and political correctness as manifestations of American insecurity, 11 Oct 2007
The central premise in Philip Roth's fulminating diatribe against the maladies of modern America is very flimsy and yet it works, probably because of its flimsiness. The pity is that I can't state it clearly here without spoiling the plot, though other reviewers have done so.
Narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego, the story revolves around the life of Coleman Silk, the autocratic Dean of Faculty in a small town New England university. Pressured and humiliated into quitting his academic position as a result of an unintentional racial double entendre he blames the subsequent death of his wife on the affair. Seething with resentment and seeking revenge on those within the university who remained silent or actively collaborated in his demise, he finally takes up with a badly damaged, poorly educated backwater girl half his age who is being stalked by her psychotic ex-Nam war vet ex-husband. Silk's life becomes increasingly precarious and complicated, resulting in the inevitable denouement. We learn later that throughout his adult life he had harboured a personal secret (out of self-interest) which made his humiliation almost laughably ironic.
Roth tackles major issues (political correctness, identity politics, racial prejudice, overseas adventurism, dumb education and dumb culture) against a backdrop of an extremely trivial one (the Clinton-Lewinsky affair) and it is a risky undertaking in modern America because of the very issues he is attacking. In particular he lays himself open to claims of cryptic racism but that would be a false claim. The action taken by Coleman Silk is not new; it is one that has been used by American Jews and English working-class men in the past as a means of personal progress and is merely a damning statement about the social climate and pressures of certain societies at certain periods in their history. It has nothing to do with personal shame or self-loathing.
There is some terrific characterisation, notably of Silk himself, his nemesis Faunia Farley, her deranged husband Lester, and Delphine Roux, the alienated French academic hired by Silk, an action that he came to regret. You genuinely come to understand their individual motivations, foibles, weaknesses and neuroses as a result. The writing is dense yet fast-paced and angry. This is the best novel I have read so far published in the current century.

Another Must-Read from Roth, 01 Nov 2008
INDIGNATION is a fascinating novel, albeit difficult to read except in 20 page bursts. The reason is that the intense Marcus Messner, Roth's young protagonist and narrator, finds little joy, but much angst and guilt, in his life. He is the master of nothing. Everything is a challenge. His world is an ordeal. At one moment, Marcus is surprised to be told by his college Dean that he is shouting and pointing angrily. But throughout, Marcus seems on the verge such hysterical expression. This makes INDIGNATION a book to enjoy in small doses.

INDIGNATION is the story of Marcus, a studious young man and only child, who flees his overbearing father in Newark for a year at Winesburg College in rural Ohio. But when Marcus takes a step forward in his life--such as excelling in school, establishing greater independence from his parents, having new sexual experiences, and befriending the leaders in a fraternity--Roth connects that step to perilous undercurrents of guilt, principled naïveté, or treachery. In INDIGNATION, all the happy normal experiences of youth and college don't make Marcus stronger. Instead, they make him increasingly vulnerable.

The narrative skill shown in INDIGNATION is truly dazzling. Not only is there not a single word out of place. But Roth is also able to pull a surprising and profound subtext from each experience that Marcus relates. The effect is that you get every event in the novel twice: once in the seamless and interesting telling; then a second time in its surprising interpretation. Only in the very end of INDIGNATION does the meaning that Roth pulls from an experience seem obvious. (I thought we were going to learn that Marcus was doomed to recapitulate the tragic meshuge of his father's family.)

Of course, it's all a matter of taste. But I must say that Roth sometimes seems to overplay to make his points. Anyone remember the vomit scene in American Pastoral, which expressed revulsion? Well, INDIGNATION has a vomit scene as well. For an author who is able to find great depth in the most ordinary interactions, I wonder why these extreme physical expressions need to occur.


In the world of the righteous, beware of what the plumber says, 23 Oct 2008
An American teenager storms off to his room. Unlikely as it sounds, this is uncharacteristic behaviour on the part of Marcus Messner, the first-person narrator of Philip Roth's latest novel. Already, within a dozen pages, we think Marcus has a point. Enrolled at the local college, he looks back to the "wonderful time" he had ("wonderful except when it came to eviscerating chickens") helping his father out at the butcher's store on Lyons Avenue in Newark, New Jersey. He remembers the way they would deal with the demanding customers, and, of course, he remembers the blood, the buckets of blood. On the other side of the world the Korean war is underway, and blood is being spilled by bullet and bayonet.

