Indignation

by Philip Roth Narrated by Ray Chase

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

On the other side of the world, the Korean War is raging, but Marcus Messner's thoughts are occupied instead with the rants of his frightened father, an earnest, slightly paranoid butcher in gritty Newark. Unnerved by his dad's intensity, young Marcus escapes to the pastoral confines of conservative Winesburg College in Ohio. There he experiences a midwestern rite of passage not easily imagined by a quiet New Jersey teenager. Another carefully sculpted novel by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Philip Roth.

Ron Charles

Copies of Indignation, Philip Roth's ferocious little tale, ought to be handed out on college campuses along with condoms and tetanus shots. This cathartic story might vent some of the volatile self-righteousness that can consume the lives of passionate young people (and, yes, old people too). It's not that it breaks any new ground; the author's favorite themes are all here—the comic sexual frustration of Portnoy's Complaint, the assimilation anxieties of the Zuckerman books, the enraged grievance of The Human Stain—but with Indignation, Roth presents his most concentrated parable of self-destructive fury…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.
—The Washington Post

Michiko Kakutani

…a darkly comic exercise in the danger of self-fulfilling prophecies and the folly of thinking that being a hard-working A student will offer any sort of protection from the mad vagaries of fate.
—The New York Times

David Gates

Roth's secret, I think, is his supreme confidence as a storyteller—and, paradoxically, a supreme humility. His writing is at the service of his story and characters; he’s a pragmatist, not a belletrist. If certain conventions of plot and language do the job, why get fancy? He can break out the fine writing when the occasion requires…The unnamed protagonist of Everyman at least gets a joyous flash of himself as a boy at the ocean before the lights go out; Indignation makes even that terminally grim book seem sentimental. Everyman and Exit Ghost both have a mood of sorrowful resignation; this book goes about its grieving savagely. And 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.
—The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Roth's 29th book tells the tale of young Marcus Messner, a boy forced to attend a pastoral, conservative college because of his father's apprehensions about life in 1951 New Jersey. Narrator Dick Hill delivers a sturdy performance that manages to bring Messner to life, but never really captures the listeners attention as he normally does. As talented as Hill is, there's something lacking in his characterization. He reads with a droning, slightly whiny voice that sometimes grates. Hill always seems on the verge of losing himself into the tale only to yank himself back from the edge at the last moment. He has a knack for bringing characters to life, but here he sounds tired. A Houghton Mifflin hardcover (Reviews, May 12). (Sept.)

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Library Journal

Pulitzer Prize winner Roth returns to the territory of his first novel, Goodbye Columbus, in his 29th book, set in 1951 at a conservative Ohio college campus against the ever-present shadow of the early Korean War. Three-time Audie Award winner Dick Hill's accents and emotions are amazing in their realism; he takes listeners on a roller coaster ride of the incredible sadness and indignation of the short life of New Jersey-born protagonist Marcus Messner. A worthwhile listen, but the graphic descriptions of sex and sexual acts and preponderance of swearing don't recommend this to the sensitive listener. [Scott Rudin has acquired the film rights; the Houghton Harcourt hc received a starred review, LJ9/1/08.-Ed.]
—Scott R. DiMarco

Kirkus Reviews

In a plot that evokes the author's earlier work, Roth (Exit Ghost, 2007, etc.) focuses on a young man's collegiate coming of age against the deadly backdrop of the Korean War. The book has a taut, elegant symmetry: A nice Jewish boy named Marcus Messner from Newark, N.J., reaches the turbulent stage where he inevitably clashes with his parents, his butcher-shop father in particular. After continuing to live at home for his first year of college, Marcus, the novel's narrator as well as protagonist, feels the need to emancipate himself by enrolling in a college as unlike urban New Jersey as possible, one that he finds in Winesburg, Ohio. Whatever of his Jewishness he is trying to escape, he discovers that his ethnicity provides the stamp of his identity on the pastoral campus, where he is first assigned to room with two of the school's few other Jewish students and soon finds himself courted by the school's lone Jewish fraternity. There's resonance of the culture clash of Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and the innocence of The Ghost Writer (1979) in the voice of this bright young man, who isn't quite experienced enough to know how much he doesn't know. The novel reaches its climax-in a couple of senses-when the virginal Marcus becomes involved with the more experienced Olivia, whose irresistible sexuality seems intertwined with her psychological fragility. Can Marcus be Olivia's boyfriend and still be his parents' son? Can he remain true to himself-whatever self that may be-while adhering to the tradition and dictates of a college that shields him from enlistment in a deadly war? Is Winesburg a refuge or an exile?A twist in narrative perspective reinforces this novel's timelessness. Agent: JeffPosternak/The Wylie Agency

From the Publisher

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

“Terrific ... there's a lovely perplexedness to the writing here.” —GQ

“He is a master. And the short form serves the story: 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.” —Entertainment Weekly

