The Justice

In true Rothian fashion, he takes up with an emotionally disturbed shikseh named Olivia, to whom his parents object, and his fascination with ejaculation is only equaled by his conviction that a girl of breeding can't possibly enjoy sex or want sex. Olivia's desire, concludes Marcus, must be "an abnormality" because there exists no evidence that her "character was anything but solid through and through."

And again, this is Roth through and through. Roth expertly gives voice to Marcus' peculiar sort of apathy, writing the back story of this least conflicted character's death. The prose is, from our knowledgeable vantage point, ironic, darkly funny and expertly crafted. Listening to Marcus pontificate, be it to himself, to his roommates or to his authority figures, is painful. His indignant atheism, indignant rejection of fraternity life and indignant confrontation of any challenge to his excellence bring to mind the worst of the college student. But in the end, the most painful and captivating aspect of Indignation of all is how Marcus allows himself to be controlled by the flow of events with a minimum of anger or rage or resistance, which leads him exactly to that which his father warned him against: "The terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result."

In the end, Indignation is a wonderful read but is neither as memorable nor as evocative as some of Roth's earlier work. Self-indulgent down to the title (drawn from the Chinese anthem favored by both Portnoy and Marcus), Indignation is made less by its protagonist's relatively small helping of the sound and fury that made Portnoy and Zuckerman famous. He accepts sex. He does not accept lifestyles alternate to his, but he chooses to avoid rather than to confront.

In fact, throughout the novel Roth glosses over confrontation, and ultimately the only true conflicts and more exciting points of the novel become Marcus' Bernard Russell-ridden war of words with the moralizing Christian Dean Caudwell and the climactic panty raid, a sophomoric jaunt that, in the end, drives Marcus to his morphine-sodden demise. But it is a testament to Roth's talent that even this less successful effort provides an entertaining, occasionally disturbing look into the difference between and results of a character making a choice and a character allowing choices to be made for him.

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