Then, one day, his father flips and begins wondering when his only son is going to go off and get himself killed. Why this sudden change? Being at college means avoiding the draft, avoiding danger. "The questions were ludicrous... I had been a prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student" whose main ambition was to be the first Messner to attend university. He storms off to his room when he finds out that his father has been "driven crazy by the chance remark of a plumber". He's incensed that his father has chosen to believe, not what he has seen with his own eyes for an entire lifetime, but what he's been told by a plumber "on his knees fixing the toilet in the back of the store!"

For me, this brings to mind the image of a priest on his knees before the altar, making people believe things that are not true, that defy a lifetime of experience of how the world goes, that contradict reason and logic and evidence. We don't know it yet, but Marcus Messner's intellectual hero is Bertrand Russell. Later, when he gets into trouble at college with Dean Caudwell ("the biggest Christer around"), we learn just how hard life can be for an American atheist in "the world of the righteous". There are parallels between Marcus and the British mathematician G. H. Hardy (who was at Trinity with Russell): both were unbelievers who bridled at the thought of attending college chapel, indignant at "putrefied primitive superstition" and the "disgrace of religion", and both resisted taking the advice of more sophisticated friends. Hardy too had to face the dean of his college, but there the parallel ends: while Hardy went on to enjoy a long and renowned academic career, Marcus sadly does not. (In the spirit of the novel, it was pure luck I happened to be reading Hardy at the same time as Roth.)

Marcus admires those who seem to be in control. At Winesburg College in Ohio he meets Olivia and this time chance works in his favour - he gets lucky in a very pleasant if perplexing way. To him, she is poised, an expert, in control. To herself, nothing could be further from the truth. Her rebuke is stinging: "I, who have eight thousand moods a minute... am 'under control'?" When his mother visits, she remembers the time her husband locked him out, and admits, "I couldn't control him, and this is the result."

This brilliant novel is set midway through the twentieth century, at a time of war and when world war was just-lived history. It was also a significant moment in intellectual history, one that might itself come to be seen as a tipping point in human knowledge. Our understanding of complex systems like national economies and the weather had rested upon the fundamental assumption that small changes in the initial values would get washed out over time. The discovery of the butterfly effect in the early sixties - in which tiny changes in those values result in huge divergence - began a rethink that is continuing to this day. Take any catastrophe and it may be that the seeds of its destructive power were there all along, slowly growing from small beginnings.

While we are now used to the idea that world events are not always or even often under the control of governments, on the scale of the individual we haven't yet shaken off the educated view of the world as a deterministic place. We are too attached to the idea that a person's success or failure is down to their intrinsic qualities rather than to luck. (Even lottery winners sometimes attribute their success to their "positive" attitude!) Roth's achievement is to tell a story that keeps you riveted to every word while also sparking off some of these ideas. In the end, it is the uneducated father who puts it best and teaches Marcus his most important lesson: "the terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieves the most disproportionate result."


Brilliant short novel, 18 Oct 2008
This is one of Philip Roth's best novels, the funny and poignant story of a young man's journey to adulthood in the 1950s. Although short, it manages to pack so much in - stifling mid-Western conformity, New Jersey Jewishness, first love and the horrors of war. It is a shame the critics now take Roth for granted because he is so prolific.He is still at the top of his game.

exasperation, 18 Oct 2008
I struggled last year to swallow the premise of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach; the depiction of a time when sex was still something barely discussed, and that the events of the couple's honeymoon could have such devastating consequences. In this similarly slim novel Philip Roth is keen to depict a very specific time (and as the college President will ask later, 'Do you have any idea that you belong to a time at all?'). He was quoted himself recently, saying "This will come as a great shock to young people, but in 1951 you could make it through college unscathed by oral sex." I obviously went to the wrong college. What he also wants to show is 'the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.' The very articulation of that and the important word there, comical, makes Roth's a far more successful book.

