Indignation

Indignation

by PhilipRoth (Author)

Synopsis

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 neighbourhood 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, tells the story of the young man's education in life's terrifying chances and bizarre obstructions. It 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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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Edition: 01
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Published: 05 Sep 2008

ISBN 10: 0224085131
ISBN 13: 9780224085137
Book Overview: Indignation, Philip Roth s twenty-ninth book, tells the story of the young man s education in life s terrifying chances and bizarre obstructions.

Media 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 twist in narrative perspective reinforces this novel's timelessness. Kirkus Reviews, Starred As provocative as his astonishing The Plot Against America...[A] fast-paced, compassionate, humorous, historically-conscious novel... Booklist, ALA, Starred Review We can see again his shocking ability to bring history to bear on the present. As always, the rpose 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. -- Vince Passaro O, The Oprah Magazine .. .there's a lovely perplexedness to the writing here...It's a terrific book... Gentleman's Quarterly 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 A meditation on love, death, and madness, Roth's new novel combines the comic absurdity of his early novel like Portnoy's Complaint with the pathos of his later novels like Everyman and Exit Ghost.Library Journal Starred Roth has been burning up the track for well over a decade now ... And in INDIGNATION his power and intensity seem undiminished...Roth's secret, I think, is his supreme confidence as a storyteller -- and, paradoxically, a supreme humility...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, on the cover of The New York Times B
Author Bio
In 1997, PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians' Prize for the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004. Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.