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Indignation | 
 enlarge | Author: Philip Roth
Creator: Dick Hill
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Category: Book
List Price: £30.85
Buy New: £15.57
You Save: £15.28 (50%)
New (9) Used (1) from £15.57
Rating:  13 reviews
Media: MP3 CD
Edition: MP3 Una
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 1423369750
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781423369752
ASIN: 1423369750
Publication Date: September 16, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW - ***Delivery usually * 4 - 5 * working days - From Aphrohead of SOUTHPORT, Lancs, UK *** . Priority Airmail used Worldwide on International orders. Thanks from all at Aphrohead.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 Masterly November 20, 2008
Hamsun (Norway)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
While this may not rank against the American trilogy this is nevertheless a masterpiece. The writing is faultless and the narrative is constantly engaging. Above all Roth is, as ever, capable of creating a state of mind that is coherent and compelling.
Another Must-Read from Roth November 1, 2008
Ethan Cooper (Big Apple)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
INDIGNATION is a fascinating novel, albeit difficult to read except in 20 page bursts. The reason is that the intense Marcus Messner, Roth's young protagonist and narrator, finds little joy, but much angst and guilt, in his life. He is the master of nothing. Everything is a challenge. His world is an ordeal. At one moment, Marcus is surprised to be told by his college Dean that he is shouting and pointing angrily. But throughout, Marcus seems on the verge such hysterical expression. This makes INDIGNATION a book to enjoy in small doses.
INDIGNATION is the story of Marcus, a studious young man and only child, who flees his overbearing father in Newark for a year at Winesburg College in rural Ohio. But when Marcus takes a step forward in his life--such as excelling in school, establishing greater independence from his parents, having new sexual experiences, and befriending the leaders in a fraternity--Roth connects that step to perilous undercurrents of guilt, principled naivete, or treachery. In INDIGNATION, all the happy normal experiences of youth and college don't make Marcus stronger. Instead, they make him increasingly vulnerable.
The narrative skill shown in INDIGNATION is truly dazzling. Not only is there not a single word out of place. But Roth is also able to pull a surprising and profound subtext from each experience that Marcus relates. The effect is that you get every event in the novel twice: once in the seamless and interesting telling; then a second time in its surprising interpretation. Only in the very end of INDIGNATION does the meaning that Roth pulls from an experience seem obvious. (I thought we were going to learn that Marcus was doomed to recapitulate the tragic meshuge of his father's family.)
Of course, it's all a matter of taste. But I must say that Roth sometimes seems to overplay to make his points. Anyone remember the vomit scene in American Pastoral, which expressed revulsion? Well, INDIGNATION has a vomit scene as well. For an author who is able to find great depth in the most ordinary interactions, I wonder why these extreme physical expressions need to occur.
In the world of the righteous, beware of what the plumber says October 23, 2008
Sphex (London)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
An American teenager storms off to his room. Unlikely as it sounds, this is uncharacteristic behaviour on the part of Marcus Messner, the first-person narrator of Philip Roth's latest novel. Already, within a dozen pages, we think Marcus has a point. Enrolled at the local college, he looks back to the "wonderful time" he had ("wonderful except when it came to eviscerating chickens") helping his father out at the butcher's store on Lyons Avenue in Newark, New Jersey. He remembers the way they would deal with the demanding customers, and, of course, he remembers the blood, the buckets of blood. On the other side of the world the Korean war is underway, and blood is being spilled by bullet and bayonet.
Then, one day, his father flips and begins wondering when his only son is going to go off and get himself killed. Why this sudden change? Being at college means avoiding the draft, avoiding danger. "The questions were ludicrous... I had been a prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student" whose main ambition was to be the first Messner to attend university. He storms off to his room when he finds out that his father has been "driven crazy by the chance remark of a plumber". He's incensed that his father has chosen to believe, not what he has seen with his own eyes for an entire lifetime, but what he's been told by a plumber "on his knees fixing the toilet in the back of the store!"
For me, this brings to mind the image of a priest on his knees before the altar, making people believe things that are not true, that defy a lifetime of experience of how the world goes, that contradict reason and logic and evidence. We don't know it yet, but Marcus Messner's intellectual hero is Bertrand Russell. Later, when he gets into trouble at college with Dean Caudwell ("the biggest Christer around"), we learn just how hard life can be for an American atheist in "the world of the righteous". There are parallels between Marcus and the British mathematician G. H. Hardy (who was at Trinity with Russell): both were unbelievers who bridled at the thought of attending college chapel, indignant at "putrefied primitive superstition" and the "disgrace of religion", and both resisted taking the advice of more sophisticated friends. Hardy too had to face the dean of his college, but there the parallel ends: while Hardy went on to enjoy a long and renowned academic career, Marcus sadly does not. (In the spirit of the novel, it was pure luck I happened to be reading Hardy at the same time as Roth.)
Marcus admires those who seem to be in control. At Winesburg College in Ohio he meets Olivia and this time chance works in his favour - he gets lucky in a very pleasant if perplexing way. To him, she is poised, an expert, in control. To herself, nothing could be further from the truth. Her rebuke is stinging: "I, who have eight thousand moods a minute... am 'under control'?" When his mother visits, she remembers the time her husband locked him out, and admits, "I couldn't control him, and this is the result."