In the period during the Korean War we meet Marcus Messner, son of a kosher butcher and straight A student. His only wish is to do well not only to justify the expense of the education which has forced his mother back behind the counter to work once again with her husband but also of course to avoid the draft. It's difficult not to draw parallels with today when Roth describes the messy and costly war abroad and the very real fear of death for any young soldier going out there. The Communist forces with their bayonets and bugle calls are shown to be an army from a different age, and yet their deadly effectiveness is all to clear. There is another driving force at work however, 'At the heart of my ambition was the desire to be free of a strong, stolid father suddenly stricken with the uncontrollable fear for a grown-up son's well-being.' Marcus' father sees the potential for his son's ruin everywhere. When late home he assumes he is in a whorehouse or pool hall and his increasing hysteria pushes Marcus to attend a college hundreds of miles away in Ohio.

Here at Winesburg he eschews both the Jewish and secular fraternities, preferring to keep his head down and work hard. Because Roth reveals where Marcus is narrating his story from we know where all this is heading and can see how each decision he makes drives him closer and closer to his fate. Marcus himself picks up on his father's fatalism and '...despite the trammels of convention still rigidly holding sway on the campus of a middling little midwestern college in the years immediately after World War Two, I was determined to have intercourse before I died.' This comes after his meeting and first date with Olivia Hutton, who will send him into a tailspin after performing that act we have mentioned before. Marcus' confusion is where much of the humour comes from, something that even I, someone born after the sexual revolution, can understand.

In the quite brilliant American Pastoral, Philip Roth describes in vivid detail the manufacture of a pair of women's gloves. Never before had I considered how it was the done let alone the care, the detail and indeed the love that used to go into making a simple pair of gloves. Now, I think, I will never forget. In his latest novel the trade he spotlights is butchery, kosher butchery to be precise and with the same skill he shows the ritual efficiency of the shochet as he slaughters chickens with a quick flick of his knife. Roth contrasts this with the scar Marcus sees on Olivia's wrist, the result of her attempt to 'ritually slaughter herself' but there's something laboured about the comparison which stops it from quite hitting the mark. The rage with which Roth has written in many of his finest works is replaced here by the titular exasperation of a student in conflict with his male authority figures.

The writing is of course excellent throughout, the humour welcome and the period evoked with skill but it's very size makes it feel like a minor work, one which fails to quite match the ambition of earlier small books such as The Ghost Writer. Another short book is on its way (dealing with suicide) and in a recent interview with Robert McCrum, Roth explained his frustration, 'Starting a new book is hell. You just flail around until something happens. It's miraculous. It comes to you out of nothing and nowhere. That's the problem with writing short books. You finish them too quickly. And that's what's wonderful about a long book. So I've decided I've got to find a big project that will take me right through to the end. Finish the day before, and - exit ghost.' That's the book I want to read.

Another Roth classic, 17 Oct 2008
The isn't, of course, the only Roth novel that will still be read in 50 years time, but its brevity and accessibility might make it one of the most popular. A young Jewish student is crushed between his upbringing, his intellect and life at a provincial college. Meanwhile, The Korean War, the humanist's hell, waits for him to fail. Oh yes, make no mistake, this is certainly grim stuff but Indignation is also full of humour with some genuinely hilarious moments. Work that one out. Better still, read this marvellous, short novel at one sitting. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Most Over-rated Author In History, 12 Oct 2008
Other reviewers, even ones who got the fundamental point that this book is simply boring, still seem to say absurd things like how great the writing is and how complicated and intense the prose is and so on...

That this book is dull and tepid is clear. But what I wish to point out is how poorly written it is. We are bashed over the head again and again with exact and clear descriptions of the emotional, moral, spiritual and historical import of what is happening. Characters experience things in complete clarity and tell us all about it. Young children have the most amazing insight into what they experience and what it signifies. Pure tripe.

Roth makes the most elementary mistakes as an author, even as basic as constantly telling rather than showing. His prose is unexciting and lacks even the subtlest hint of subtlety. He is without doubt the most over-rated author in history. He comes across to me as someone who desperately wanted to be an author and who overcame his complete lack of creativity and intelligence to achieve his ambitions in spite of a total absence of native talent. The resulting works are the irrelevant products of someone trying real hard.

Once the hype and marketing campaigns are over Roth will be remembered as an embarrassment to literature. Don't waste your valuable reading time on Roth. There are thousands of other better reads.

tiring, 04 Oct 2008
This book is very boring to read. Roth really seems to believe that anything thing he writes is interesting. The result is a terrible lack of concision and lack of structure.

