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Indignation
by Philip Roth
National Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book
A Washington Post and St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year
In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins 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, hardworking 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. Far from Newark, Marcus has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.
Indignation, Philip Roth's twenty-ninth book, is a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in Roth's recent books and a powerful exploration of a remarkable moment in American history.
Additional resources:
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• Read an excerpt from the book•
Watch Philip Roth and Ben Taylor discuss Indignation
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Further enhance your book discussion by reading the following reviews:
• Slate
• Los Angeles Times
Praise
"In Indignation [Roth's] power and intensity seem undiminished...Of all Roth's recent novels, it ventures farthest into the unknowable. In his unshowy way, with all his quotidian specificity and merciless skepticism, Roth is attempting to storm heaven-an endeavor all the more desperately daring because he seems dead certain it's not there."
-David Gates, The New York Times Book Review
"A triumph."
-USA Today
"It is Roth's virtuoso skill to couple Marcus's companionable pleasure in part-time butchering with his nightmare that the knives he wields so dexterously will be used on himself."
-The Boston Globe
"As always, the prose is well built-sinewy and graceful-and, as always, the wit is as sharp as a German knife. There are simply no novels by Roth in which you cannot detect the hand of a master."
-O, The Oprah Magazine
Click here to read more praise.
An Excerpt
"Under Morphine"
About two and a half months after the well-trained divisions of North Korea, armed by the Soviets and Chinese Communists, crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea on June 25, 1950, and the agonies of the Korean War began, I entered Robert Treat, a small college in downtown Newark named for the city's seventeenth-century founder. I was the first member of our family to seek a higher education. None of my cousins had gone beyond high school, and neither my father nor his three brothers had finished elementary school. "I worked for money," my father told me, "since I was ten years old." He was a neighborhood butcher for whom I'd delivered orders on my bicycle all through high school, except during baseball season and on the afternoons when I had to attend interschool matches as a member of the debating team. Almost from the day that I left the store-where I'd been working sixty-hour weeks for him between the time of my high school graduation in January and the start of college in September-almost from the day that I began classes at Robert Treat, my father became frightened that I would die. Maybe his fear had something to do with the war, which the U.S. armed forces, under United Nations auspices, had immediately entered to bolster the efforts of the ill-trained and under-equipped South Korean army; maybe it had something to do with the heavy casualties our troops were sustaining against the Communist firepower and his fear that if the conflict dragged on as long as World War Two had, I would be drafted into the army to fight and die on the Korean battlefield as my cousins Abe and Dave had died during World War Two.
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