Indignation draws the reader’s feelings in many directions. We side with Marcus for his integrity and we support his witty debunking of Winesburg’s phoniness, but when his anger passes a certain point it seems incommensurate and we look again at the people and institutions he opposes to see whether our acquiescence was too cheaply bought. Both Marcus and the Dean claim that the other is intolerant, and Roth leaves the issue circling: is one, or both, or neither of them to blame for a situation where a gifted student cannot thrive in a hidebound college? Similar complications exist with Marcus’s father, who made Marcus’s life intolerable largely out of genuine, misapplied love, and who then, when Marcus flees to Ohio, works harder so that he can meet the increased college fees.
It is, therefore, a story of contrasts. There is immense anger — one can feel Marcus’s rage kindling as the Dean accuses him, with icy composure, of sexual deviance, rebelliousness and blasphemy — but elsewhere there is a gentle, understanding tone which derives from the distance between the frazzled Marcus of the story and the older, less uptight version who is describing wounds that have since healed. However, that homely, reminiscing style then provides the novel’s most marked, and artistically rendered, contrast: the shift between comedy and tragedy. On the first date, when Olivia is giving Marcus something ‘to puzzle over for weeks afterward’, it seems like a comedy of sexual manners redolent of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Roth’s breakthrough novel. But then, in the middle of the anecdote, Marcus shatters the jokey tone by telling us that he is now dead, having lost his life aged 19, not long after the time which he is describing. Suddenly all the potential we had seen in him drains away, along with the antic humour he had built up. The fact that death here comprises an eternal, solitary reflection on one’s past makes it all the worse: what had seemed like a wry old man’s memoir is in fact a plaintive tale of a life extinguished before it had properly begun.
You could say that Roth is operating within his limits — this is a short book about growing up, innocence, sex and death, all recurring subjects in his fiction — but the writing is too good for complaints. Indignation is a superbly realised novel, which begins with the light-hearted tone of a coming-of-age tale, before unleashing a devastating narrative about dying and the pain of being forever separated from those you love:
Ma! Dad! Olivia! I am thinking of you!
No response. To provoke no response no matter how painstaking the attempt to unravel and to be revealed. All minds gone except my own. No response. Profoundly sad.
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