For the first 25 pages or so of Philip Roth’s suspenseful, sad new
novel, a reader could be forgiven for wondering if
Nathan
Zuckerman really is dead. Zuckerman—one of contemporary
literature’s most fruitful alter egos and a fixture in the majority of
Roth’s books since 1979—expired in last year’s otherwise minor
novella Exit Ghost. Still, Marcus Messner, the hero/narrator of
Indignation, will seem awfully familiar to even casual Roth
readers: a dutiful Jewish son whose father’s defining trait is
smothering fear of the outside world; a “prudent, responsible,
diligent, hardworking A student” chafing at his parental constraints;
and, obviously, a Newarker who leaves the nest in search of his great
liberty (and a crazy shiksa) in an America of limitless opportunity.
The Jewish-generation-gap trope is inscribed in so many of Roth’s best
books—treated earnestly in Goodbye, Columbus; satirized
mercilessly in Portnoy’s Complaint; inverted in The Professor
of Desire; tragedized in the Zuckerman trilogy; postmodernized in
The Counterlife; subtextualized but never fully sidelined in the
American trilogy of American Pastoral, I Married a
Communist, and The Human Stain (all of which are narrated
and imagined by Zuckerman)—that it’s easy at first to overlook
the essential distinction at work in Indignation. Marcus and his
family are easy to recognize; it’s the America they live and die in
that has changed.
Because the Messners and the Zuckermans—to say nothing, of
course, of the Roths (fictive and otherwise)—inhabit the same
town at the same time, it’s safe to assume that the author isn’t
revising history so much as viewing it through the refractory lens of
today’s broken America, which the hopeful strivers of Roth’s earlier
books could never have imagined. “Though I never doubted this country
was mine,” Roth wrote in his problematic
antimemoir The
Facts, “I was not unaware of the power to intimidate that emanated
from the highest and lowest reaches of gentile America.”
Indignation, following in the tradition of The Plot Against
America, imagines that power as insurmountable.
Where his predecessors were strivers breaking free of outsider
constraints by virtue of their birthright not as Jews but as Americans,
Marcus is simply a victim of his own rebellion. Where Zuckerman found
literary glory, Marcus finds antagonism and death (spoiler purists be
calmed: We learn fairly early on that most of the book is narrated from
a deathbed; you’re supposed to know). And while it may be
tempting to ascribe Marcus’s death in a Korean foxhole at age 19 to
something abstract like fate, Indignation is neither a fable nor
a cautionary tale. It offers a clear course of events issuing from its
protagonist’s stubborn refusal to be constrained by his identity. He’s
not a tragic hero, because he never gets a chance to be great. He’s
just a casualty of a world he cannot will himself into belonging
to—perhaps the greatest indicator of just how different he is
from Zuckerman and his mastermind.
Marcus’s failure to belong isn’t surprising. The son of a kosher
butcher, he leaves Newark when his father suddenly goes “crazy with
worry that his cherished only child was as unprepared for the hazards
of life as anyone else entering manhood, crazy with the frightening
discovery that a little boy grows up, grows tall, overshadows his
parents, and that you can’t keep him then, that you have to relinquish
him to the world.” But while the father’s fears are oppressive, they’re
motivated—as much by his son’s maturation as by the Korean War
(“American troops had never fought in a war more frightening than this
one”) and the encroachment of the neighborhood’s first supermarket onto
the turf of the butcher shop where Marcus has learned to eviscerate
chickens and scoop out their blood. By contrast, Marcus’s yearning for
independence is inarticulate—he has no calling to be an artist or
a great thinker; he just wants out. And out he gets, about as far out
from a Newark kosher butcher shop as he can: Winesburg College in Ohio
(an allusion not only to Sherwood Anderson’s stories, but to the vivid
reality of WASP “grotesques” they evoke), a Baptist school where his
impulse to be strident finds a perfectly inhospitable target. Marcus
clashes with inconsiderate roommates, pushy fellow students, the
fatuous dean of men, and, toxically, a girl named Olivia whose sexual
experience and scarred wrist offer more complex temptation than he can
handle. Against this backdrop, and with the aid of Marcus’s
indignation, the father’s indignant fears—appendicitis, a fatal
car crash, a panty raid that becomes a bloody sex riot, the threat of
the draft—all take grim form. They almost seem wise.
One of the perils of being a close Roth reader is the
often-irresistible assumption that he spends his life conjuring up ways
to tantalize his audience by blurring the distinction between
autobiography and fiction. But as years have gone on, his interest in
the infinite mutability of the self has expanded into a consideration
of the self as a shadow on the cave wall of American history. Marcus
Messner is not much of a hero; the book’s title word, drawn from the
anthem of the People’s Republic of China, is his only real trait. But,
as Roth pointed out in his recent webcast (projected at bookstores
around the country in lieu of a book tour), indignation is the only
thing that unites Marcus with the world he occupies. It also spells his
downfall. 