Result- tedium

Verbose, 15 Sep 2008
An interesting premise all but destroyed by the verbose ranting and railing of the author. I know that plot is just a vehicle around which the central message of a novel is based but did it all need to be excluded in favour of page-after-tedious-page of invective analysis on the loss of the American dream?


Very disappointing, 24 Apr 2008
Having discovered the brilliance of Roth after reading The Human Stain I was very much looking forward to American Pastoral, the first in the Nathan Zuckerman Trilogy.
If I had read this book first I would not have read another! After a very promising start the storyline drifts off at the point Skip Zuckerman invents the life story of Swede Levov.
At that point the prose becomes unbearably tedious to the very end of the book without any respite. If there was a point to it then it was completely over my head - very very boring and wouldnt recommend it.

American obsessional, 29 Feb 2008
American Pastoral is the first of a trilogy so loosely connected that even the publisher draws no attention to it. It wasn't until I had read the third volume - The Human Stain - that I realised I had come in at the end, and went back to the beginning with this book (the second volume is I Married A communist).

But reading The Human Stain first does throw American Pastoral into relief. The writing in American Pastoral is as magnificent, but the combination of plot and polemic far less satisfying. Whereas The Human Stain races along in a taut tension between the uncovering of secrets and the unmasking of humanity, American Pastoral is an obsessional, almost pathologically forensic, dissection of the American Way, with the plot acting only as a frustratingly episodic driver.

On the face of it this is a tale of how a man who is the perfect embodiment of the American Dream is blighted by the sheer simplicity of his perfection. He is undone by deviancy right on his doorstep. It's a deviancy he is powerless to prevent because it comes from the person to whom he is most devoted: his daughter.

It's a brilliant premise - so brilliant you long for more of the book to focus directly on it. Yet much of what you get instead is gloves. Yes, gloves. Your knowledge of the glovemaking process will be mightily improved by this book. And though it works as a device for a while, it comes eventually to feel as if you are being beaten to death by metaphor.

And that is true of many of the other meticulous digressions too. Roth scratches at the itch of Americana with a relentlessness that borders on autism. Since he is such a brilliant writer this mania is not without its insights - and humour. But it makes for a tough read. And when you finally reach the shocking drama of the final pages you are left feeling robbed of the more direct - but perhaps no less effective - narrative that might have been.

Mixed feelings, 05 May 2008
Let me just start with the silliest comment: the only way to find out whether you like this book or not, is by reading it. Most reviews here and on Amazon.com reflect ambivalent feelings. After turning the last page, mine was not altogether negative, but not entirely positive either. This was also my first book by Philip Roth.

Ageing but vigorous professor Coleman Silk is accused of racism in the classroom and forcefully rejecting it (in vain), he chooses to retire after a long, fulfilling and esteemed teaching career. His tale is told by his friend, writer Nathan Zuckerman. Hardly acknowledging each other for years, a friendship begins and Zuckerman tries to understand the multiple facets defining Silk's personality. Unbeknownst to him, he will later discover a secret that Silk has kept for decades, a secret which his life had been, and still is, based on.

Looping around the main theme, there are other characters who are connected with Silk and bear relevance. In the background, Coleman's parents and siblings. Their beginnings, the struggles to send all their children to proper schools for the best education possible. We then have his wife, a strong, independent personality who died during the `racism ordeal', and their four adult children (it's 1998 by then). Silk's bursting rage and pain towards these two -to him- related events (the accusations and his wife's death), find a degree of comfort through the acquaintance -later developing into something much more- of Faunia, a janitor in the Athena college where he used to teach. Faunia, a tormented soul herself, does not seem to be left alone by her ex-husband, Les, who keeps stalking her after a terrible tragedy struck at their home some years previously. Some other characters from the past who are irretrievably connected with Coleman, pop into the picture. His former girlfriend, Steena, met and loved in his twenties. The young French dean at Athena, Dolphine Roux, who supported the racism accusations. Zuckerman himself finds a niche for some of his personal details.

