Dead Man Talking

If Everyman was a poignant meditation on illness and death, Indignation is a rejoinder to it, albeit one in which that order of nature is turned upside down. Here, it is the young dying: 8220;The loveliest fairytale of life is that everything happens in order,8221; as David Kepesh says in The Dying Animal. And when the dead recalls his life and the conspiracies that cut it short, he feels, not indignity, but indignation.

Indignation is another catalogue of Jewish-American themes: the doting mother, the domineering father, sexual initiation and the femme fatale shiksa. The protagonist must undergo a painful process of initiation, to be destroyed by his environment. Like Zuckerman and Kepesh, Marcus Messner, the dead narrator-protagonist here, must go forth and embrace his ruination. But unlike Zuckerman or Alexander Portnoy, Marcus is not torn between duty and defiance/desire. He is the closest to what we can call 8220;innocent8221;. He runs away from his Newark college to Winesburg, Ohio, because he couldn8217;t bear the obsessive concern of his father for his safety. But he remains focussed on giving his parents value for their investment in his education. Marcus is single-dimensional, under- or undeveloped. He is destroyed by his father8217;s irrationality, not because of his little rebellion. This isn8217;t a Roth novel where the genesis of the crisis lies within, but outside. Yet it is in keeping with Roth8217;s treatment of history, a blind force that consumes and obliterates the private story. However, death for Marcus is no oblivion, it doesn8217;t set him free. He remains in a state of being or nothingness in which memory cogitates 8220;for eons on itself8221;, an 8220;endless nothing8221;. In death, he meditates on his life.

Jewish-American fiction traverses a mental geography, not a spatial one. The vast expanse of the US didn8217;t, as a rule, enter the literature of writers who grew up in East Coast cities. Indignation, to an extent, translates this imaginative geography into a spatial one 8212; Marcus goes to the Midwest and the trajectory of his death is triggered off there. He is an outsider to 1951 WASP America and doesn8217;t belong to the Jewish intellectual milieu of the Village either. His conditioning is in his butcher father8217;s shop: 8220;I grew up in blood.8221; To escape that blood, he dies a bloody death because he was uneducated in the book of life, having spent his time hitherto as 8220;Mama Aurelius8217;s8221; boy. At Winesburg, a microcosm of pre-1960s prejudices, he meets anti-Semitism and Olivia Hutton, another of Roth8217;s 8220;fucked-up8221; but intelligent shiksas, whose emotional turbulence and his comic battles with college authorities bring about his downfall. He goes to Korea, a fate he wanted to avoid, and dies. Ironically, the father who was wrong when Marcus was alive, in his death is proved right.

This is not intended as a competitor to Roth8217;s post-war American trilogy. It is touching but flatly written, and his fabled eye for detail is absent. One also suspects compulsion: after writing so much about death, he had to get a narrator who was dead. To be fair, Roth is perhaps reliving youth by proxy and conceiving, after Zuckerman in American Pastoral, a 8220;tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy8221;.