The year is 1951, and hard-working young Marcus Messner, the son of a butcher in Newark, New Jersey, enrolls at a local college. However, when his dad begins to worry too much about him, he moves to a university in Winesburg, Ohio, simply to get away from him. Winesburg, in Roth's portayal is a somewhat staid mid-Western college in a town which does not have the racial mix that characterises the more vibrant, mouthy city of Newark.
Thus the premise of this intriguing 2008 novel, a coming-of-age story which shows how young Messner is transformed from dutiful student into confrontational rebel. The trouble begins after he is obliged to move dormitory twice due to unfortunate encounters with fellow dormers. Following the dorm-changing business, the college Dean, the rather humourless Caudwell summons the hapless Marcus and quizzes him far too closely about his life and his relations with others.
These relations include a sexual favour granted by Olivia Hutton, an unhinged female student, a doctor's daughter. The favour is repeated when Olivia visits Marcus in hospital some weeks later, activity which is duly registered by a senior female member of the nursing staff. So far, so mildly comic and picaresque, jostling a tad uncomfortably with the serious intent of the novel. That graver concern of the novel relates to its dispatches from the Korean War in which approximately 100,000 American soldiers lost their lives.
An avowed atheist, at a time when atheism was particularly frowned upon in the majority of educational institutions, Marcus parrots Bertrand Russell's essay, Why I am Not a Christian to the bloodless, unmoved Dean. The young lad is essentially an outsider who wants to succeed and work hard, and anything that gets in his way is a problem that must be dealt with. Yet he grows up unwittingly, almost unaware of it happening, by articulating his contrarian views, acquiring a kind of chutzpah or cojones in the process.
Much good it will do him indeed. Told from beyond the grave, the reader realises half-way though Indignation that Marcus lost his life in Korea to where he was drafted, presumably after expulsion from Winesburg college.
Written with notable fluency - you will fly through it - Indignation is a black farce which draws a certain amount of ho-hum, comedic value from the prurience and enforced chastity of the period. Somehow this reader longed for the valedictory wisdom of Roth's 2006 novel Everyman, a very different kind of story, which is somehow more clear about its terms.
Is Roth having a laugh or not, you find yourself asking regularly as you read Indignation, which can make a reader a little uncomfortable.
Paddy Kehoe
