It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad - mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy.

As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father's fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.

Indignation, Philip Roth's twenty-ninth book, tells the story of the young man's education in life's terrifying chances and bizarre obstructions. It is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.

 

Dick Hill animates Philip Roth's tragic comedy. (Or is it comic tragedy?) Hill's exuberance and vitality elevate Roth's characters from the written page and through some sort of verbal legerdemain render them as tangible and present as anyone else you encounter. That is especially true of Roth's continuously indignant protagonist, Marcus Meisner, who in 1951 flees Newark and the suddenly suffocating overprotectiveness of his kosher butcher father, for the pastoral and decidedly goyish Winesburg College in rural Ohio. Though Meisner wants nothing more than to follow the rules and excel (and avoid the Korean War), he continually finds himself transgressing this social more or that requisite. Hill's depiction of Marcus's indignation is uproarious but no less than his portrayal of the moral rectitude and sanctimoniousness of Winesburg's elders. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

 

In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for AMERICAN PASTORAL. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA received the Society of American Historians' prize for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004." Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.

Indignation by Philip Roth
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