After two short books about the end of life — “Everyman” and “Exit Ghost” — the new Philip Roth novel “Indignation” (Houghton Mifflin) seems, at first, like an escape from the writer’s recent exploration of decay and death.
The story begins in 1951 New Jersey where college student Marcus Messner is being driven crazy by his father’s obsession with his son’s safety.
Marcus was happily attending nearby Robert Treat College until “my father became frightened that I would die.”
A bit like the title character in John Irving’s “The World According to Garp,” Marcus’s dad suddenly has an extreme recognition of the delicacy of human life and the dangers that are all around his beloved son.
The newspapers are filled with accounts of the brutality faced by young Americans in the Korean War — a situation that no doubt heightened the fears of every early 1950s parent with a son of draft age.
College deferments are in place, however, and Marcus decides to escape from Newark and his father by transferring to a rural and conservative Ohio college, Winesburg College.
What starts off like a combination of Roth’s funny and acerbic novella about a New Jersey youth of the 1950s — “Goodbye, Columbus” — with his more recent historical novels (“The Plot Against America” and “I Married a Communist”) soon turns out to be one the author’s bleakest tales.
On page 54 of the 233-page book, Roth reveals that Marcus is dead and is looking back at the events of 1951.
Marcus is in some sort of limbo where he is doomed to live and re-live his 19 years of life forever — as written by Roth, this is one of the most powerful visions of hell in contemporary literature. Infinite nostalgia.
“As in life, I know only what is, and in death what is turns out to be what was,” Marcus tells us from the other side. “You are not just shackled to your life while living it, you continue to be stuck with it after you’re gone…As a nonbeliever, I assumed that the afterlife was without a clock, a body, a brain, a soul, a god — without anything of any shape, form, or substance, decomposition absolute. I did not know that it was not only NOT without remembering but that remembering would be THE everything. I have no idea, either, whether my remembering has been going on for three hours or for a million years.”
After this shocking aside, the suspense and black comedy in “Indignation” become almost overpowering as we shift back to Ohio in 1951 and wonder how our protagonist will be meeting his fate within a year.