So many people, so many different personalities, so many tragedies. This book explores a variety of themes -race, rape, depression, death, loneliness- which make it certainly for a substantial, full-of-texture read. It also speaks of love, love for a profession, for a person, for life in general, but the intricacy with which the author interpolates this concept is open to debate. This is why I cannot define in full its identifying quality, or, for that matter, what exactly I did not like about this book. Perhaps a certain dislike for the structure of some of the chapters: sentences which do not see a full stop, a pause, for an entire page for example. This rendered the read a bit tedious. Also, I found the numerous references to the Clinton/Lewinski's `interlude' somewhat irrelevant to the core of the story and if the purpose was to pinpoint that Silk's own story began to unfold back then, in 1998, well, it was clear enough already. Not to mention the final paragraphs -and this is not a spoiler- when an incredible and unrealistic conversation ensues in a cemetery. I mean, was that to supply the reader with some final `answers' -which could not have been `real' anyway since it was all a mental image?- .

And yet. Coleman Silk is a personage. And his secret, the secret from which we are often distracted due to a number of superimposed, unnecessary (to me) details, is the central theme of this book. Like it or not, mixed feelings or not, I've never written such a long review before. There must be a reason, although I myself am not sure what that is. What I am sure about is that this tale is so imbued with wrenching issues that it cannot fail to dazzle, provoke and stimulate conversations.


Very putdownable, 28 Mar 2008
The premise and the promise is great, but the book fails to impress. This book has two of Roth's favourite preoccupations - sex and the experience of the Jewish man in America - in abundance. This was also very important material for Everyman, whereas the latter is an absolute tour de force this is a tour to nowehere, via a fairly dull and lengthy scenic route that I did not even wish to complete. One of the main problems with this book is the detachment I experience from its central character Coleman Silk. I would rather that he had delivered this narrative first hand. Instead it is delivered by Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Another problem is the huge amount of words and energy invested in to building character and "backstory" (that awful new expression) for characters that really turn out to be not very important. Dare I accuse the great Roth of this (and he IS sometimes great) but much of this seems to be padding. Indeed, you get the feeing that Roth is writing too much and that half of his output of the last 10 years would be more than sufficient. Everyman is wonderful and so to supposedly, is American Pastoral. Both are enough to secure his reputation in the pantheon of great American novelists - as if he needed anyone to reassure him - and that's not mentioning Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint and the 20 plus other novels he has written. Although this book has plenty of interesting things to say about political correctness gone mad and issues of race and racism, I found that I was left wanting to get properly inside the head of Coleman Silk but with the narrative stucture and device employed, this proved impossible.

Remarkably captivating, 15 Feb 2008
Here are sentences like paragraphs and paragraphs like chapters which have a tendency to exasperate. That said, this is actually a great read. Zuckerman, the writer again, has an assignment of profound consequence. An association with Coleman allows us to see a retrospective unfolding scene to the inevitable. There is no especial mystery, yet the novel is remarkably captivating. Some characters are witnessed second hand, but this does not matter, for that is part of the well developed construction. Ideas are aplenty with lots of rich pages of impressive brilliance.


A primer for the soul, 22 Nov 2007
I've long since learned to be sceptical of the hyberbolic quotes that decorate the covers of books. So when I read the Sunday Telegraph's summary of The Human Stain as 'The work of a genius at full throttle' I anticipated disappointment. But within only a few pages their assessment became a statement of fact rather than opinion.

It would have been absurd for Roth to call his novel 'The Human Condition', and yet he reasonably could have. In these three hundred and fifty or so pages he describes with cruel precision the human need to tell stories and lies about ourselves and each other - stories and lies which together ensure that all human interaction is at cross purposes. 'Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning?' he writes. 'All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.'

Through the story of Coleman Silk, a man whose anger at being wronged is amplified to the point of near madness by the knowledge of his own secret wrongs, Roth shines a bitterly bright spotlight on the assumptions we make about others, and on the assumptions we try to make others have of us. The Human Stain is a tragedy of epic proportions - with all the pain, irony, misunderstanding and revelation that suggests. The twists of the plot are like the twists of the knife as he skewers human frailty, prejudice and self-deception.

I read this book very slowly - not because it is hard work (it is in fact an electrifying page-turner) - but because the brilliance of the prose and the richness of the insight makes it sometimes feel like a primer for the soul - and to miss a sentence might be to miss an insight one should never forget. So, for example, buried deep mid-paragraph, in the middle of the book, Roth almost casually encapsulates the thesis of the novel: '...we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen - there's no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It's in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.'

