Synopses & Reviews
Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life's unimagined chances and terrifying consequences.
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 the 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, 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.
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"[A]s provocative as his astonishing Plot Against America....[A] fast-paced, compassionate, humorous, historically conscious novel..." Booklist (Starred Review)
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"The book has a taut, elegant symmetry....A twist in narrative perspective reinforces this novel's timelessness." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
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"A meditation on love, death, and madness, Roth's new novel combines the comic absurdity of his early novels like Portnoy's Complaint with the pathos of his later novels like Everyman and Exit Ghost." Library Journal (Starred Review)
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"[P]erhaps we've been around these bends with him before, but he is a master....The shocking rush from this book comes from watching Roth expertly and quickly build up to a half-dozen final pages that absolutely deliver the kill. (Grade: A-)" Entertainment Weekly
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"What the novel lacks in scale, it compensates for in its writing. Roth lovingly describes the bloodletting rituals of a kosher butcher." USA Today
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"Philip Roth is our greatest living novelist, and his new book, Indignation, is an irritating, puzzling and fascinating bundle of mistakes, miscalculations and self-indulgences." Los Angeles Times
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"Here's a novel to be witnessed as an explosion from an author still angry enough to burn with adolescent rage and wise enough to understand how self-destructive that rage can be." Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World
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"[T]his book features some of Roth's most exuberant writing, especially in the brilliantly imagined confrontations between conservative authority and spirited independence on the pastoral campus of Winesburg." The Miami Herald
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"Indignation is impossible to put down until it's finished. Then, it's impossible to shake off the aftermath of this mesmerizing story." The Seattle Times
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"Before he decided to dispense entirely with the respect of his readership which must have been, oh, some years ago now Philip Roth used to try to balance the quotidian with a larger theme. In novels like I Married a Communist and The Plot Against America, he sought to mesh the "micro" most usually the familiar world of Jewish angst in New Jersey with the "macro": the successive spasms of alarm and disorder that have punctuated modern American history....In Indignation, he varies the procedure a little." Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic Monthly review)
About the Author
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 for "a body of work…of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship" and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose "scale of achievement over a sustained career…places him or her in the highest rank of American literature."
Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.