This brilliant novel is set midway through the twentieth century, at a time of war and when world war was just-lived history. It was also a significant moment in intellectual history, one that might itself come to be seen as a tipping point in human knowledge. Our understanding of complex systems like national economies and the weather had rested upon the fundamental assumption that small changes in the initial values would get washed out over time. The discovery of the butterfly effect in the early sixties - in which tiny changes in those values result in huge divergence - began a rethink that is continuing to this day. Take any catastrophe and it may be that the seeds of its destructive power were there all along, slowly growing from small beginnings.
While we are now used to the idea that world events are not always or even often under the control of governments, on the scale of the individual we haven't yet shaken off the educated view of the world as a deterministic place. We are too attached to the idea that a person's success or failure is down to their intrinsic qualities rather than to luck. (Even lottery winners sometimes attribute their success to their "positive" attitude!) Roth's achievement is to tell a story that keeps you riveted to every word while also sparking off some of these ideas. In the end, it is the uneducated father who puts it best and teaches Marcus his most important lesson: "the terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieves the most disproportionate result."
Brilliant short novel October 18, 2008
J. H. Bretts
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is one of Philip Roth's best novels, the funny and poignant story of a young man's journey to adulthood in the 1950s. Although short, it manages to pack so much in - stifling mid-Western conformity, New Jersey Jewishness, first love and the horrors of war. It is a shame the critics now take Roth for granted because he is so prolific.He is still at the top of his game.
 exasperation October 18, 2008
William Rycroft (London, UK)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I struggled last year to swallow the premise of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach; the depiction of a time when sex was still something barely discussed, and that the events of the couple's honeymoon could have such devastating consequences. In this similarly slim novel Philip Roth is keen to depict a very specific time (and as the college President will ask later, 'Do you have any idea that you belong to a time at all?'). He was quoted himself recently, saying "This will come as a great shock to young people, but in 1951 you could make it through college unscathed by oral sex." I obviously went to the wrong college. What he also wants to show is 'the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.' The very articulation of that and the important word there, comical, makes Roth's a far more successful book.
In the period during the Korean War we meet Marcus Messner, son of a kosher butcher and straight A student. His only wish is to do well not only to justify the expense of the education which has forced his mother back behind the counter to work once again with her husband but also of course to avoid the draft. It's difficult not to draw parallels with today when Roth describes the messy and costly war abroad and the very real fear of death for any young soldier going out there. The Communist forces with their bayonets and bugle calls are shown to be an army from a different age, and yet their deadly effectiveness is all to clear. There is another driving force at work however, 'At the heart of my ambition was the desire to be free of a strong, stolid father suddenly stricken with the uncontrollable fear for a grown-up son's well-being.' Marcus' father sees the potential for his son's ruin everywhere. When late home he assumes he is in a whorehouse or pool hall and his increasing hysteria pushes Marcus to attend a college hundreds of miles away in Ohio.
Here at Winesburg he eschews both the Jewish and secular fraternities, preferring to keep his head down and work hard. Because Roth reveals where Marcus is narrating his story from we know where all this is heading and can see how each decision he makes drives him closer and closer to his fate. Marcus himself picks up on his father's fatalism and '...despite the trammels of convention still rigidly holding sway on the campus of a middling little midwestern college in the years immediately after World War Two, I was determined to have intercourse before I died.' This comes after his meeting and first date with Olivia Hutton, who will send him into a tailspin after performing that act we have mentioned before. Marcus' confusion is where much of the humour comes from, something that even I, someone born after the sexual revolution, can understand.
In the quite brilliant American Pastoral, Philip Roth describes in vivid detail the manufacture of a pair of women's gloves. Never before had I considered how it was the done let alone the care, the detail and indeed the love that used to go into making a simple pair of gloves. Now, I think, I will never forget. In his latest novel the trade he spotlights is butchery, kosher butchery to be precise and with the same skill he shows the ritual efficiency of the shochet as he slaughters chickens with a quick flick of his knife. Roth contrasts this with the scar Marcus sees on Olivia's wrist, the result of her attempt to 'ritually slaughter herself' but there's something laboured about the comparison which stops it from quite hitting the mark. The rage with which Roth has written in many of his finest works is replaced here by the titular exasperation of a student in conflict with his male authority figures.
The writing is of course excellent throughout, the humour welcome and the period evoked with skill but it's very size makes it feel like a minor work, one which fails to quite match the ambition of earlier small books such as The Ghost Writer. Another short book is on its way (dealing with suicide) and in a recent interview with Robert McCrum, Roth explained his frustration, 'Starting a new book is hell. You just flail around until something happens. It's miraculous. It comes to you out of nothing and nowhere. That's the problem with writing short books. You finish them too quickly. And that's what's wonderful about a long book. So I've decided I've got to find a big project that will take me right through to the end. Finish the day before, and - exit ghost.' That's the book I want to read.
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