INDIGNATION - Philip Roth - Fiction

While firmly rooted in Roth's characteristic subject matter--the sexual impulses, guilt, and familial disharmony of the genetically Jewish male--INDIGNATION also unimpugnably addresses a more contemporary topic: the mistreatment and disenfranchisement of the American atheist. Couched in situations that resonate with the mistreatment of other socially marginalized character types (the Jewish family, the sexually liberated young woman living in the early 1950s), Marcus's experiences show, with great dignity, an ethical and principled young man whose hot-headedness and unwillingness to compromise throw him into circumstances that expand increasingly out of his control, resulting in his death as a private in the Korean war. Throughout the narrative, it is ironically the fear of this possibility that continually drives Marcus's choices, and the smallest of slip-ups that brings about his drafted entry into the war.

INDIGNATION shows a more mature Roth than the creator of PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT and THE BREAST. Some of the same complications surrounding meat, family, an idolized mother and a respected but distanced father are present again, but treated with much more tact, and restraint. Marcus's views on sexuality and family are a product of his times, but an explicitly self-aware product, which prompts him to evaluate them, and himself, when he reacts prudishly to his first sexual encounter, or breaks into tears at his mother's announcement that she is considering divorce. Marcus is incredibly self-disciplined, in thought and action, having progressed from high-school debate captain to straight-A student and future lawyer, devoting himself entirely to his studies and to the logical interrogation of the beliefs in which he was raised. Sparked by Bertrand Russell, Marcus quietly renounces all religious belief, and becomes increasingly disturbed by his college's chapel requirement, which purports to educate its students in religiously proscribed self-contemplation and determined action. Despite the unassailable correctness of his arguments against forced religious participation, Marcus makes an enemy of his school's Dean of Men when he attempts to directly address this infringement on his rights, instead of circumventing it by hiring another man to sign in at chapel for him, as Marcus later discovers is done by most of the Jewish men on campus.

Having been raised by his father to do what was right (exemplified in an anecdote by his father's strict adherence to the rules of his kosher butcher shop, despite a lack of overseeing authority to stop him from bending or breaking the kosher strictures), Marcus initially balks at cheating the system as the boys in the Jewish fraternity do. When Marcus comes up against something he doesn't like, his preferred method is passive resistance; in a clever riposte to the background of the Korean war, Marcus chooses to remove himself peacefully rather than enter into a confrontation with his father, or later his roommates, and only attacks when provoked, as when the Dean of Men calls Marcus into his office, and levels insinuations at Marcus' character, Jewishness, and conduct among his peers.

Two characters provoke Marcus's ruin: first, a poorly sketched-out homosexual roommate who desecrates Marcus's dorm room while he is at the hospital, and necessitates his retreat to the second, Sonny, a representative of a sort of privileged class of Jewry to which Marcus neither belongs nor aspires. It is Sonny who gets around Marcus's defenses, and Sonny who represents, to Marcus, the type of son who might be able to fix his parents, as his father declines into paranoia and his mother contemplates divorce. It is also Sonny who first provides evidence of the potential treachery in Marcus's girlfriend, Olivia, who hides from him first her suicidal, alcoholic past, and then her extracurricular affections, for Sonny and most likely for other men, as eventually Marcus's Dean reveals to him that Olivia is pregnant--quite unexpectedly, for Marcus, whose contact with Olivia is limited to hands, mouths, and a great deal of worry and self-depredation.

What makes this novel particularly tragic and frustrating is that Marcus's actions are resolutely understandable, when not outright admirable. Although nearly all the men of his college participate in a widespread assault, Marcus abstains. Where other men would shun and smear Olivia for being so uninhibited, Marcus tries to look beyond her past, and fights with himself to avoid judging her actions without also judging himself and his desires. Marcus disregards the slights of his fellow students, who call him 'Jew' during his campus job as a waiter, ignore him and best and are openly hostile at worst, and shun him because of his upbringing. It's hard to consider him a saint, when he argues with his father and finds himself uncomfortably unable to forgive Olivia her past relationships, but he is close to a perfect college boy, and yet is insidiously undermined by the old-boys network of his college, and the prevailing WASPy attitudes of the time and place. Roth, usually a fairly conservative writer, has delivered an excellent treatise on how the personal becomes political, and how effortlessly a minority viewpoint can be punished, even by omission.