KEY POINTS:
Philip Roth's astounding and sustained period of late creativity has been notable for one unifying preoccupation: death.
In novel after novel, Roth, who is 75 and as prolific as ever (this is his 29th book), leads his ageing and diminished protagonists to the very edge of non-existence, only to leave them suspended, waiting, in a fury of metaphysical incomprehension and mourning.
They mourn not only those they knew who have died but their own lost vitality, the reality of which they can never escape, assaulted as they are daily by the indignities of old age: impotence, incontinence, failing memory, bodily pain. "The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy," Nathan Zuckerman says in Roth's American Pastoral, "that is every man's tragedy." But every man's tragedy, as Zuckerman also knows, is death.
Everyman was the title Roth chose for the short, intense, rather beautiful novel he published in 2006, in which he told the story of a man's life through his various illnesses. He follows his nameless protagonist finally on to the operating table, where he has a heart attack and dies: "He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it."
Yet it's not always the old and sickly who die. The young die too, as another Roth alter ego, the libertine David Kepesh - in The Dying Animal - discovers when, in late middle age and having selfishly dedicated his life to the pursuit of sexual pleasure without responsibility, he suddenly and quite obsessively falls in love with one of his graduate students. Desire dislocates him.
In his subsequent anguish and grief (the student develops breast cancer) Kepesh begins to re-evaluate the moral codes by which he has lived and to rage against what he considers to be a profound violation of the natural order of being. In this latest novel, Indignation, heightened awareness of the imminence of death, of how danger and threat lie in wait for all of us all the time, torment the father of a promising Jewish student from New Jersey.
The novel is set in 1951, the second year of the Korean war. The father is a kosher butcher, from a family of butchers, and he cannot bear to relinquish his son to the world beyond the protective shield of the family. His son, Marcus Messner, is an exceptional student who works part-time with his father in the family shop. Messner eventually chooses a university far away from home, in the Midwest, a conservative institution called Winesburg College. He is determined to escape his ancestral inheritance, from the claustrophobia of family life, the shop, the stink of blood and uncooked meat.
Above all, he wants to escape from his father's oppressive love, his protection, his anxiety. "You are a boy with a magnificent future before you," Marcus' father tells him. "How do I know you're not going to places where you can get yourself killed?"
In the event, the father is correct to have been abnormally concerned about his son, because it turns out that Messner does not have a future beyond the age of 19, the age at which he is killed in action in Korea (he has been drafted after being expelled from Winesburg following a series of comic clashes with the college authorities). And yet, after death, he experiences a peculiar kind of afterlife, existing everywhere and nowhere, condemned endlessly to shuffle through the events of his life.
The conceit of the book is that, as in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones or Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman or the films Sunset Boulevard and American Beauty, the narrator is dead. But unlike the unnamed protagonist of Everyman, death does not free Messner: it imprisons him in an "endless nothing", where memory cogitates "for eons on itself".
Messner has entered into nowhere but his misfortune is to know everything about it. Death for him offers no escape from life. That is what he believes is his ultimate fate, though Roth, who is an atheist, slyly opens up the possibility in the closing pages that oblivion is what awaits him, and all of us, after all.
Indignation is the inevitable culmination of the death obsession in late-period Roth; in retrospect, it seems it was only a matter of time, if time allowed, before he imaginatively followed one of his protagonists from this life into the next, from the operating table into the endless nothing.
The book is rather flatly written for the first quarter, in short, plain sentences, and there is little of Roth's usual fastidious attention to small detail. His depiction of the inner particularity of a butcher's shop is perfunctory compared with the radiant precision of his previous representations of, say, the workings of a glove factory, a jewellery store or a boxing gym.
It's a risk, too, this attempt to write as an unsophisticated, non-literary 19-year-old, to be true to the integrity of who he is, to find an appropriate voice for him, without also resorting to the easy consolations of cliche, as Roth does early on.
Then, almost incidentally, Messner, our narrator, tells us he is dead, after which the novel ignites, the sentences lengthen and the style becomes more expansive. You begin to hear more of the authentic Rothian tone, the urgency, the extremity, the scathing wit. Indignation is a strange, troubling and occasionally ridiculous book.
The themes are very familiar - the role of a stern, overbearing father in the life of his restlessly rebellious son, the evocation of a lower-middle-class boyhood in what is now a vanished neighbourhood of Newark, the Jewish immigrant experience in America, the way we can all become caught up in and destroyed by historical forces beyond our control.
It can be read, perhaps, most successfully as an addendum to Roth's recent fiction, as a novel engaged in a complicated conversation with those that preceded it, rather than as a significant work in its own right. And yet one is ultimately moved and fascinated by it.
A great writer is a great writer, even when he's on cruise control.
Indignation
By Philip Roth (Cape $49.99)
- OBSERVER
