Indignation, Philip Roth’s 29th book, is about the sophomore year of its narrator, Marcus Messner, who attends college in 1951, a time when the Korean War hangs in the background, waiting to devour America’s youth. Marcus is a brilliant student, the first of his family to enter university, but he has recently suffered unrest. He spent his freshman year at college in his native Newark, which enabled him to live at home. It should have been ideal for a quiet boy such as Marcus, who wanted nothing more than to achieve good grades, but his normally easy-going father had a breakdown of sorts which made him irritable and intrusive to the point where Marcus could no longer live with him.
At the beginning of the novel Marcus is in Ohio, having left the family home and enrolled at the fictional Winesburg College (a nod to Sherwood Anderson, author of the 1919 short-story collection Winesburg, Ohio). He is determined to study hard, and even applies himself to the tedious yet compulsory military training, so that when he graduates he will be conscripted as an officer rather than as a cannon-fodder private. But he cannot settle. His irksome, bohemian roommate plays Beethoven records through the night, and so, panicking about his ability to study properly, Marcus moves elsewhere. Winesburg’s traditions strike him as silly, and he finds the teachers mediocre. Eventually he gets a girlfriend, but even then he cannot stop analysing: when Olivia favours him with an act he had not imagined an undergraduate could ever receive on a first date, all he can do is worry, somewhat bathetically, about the girl’s mental and moral condition; like everything else in Ohio, she disorientates him.
As much as Marcus’s initial prudishness is laughable (and he later draws the link between himself and his father, both of whom become frightened of everything), Olivia truly is a little strange. She is a sympathetic character, possibly with abuse in her past, but she is also moody and needy, has been treated for mental illness and alcoholism, and has attempted suicide. Marcus needs a stabilising influence to replace that which his father and home once offered, but for all her fragile charm, Olivia provides the antithesis of that. Before long, Marcus’s quiet intensity has boiled into the indignation of the title. Everything maddens him, particularly the college’s enforced church-going, and by the time he engages in a set-piece showdown with the Dean halfway through the book, his temper is clearly jeopardising his future.
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