Lately I have felt weary of the over conceptualised and plodding earnestness of so much contemporary literary fiction, and this book singlehandedly made me fall in love again with the act and purpose of reading. It is a book that makes you want to gasp at the beauty of language in the hands of a master-craftsman, and that leaves you feeling wiser about yourself, and everyone else - even if that wisdom is deep, dark and desperate.

Identity politics and political correctness as manifestations of American insecurity, 11 Oct 2007
The central premise in Philip Roth's fulminating diatribe against the maladies of modern America is very flimsy and yet it works, probably because of its flimsiness. The pity is that I can't state it clearly here without spoiling the plot, though other reviewers have done so.
Narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego, the story revolves around the life of Coleman Silk, the autocratic Dean of Faculty in a small town New England university. Pressured and humiliated into quitting his academic position as a result of an unintentional racial double entendre he blames the subsequent death of his wife on the affair. Seething with resentment and seeking revenge on those within the university who remained silent or actively collaborated in his demise, he finally takes up with a badly damaged, poorly educated backwater girl half his age who is being stalked by her psychotic ex-Nam war vet ex-husband. Silk's life becomes increasingly precarious and complicated, resulting in the inevitable denouement. We learn later that throughout his adult life he had harboured a personal secret (out of self-interest) which made his humiliation almost laughably ironic.
Roth tackles major issues (political correctness, identity politics, racial prejudice, overseas adventurism, dumb education and dumb culture) against a backdrop of an extremely trivial one (the Clinton-Lewinsky affair) and it is a risky undertaking in modern America because of the very issues he is attacking. In particular he lays himself open to claims of cryptic racism but that would be a false claim. The action taken by Coleman Silk is not new; it is one that has been used by American Jews and English working-class men in the past as a means of personal progress and is merely a damning statement about the social climate and pressures of certain societies at certain periods in their history. It has nothing to do with personal shame or self-loathing.
There is some terrific characterisation, notably of Silk himself, his nemesis Faunia Farley, her deranged husband Lester, and Delphine Roux, the alienated French academic hired by Silk, an action that he came to regret. You genuinely come to understand their individual motivations, foibles, weaknesses and neuroses as a result. The writing is dense yet fast-paced and angry. This is the best novel I have read so far published in the current century.



Portnoy is a psychoanalyst's dream patient, 17 Nov 2008
Alexander Portnoy is thirty three, reluctantly Jewish and confessing his life to his psychoanalyst, from being a five-year-old mother's boy, through formative years as a gifted student to his current status as New York's Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity.

Alex's is a life overshadowed by the memories of his parents smothering him with their expectations and cloying Jewish heritage. Poppa Jack is a modestly successful insurance salesman, but because he is the only Jew in the branch he gets the worst clientele and has to work doubly hard for his return. Momma Sophie wants to be just enough of a cut above her contemporaries for it to be noticeable, whilst she runs their home as the archetypal Jewish mother. Alex's early recollections capture the essence of growing up in Newark during the Second World War, as part of a family that runs the full gamut of experiences from anti-semitism to cousin Heshie dying on the Normandy beaches.

From the opening lines, Alexander whips his story along at racing speed, incisive and outrageously funny, completely besotted with his own burgeoning sexuality which Roth portrays in language that was condemned at the time and is no less abrupt today. No experience is spared his detailed remembrance and one wonders at the shear variety and energy required to sustain it.

Through the growing up and the frustrations and the awakening and the simply doing of it all, his constant fear of being exposed by his parents as a degenerate haunts his every thought whilst driving him on to do it again and again, and again. As Alex says to his confessor, "So I have desires - only they're endless. Endless!".

It is a compelling read and very, very funny.


shockingly good, 08 Oct 2008
I'm a complete newcomer to Philip Roth and picked this up on impulse in a second-hand bookshop (sorry amazon!). I loved it from start to finish and would recommend it to anyone, young, old, male or female, but with a few caveats. Firstly if you are coming new to it as I did, you might be surprised by the, shall we say frank-ness of the writing. I'm no prude but I was cringing as much as laughing during some of the more extreme passages. That a book written 40 years ago still has the power to shock is something - that its still worth reading and not just a passing fad is something else. Also, if you are at all familar with the tv show Curb Your Enthusiasm, it may be difficult not to read the whole book aloud in Larry David's voice inside your head; its very very Larry, and I suspect might have been a partial inspiration for his character on that show. Which is to say that it says a lot about being a modern Jewish male, with all the glories and hang-ups that (apparently) brings. Above all it manages to be enthralling without being remotely plot-driven and profound without being pretentious or heavy. Well done Mr Roth!

