Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Indignation

Indignation
Author: Phillip Roth 2008 231 pp
My rating: 4*
Started October 15 2008, Finished October 16 2008.

Seductively readable, this novella length work crosses the somewhat hopeful early Roth of the “Goodbye Columbus” era with the later fatalist of American Pastoral and The Plot Against America. Indignation begins as a Jewish family drama with local college commuter Marcus Messner’s attempts to get out from under the thumb of his overbearingly protective father in Newark, NJ then turns into a fish out of water tale as Marcus transfers to an insular, WASP school in Winesburg Ohio. The book’s tone seems comedic but gradually turns to darkness. The Roth protagonists of 30 and 40 years ago, about the same age as Marcus, were primarily concerned with having sex while Marchus is primarily concerned with maintaining a high enough GPA to avoid being drafted and having to fight in the Korean War. If this were a full novel length, it might get five stars. As it is it has a couple of weaknesses: characters tend to speak in perfectly formed paragraph or longer speeches and the Sonny Cottler character does not make much sense except as a plot mechanism.




What girl found a bay “desirable” at Winesburg College? I for one had never heard of such feelings existing among the girls of Winesburg or Newark or anywhere else. (58)

I couldn’t even get my first blowjob without wondering while I was getting it what had gone wrong to allow me to get it. Why wasn’t that good enough for everybody? (91)

Work -- certain people yearn for work, any work, harsh or unsavory as it may be, to drain the harshness from their lives and drive from their minds the killing thoughts. (165)

… the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result. (231)

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