“The interplay between a life just begun and ended, impulse and reflection, college high jinks and eternity is what makes it resonate.” —People, 4 out of 4 stars

“Of how many writers can it be said that they're still producing some of their best work well into their 70s? With [Indignation], his 24th novel, Philip Roth proves beyond any dispute that he deserves to be counted in that select group.” —BookPage

“Mr. Roth is a master magician who can make the same old rabbits do new tricks.” —The New York Sun    

“Mesmerizing ... Philip Roth’s intrepid novel of self-revelation demands to be read in one sitting. It’s that good. It’s that audacious. It’s that compelling.” —The Seattle Times

“Roth, blending the bawdy exuberance of his early period and the disenchantment of his recent work, demonstrates with subtle mastery, the 'incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result'.” —The New Yorker

“As sharply honed as one of those butcher-shop knives that haunt Marcus's dreams ... Hard to forget.” —Newsweek

“A magnificent display of writerly talent: a lean, powerful novel with bold characters who command attention, scenes of impressive dramatic interest and comic vitality, language that blasts the reader's cozy complacency ... and a theme that swells imperceptibly from a murmur to a satisfying roar ... Read Indignation—read it with a ear for the naked power of Philip Roth at full tilt.” —The New York Observer  

“Copies of Indignation, Philip Roth's ferocious little tale, ought to be handed out on college campuses along with condoms and tetanus shots ... 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.” —Washington Post Book World

“Does anybody else writing prose today sustain a conversation with the reader as beautifully as Roth, with his whirlwind of shouts, whispers, riffs and exposition?.... Roth returns with ‘Indignation’ and Virtuosity.” —Oscar Villalon, Books We Like, NPR

“Indignation is a glorious act of chutzpah on the part of arguably the most fearless American novelist working today.” —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“It's that final twist of the knife that makes the book so powerful, and leaves you feeling unstrung when you put it down.” —Bloomberg News

“Roth balances the darkness with sharp, comic irony ... In Indignation, Roth has reached back to Newark to breath new life into all the old obsessions.” —Associated Press

“Written in elegant, economical prose.... intensely psychological.... utterly engrossing.” —Times Literary Supplement (London)

“A late masterpiece.... Indignation is Philip Roth's best novel since The Counterlife ... Intricately wrought, passionate and fascinating.” —Financial Times (London)

New Yorker

Roth…demonstrates with subtle mastery the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.”

Booklist (starred review)

Provocative…Fast-paced, compassionate, humorous, historically conscious.”

The Oprah Magazine O

There are simply no novels by Roth in which you cannot detect the hand of a master.”

Financial Times (London)

A late masterpiece…Indignation is Philip Roth’s best novel since The Counterlife.”

Seattle Times

Mesmerizing…Philip Roth’s intrepid novel of self-revelation demands to be read in one sitting. It’s that good. It’s that audacious. It’s that compelling.”

USA Today

A triumph.”

NOVEMBER 2008 - AudioFile

Dick Hill animates Philip Roth's tragic comedy. (Or is it comic tragedy?) Hill's exuberance and vitality elevate Roth's characters from the written page and through some sort of verbal legerdemain render them as tangible and present as anyone else you encounter. That is especially true of Roth's continuously indignant protagonist, Marcus Meisner, who in 1951 flees Newark and the suddenly suffocating overprotectiveness of his kosher butcher father, for the pastoral and decidedly goyish Winesburg College in rural Ohio. Though Meisner wants nothing more than to follow the rules and excel (and avoid the Korean War), he continually finds himself transgressing this social more or that requisite. Hill's depiction of Marcus's indignation is uproarious but no less than his portrayal of the moral rectitude and sanctimoniousness of Winesburg's elders. M.O. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169607635
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	03/01/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read 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.

Or maybe the fear had to do with his financial worries: the year before, the neighborhood's first supermarket had opened only a few blocks from our family's kosher butcher shop, and sales had begun steadily falling off, in part because of the supermarket's meat and poultry section's undercutting my father's prices and in part because of a general postwar decline in the number of families bothering to maintain kosher households and to buy kosher meat and chickens from a rabbinically certified shop whose owner was a member of the Federation of Kosher Butchers of New Jersey. Or maybe his fear for me began in fear for himself, for at the age of fifty, after enjoying a lifetime of robust good health, this sturdy little man began to develop the persistent racking cough that, troubling as it was to my mother, did not stop him from keeping a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth all day long.

Whatever the cause or mix of causes fueling the abrupt change in his previously benign paternal behavior, he manifested his fear by hounding me day and night about my whereabouts. Where were you? Why weren't you home? How do I know where you are when you go out? You are a boy with a magnificent future before you–how do I know you're not going to places where you can get yourself killed?

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