A young man's world, 04 Sep 2008
This was the second book by Roth that I have read, after Everyman, and by comparison I found it much less insightful to the human (male) condition. From the cover notes I was also expecting it to be funnier. There are some hilarious moments but it is certainly not a comedy. Maybe it is the focus on what a "good Jewish boy" should do that made it more difficult for me to identify with the main character. The agonising battle against guilt and his biology (sexual drive) can perhaps only truly make sense from a Jewish perspective of expectation. That said the style, of one book-long monologue, does help build an increasing tension and revelation. In the end it cleverly exposes the life of self-justification and essentially selfish, shallow existence, even if the apparent shackles are broken and every indulgence gratified. This is probably a book that would resonate with a 30-year old wondering where to go in life, but not so much a 50-year old wondering what it all meant.

Very funny, 10 Nov 2007
I read this book in high school and found it very funny. It gave me an insight into teenage boys (and some of my later male friends) that I don't think I would have had otherwise. It is self-indulgent and a bit disgusting in some places, but I remember it as a good read.

Even in 2007 this is a great book!!, 26 Oct 2007
First, please do not be put off by the reviewer who states this book does not hold up in 2007. It does.
I read this book about 6 months ago and could not put it down. It's hysterically funny, it will make you cringe, and yes, even in 2007, it will shock you.
I've never written a review on Amazon before, but when I saw that someone had only given this book one star I had to give me opinion!! I'm not the world's biggest Phillip Roth fan by any stretch, but I read Portnoy's Complaint after I came accross it in a second hand book shop. It's clearly completely self-indulgent on Roth's part, but why not? In this case self-indulgence makes it all the more engaging and enjoyable to read. You will want to slap Portnoy accross the face, but you'll also want to see just exactly what idiotic and disgraceful things he'll do next.
Read this, you won't regret it!

Another Must-Read from Roth, 01 Nov 2008
INDIGNATION is a fascinating novel, albeit difficult to read except in 20 page bursts. The reason is that the intense Marcus Messner, Roth's young protagonist and narrator, finds little joy, but much angst and guilt, in his life. He is the master of nothing. Everything is a challenge. His world is an ordeal. At one moment, Marcus is surprised to be told by his college Dean that he is shouting and pointing angrily. But throughout, Marcus seems on the verge such hysterical expression. This makes INDIGNATION a book to enjoy in small doses.

INDIGNATION is the story of Marcus, a studious young man and only child, who flees his overbearing father in Newark for a year at Winesburg College in rural Ohio. But when Marcus takes a step forward in his life--such as excelling in school, establishing greater independence from his parents, having new sexual experiences, and befriending the leaders in a fraternity--Roth connects that step to perilous undercurrents of guilt, principled naïveté, or treachery. In INDIGNATION, all the happy normal experiences of youth and college don't make Marcus stronger. Instead, they make him increasingly vulnerable.

The narrative skill shown in INDIGNATION is truly dazzling. Not only is there not a single word out of place. But Roth is also able to pull a surprising and profound subtext from each experience that Marcus relates. The effect is that you get every event in the novel twice: once in the seamless and interesting telling; then a second time in its surprising interpretation. Only in the very end of INDIGNATION does the meaning that Roth pulls from an experience seem obvious. (I thought we were going to learn that Marcus was doomed to recapitulate the tragic meshuge of his father's family.)

Of course, it's all a matter of taste. But I must say that Roth sometimes seems to overplay to make his points. Anyone remember the vomit scene in American Pastoral, which expressed revulsion? Well, INDIGNATION has a vomit scene as well. For an author who is able to find great depth in the most ordinary interactions, I wonder why these extreme physical expressions need to occur.


