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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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Indignation
by Philip Roth |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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If Certain
episodes in life seem to change everything. If only …. Philip
Roth takes this notion forward in disproportionate ways in his 25th
novel, Indignation.
Protagonist Marcus Messner decides to go to college in Winesburg, Ohio, after
his father, a kosher butcher, becomes overly protective. One thing leads to
another, and everything changes in this finely written novel. Here’s an
excerpt, pp. 18-21: I
was assigned to a dormitory room in Jenkins Hall, where I discovered that the
three other boys I was to live with were Jews. The arrangement struck me as
odd, first because I'd been expecting to have one roommate, and second because
part of the adventure of going away to college in far-off Ohio was the
chance it offered to live among non Jews and see what that was like. Both my
parents thought this a strange if not dangerous aspiration, but to me, at
eighteen, it made perfect sense. Spinelli, the shortstop—and a pre-law
student like me—had become my closest friend at Robert Treat, and his taking
me home to the city's Italian First Ward to meet his family and eat their
food and sit around and listen to them talk with their accents and joke in
Italian had been no less intriguing than my two-semester survey course in the
history of Western civilization, where at each class the professor laid bare
something more of the way the world went before I existed. The
dormitory room was long, narrow, smelly, and poorly lit, with double-decker
bunk beds at either end of the worn floorboards and four clunky old wooden
desks, scarred by use, pushed against the drab green walls. I took the lower
bunk under an upper already claimed by a lanky, raven-haired boy in glasses
named Bertram Flusser. He didn't bother to shake my hand when I tried to
introduce myself but looked at me as though I were a member of a species he'd
been fortunate enough never to have come upon before. The other two boys looked
me over too, though not at all with disdain, so I introduced myself to them,
and they to me, in a way that half convinced me that, among my roommates,
Flusser was one of a kind. All three were junior English majors and members
of the college drama society. None of them was in a fraternity. There were twelve fraternities
on the campus, but only two admitted Jews, one a small all Jewish fraternity
with about fifty members and the other a nonsectarian fraternity about half
that size, founded locally by a group of student idealists, who took in
anyone they could get their hands on. The remaining ten were reserved for
white Christian males, an arrangement that no one could have imagined
challenging on a campus that so prided itself on tradition. The imposing
Christian fraternity houses with their fieldstone facades and castlelike
doors dominated Buckeye Street, the tree-lined avenue bisected by a small
green with a Civil War cannon that, according to the risque witticism
repeated to newcomers, went off whenever a virgin walked by. Buckeye Street
led from the campus through the residential streets of big trees and neatly
kept-up old frame houses to the one business artery in town, Main Street,
which was four blocks long, stretching from the bridge over Wine Creek at one
end to the railroad station at the other. Main was dominated by the New
Willard House, the inn in whose taproom alumni gathered on football weekends
to drunkenly relive their college days and where, through the college
placement office, I got a job Friday and Saturday nights, working as a waiter
for the minimum wage of seventy-five cents an hour plus tips. The social life
of the college of some twelve hundred students was conducted largely behind
the fraternities' massive black studded doors and out on their expansive
green lawns—where, in virtually any weather, two or three boys could always
be seen tossing a football around. Whether
you’re a fan of Philip Roth or not, you’re likely to enjoy reading Indignation.
If only …. Steve
Hopkins, October 20, 2008 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the November 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Indignation.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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