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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