Butchery of two kinds pervades Philip Roth's thrilling new novel. Gleaming in the foreground are the razor-sharp knives and meat cleavers of a kosher butcher's shop in 1950s New Jersey. Lethally flashing in the background are the bayonets of Chinese soldiers fighting US troops in Korea. Ribs and shanks of lamb, bloodied hunks of beef and the bodies of ritually slaughtered chickens dangle from hooks in the Newark neighbourhood store 12 miles north of New York. Hacked and sliced carcasses of conscripts strew the Far East battlefields.
Ominously situated between these two abattoir-like environments is Marcus Messner, a hard-working straight-A student who has entered college in downtown Newark (the city where Roth grew up) at about the same time US forces entered South Korea to help repel the invasion by north Koreans aided by Soviet and Chinese communists. Marcus isn't the only recent Roth protagonist to be menaced by an ugly turn in his country's history. Counter-culture anarchy during the Vietnam years, the McCarthy witch-hunts and 1990s PC punitiveness respectively jeopardised the heroes of American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). The angry sympathy Roth brought to their predicaments is one of the factors that has made this late phase of his writing such a glowing Indian summer of achievement. Amid the remarkable sequence of novels he has published over the past decade or so, the one exception was last year's Exit Ghost, a disappointingly flaccid narrative about the frustrations of age. Now, he reasserts his fictional mastery with a fine taut narrative about the frustrations of youth.High among these for Marcus is the increasingly unreasonable behaviour of his father. Although Marcus is a model son - studious, dutiful, a non-drinker and non-smoker who, when not immersed in college work, cheerfully puts in 60-hour weeks at the family's butcher shop - his parent becomes paranoiacally distrustful of him. Marcus is enraged to find himself suspected of hanging out in a pool hall, when he is innocently reading Gibbon in the library. Monitoring his every move, his father oppresses him with near-insane vigilance.To elude it, he transfers to a college 500 miles away: Winesburg in the rural depths of Ohio (a fictitious locale Roth borrows from Sherwood Anderson's now little-read 1919 book of short stories, rather as his 2004 alternative history novel, The Plot Against America, made use of Sinclair Lewis's little-known 1935 fantasy, It Can't Happen Here). It's a move that widens scope not only for Marcus but Roth. The opening sections of Indignation draw on some of his longest persisting concerns: tensions between father and son (a theme whose autobiographical roots were enthrallingly explored in Patrimony, 1991), life among the hard-working, decently aspiring community of Jewish shopkeepers and salesmen in mid-20th-century Newark, a milieu that has been a continuingly enriching presence in his fiction. Marcus's misadventures at Winesburg enable Roth to return (in a novel that harks back to his own college years) to preoccupations largely dormant since his earliest books: adolescent turbulence, collisions between Wasp bigotry and upwardly mobile Jewishness in 1950s America.Not that there's anything slackly repetitive about Indignation. Every part of it is dovetailed into a story of compelling economy. Where Roth's 2006 novella, Everyman, gave a contemporary twist to the medieval morality play, Indignation, behind its acute and sometimes scathingly funny scenes from the early 1950s, has the inexorable momentum of Greek tragedy.Ill chance and cruel ironies entrap Marcus, whose fatal flaw is indignation (“the most beautiful word in the English language”, he feels). It's the quality, of course, that has fuelled most of Roth's best work. His fiction's distinctive energy is combative. His characters typically rebel against injustice and hypocrisy. Heated debate and pugnacious tirades pepper his pages. Outrage can seem his default mode. Here, he depicts what happens to a young man of awkwardly outspoken integrity entangled in infuriating circumstances. Elm-shaded and ivy-clad, the Winesburg campus looks idyllic. Graceful old gas-lamps, discreetly electrified, line the brick walkways crossing its green quadrangles. Its ethos is matchingly steeped in mellow tradition.Gradually, though, things slip awry for Marcus. Determined that nothing should endanger his studies (or his life: dismissal from college means conscription to the killing-grounds of Korea), he twice changes accommodation to escape disruptive room-mates. A summons from the dean to explain this restiveness leads into a superb set-piece scene. As Dean Caudwell, a former athletics star, interrogates Marcus, animosity kindles. Furious at what seems another version of the unjust accusation he had from his father, Marcus also detects anti-semitism in Caudwell's condescending tones. Goaded by it, he protests against the compulsory chapel attendance demanded by the college - not because he is a Jew but because he is an atheist. The ensuing clash is vintage Roth: a riveting duel between patronising smugness and a clever young mind tactlessly exasperated by its opponent's suave shoddinesses of argument.Self-regarding obtuseness and conservatism aren't the only irritants Marcus encounters at Winesburg. Beneath its overlay of picturesque propriety, repressions seethe. Contact with two manifestations of this - a maladjusted gay student and a glamorous sophomore with a wrist scarred from a suicide bid - tightens the chain of unlucky accidents tugging him towards catastrophe. When suppressed sex erupts into a panty raid on the women's dormitories that escalates out of control, Marcus, though blameless, suffers drastic repercussions.By this point, the reader is likely to be quivering with indignation, too: at the maltreatment of an admirable young man for refusing to acquiesce in insincerity, at the bigotry and snobbery prevailing around him, and at a monstrous overseas conflict with a grim death toll (parallels with Iraq are apparent but never crudely explicit).At the end of this story, with its potent blend of sharp-eyed nostalgia, biting cogency and engrossing social, psychological and moral complexity, Marcus completes his education by learning the lesson his uneducated father was struggling, in his frenzied flailing way, to teach him back in Newark: in life “the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences”. It's a lesson Aeschylus and Sophocles gave voice to, thousands of years ago. As grippingly streamlined as Greek drama, Roth's mid-20th-century tale of nemesis transmits it again, brilliantly renewed with all the intellectual and imaginative force of a great novelist writing at the height of his powers.Indignation by Philip Roth
Cape £16.99 pp233
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