In the world of the righteous, beware of what the plumber says, 23 Oct 2008
An American teenager storms off to his room. Unlikely as it sounds, this is uncharacteristic behaviour on the part of Marcus Messner, the first-person narrator of Philip Roth's latest novel. Already, within a dozen pages, we think Marcus has a point. Enrolled at the local college, he looks back to the "wonderful time" he had ("wonderful except when it came to eviscerating chickens") helping his father out at the butcher's store on Lyons Avenue in Newark, New Jersey. He remembers the way they would deal with the demanding customers, and, of course, he remembers the blood, the buckets of blood. On the other side of the world the Korean war is underway, and blood is being spilled by bullet and bayonet.

Then, one day, his father flips and begins wondering when his only son is going to go off and get himself killed. Why this sudden change? Being at college means avoiding the draft, avoiding danger. "The questions were ludicrous... I had been a prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student" whose main ambition was to be the first Messner to attend university. He storms off to his room when he finds out that his father has been "driven crazy by the chance remark of a plumber". He's incensed that his father has chosen to believe, not what he has seen with his own eyes for an entire lifetime, but what he's been told by a plumber "on his knees fixing the toilet in the back of the store!"

For me, this brings to mind the image of a priest on his knees before the altar, making people believe things that are not true, that defy a lifetime of experience of how the world goes, that contradict reason and logic and evidence. We don't know it yet, but Marcus Messner's intellectual hero is Bertrand Russell. Later, when he gets into trouble at college with Dean Caudwell ("the biggest Christer around"), we learn just how hard life can be for an American atheist in "the world of the righteous". There are parallels between Marcus and the British mathematician G. H. Hardy (who was at Trinity with Russell): both were unbelievers who bridled at the thought of attending college chapel, indignant at "putrefied primitive superstition" and the "disgrace of religion", and both resisted taking the advice of more sophisticated friends. Hardy too had to face the dean of his college, but there the parallel ends: while Hardy went on to enjoy a long and renowned academic career, Marcus sadly does not. (In the spirit of the novel, it was pure luck I happened to be reading Hardy at the same time as Roth.)

Marcus admires those who seem to be in control. At Winesburg College in Ohio he meets Olivia and this time chance works in his favour - he gets lucky in a very pleasant if perplexing way. To him, she is poised, an expert, in control. To herself, nothing could be further from the truth. Her rebuke is stinging: "I, who have eight thousand moods a minute... am 'under control'?" When his mother visits, she remembers the time her husband locked him out, and admits, "I couldn't control him, and this is the result."

This brilliant novel is set midway through the twentieth century, at a time of war and when world war was just-lived history. It was also a significant moment in intellectual history, one that might itself come to be seen as a tipping point in human knowledge. Our understanding of complex systems like national economies and the weather had rested upon the fundamental assumption that small changes in the initial values would get washed out over time. The discovery of the butterfly effect in the early sixties - in which tiny changes in those values result in huge divergence - began a rethink that is continuing to this day. Take any catastrophe and it may be that the seeds of its destructive power were there all along, slowly growing from small beginnings.

While we are now used to the idea that world events are not always or even often under the control of governments, on the scale of the individual we haven't yet shaken off the educated view of the world as a deterministic place. We are too attached to the idea that a person's success or failure is down to their intrinsic qualities rather than to luck. (Even lottery winners sometimes attribute their success to their "positive" attitude!) Roth's achievement is to tell a story that keeps you riveted to every word while also sparking off some of these ideas. In the end, it is the uneducated father who puts it best and teaches Marcus his most important lesson: "the terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieves the most disproportionate result."


Brilliant short novel, 18 Oct 2008
This is one of Philip Roth's best novels, the funny and poignant story of a young man's journey to adulthood in the 1950s. Although short, it manages to pack so much in - stifling mid-Western conformity, New Jersey Jewishness, first love and the horrors of war. It is a shame the critics now take Roth for granted because he is so prolific.He is still at the top of his game.

exasperation, 18 Oct 2008
I struggled last year to swallow the premise of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach; the depiction of a time when sex was still something barely discussed, and that the events of the couple's honeymoon could have such devastating consequences. In this similarly slim novel Philip Roth is keen to depict a very specific time (and as the college President will ask later, 'Do you have any idea that you belong to a time at all?'). He was quoted himself recently, saying "This will come as a great shock to young people, but in 1951 you could make it through college unscathed by oral sex." I obviously went to the wrong college. What he also wants to show is 'the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the mo