Indignation Read online

  Praise for Indignation

  “A gratifying novel … Indignation is, unquestionably, seriously ‘good’ Roth.”

  —Meg Wolitzer, The Times

  “[Roth] still towers above just about every living English-language author.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Roth’s secret … is his supreme confidence as a story-teller—and paradoxically, a supreme humility … Of all Roth’s recent novels, it ventures farthest into the unknowable. In his unshowy way, with all his quotidian specificity and merciless skepticism, Roth is attempting to storm heaven—an endeavor all the more desperately daring because he seems dead certain it’s not there.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “We can see again his shocking ability to bring history to bear on the present. As always, the prose is well built—sinewy and graceful—and, as always, the wit is as sharp as a German knife. There are simply no novels by Roth in which you cannot detect the hand of a master.”

  —O, The Oprah Magazine

  “The implacable face of history … broods menacingly over everything else.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “Seethes with outrage … A deft, gripping, and deeply moving narrative.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “A fine taut narrative about the frustrations of youth … [A] potent blend of sharp-eyed nostalgia, biting cogency and engrossing social, psychological and moral complexity … As grippingly streamlined as Greek drama, Roth’s mid-20th-century tale of nemesis transmits it again, brilliantly renewed with all the intellectual and imaginative force of a great novelist writing at the height of his powers.”

  —The Sunday Times (UK)

  “Roth’s ferocious little tale ought to be handed out on college campuses … Here’s a novel to be witnessed as an explosion from an author still angry enough to burn with adolescent rage and wise enough to understand how self-destructive that rage can be.”

  —The Washington Post

  “The interplay between a life just begun and ended, impulse and reflection, college high jinks and eternity is what makes it resonate. Four stars.”

  —People

  “[Indignation] reads, in short, like Roth making a quick star turn with many of the elements we have come to expect from him over the years.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “It is Roth’s virtuoso skill to couple Marcus’s companionable pleasure in part-time butchering with his nightmare that the knives he wields so dexterously will be used on himself … [Roth’s reasons] are at once insane, plausible, and disastrous.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Demands to be read in one sitting. It’s that good. It’s that audacious. It’s that compelling … Indignation is impossible to put down until it’s finished. Then, it’s impossible to shake off the aftermath of this mesmerizing story.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “A magnificent display of writerly talent: a lean, powerful novel with bold characters who command attention; scenes of impressive dramatic intensity and comic vitality; language that blasts the reader’s cozy complacency (it’s not called Indignation for nothing); and a theme that swells imperceptibly from a murmur to a satisfying roar.”

  —The New York Observer

  “Roth’s prose is brilliantly engaging, the narrative engrossing and the limning of the characters masterful … Indignation provides breathless, eye-opening reading. It is a vital burlesque of youth and the waste of war … it is among the finest writing about post-World War II America.”

  —Canadian Jewish News

  “Roth makes everything snap together, almost like a great short story. The brief final section—just a few pages long— masterfully sews together all the images and themes of the book … In Indignation Roth has reached back to Newark to breathe new life into all the old obsessions.”

  —The Daily Gleaner

  “Roth, blending the bawdy exuberance of his early period and the disenchantment of his recent work, demonstrates with subtle mastery the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Blistering … [Roth] is a master … The shocking rush from this book comes from watching Roth expertly and quickly build up to a half-dozen final pages that absolutely deliver the kill.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “This is a Philip Roth novel and a morbid, ironic surprise or two should be expected. It does not spoil the crisp dialogue, the rush of emotion, the assured storytelling.”

  —Winnipeg Free Press

  “Intricately wrought, passionate and fascinating … [A] masterpiece.”

  —Financial Times

  “A relevant and well-judged consideration of how national orthodoxy can have dire personal implications (particularly at a time of war) … Indignation is, among its many pleasures, a controlled expression of wrath.”

  —The Telegraph

  “A superbly realised novel, which begins with the lighthearted 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.”

  —The Spectator (UK)

  “Beneath the engines of his rage, Roth cannot suppress his fierce love for the innocent—for Marcus on his road to destruction … for America itself, still innocent enough to dream of a better tomorrow. Indignation ought to be required reading for presidential candidates.”

  —Evening Standard

  PENGUIN CANADA

  INDIGNATION

  In 1997 PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Award for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.”

  Recently Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award “for a body of work … of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship” and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career … places him or her in the highest rank of American literature.”

  Roth is the only living writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.

  BOOKS BY PHILIP ROTH

  ZUCKERMAN BOOKS

  The Ghost Writer

  Zuckerman Unbound

  The Anatomy Lesson

  The Prague Orgy

  The Counterlife

  American Pastoral

  I Married a Communist

  The Human Stain

  Exit Ghost

  ROTH BOOKS

  The Facts • Deception

  Patrimony • Operation Shylock

  The Plot Against America

  KEPESH BOOKS

  The Breast

  The Professor of Desire

  The Dying Animal

  MISCELLANY

  Reading Myself and Others Shop Talk

  OTHER BOOKS

  Goodbye, Columbus • Letting Go

  When She Was Good • Portnoy’s Complaint • Our Gang

  The Great American Novel • My Life as a Man

  Sabbath’s Theater • Everyman

  Indignation

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 9
0 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2008

  First published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South,

  New York, New York 10003, 2008

  Published in this edition, 2009

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Philip Roth, 2008

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  Book design by Robert Overholtzer

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Roth, Philip

  Indignation / Philip Roth.

  ISBN 978-0-14-317042-6

  I. Title.

  PS3568.O855I33 2009 813’.54 C2009-903819-6

  * * *

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  For K. W.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Chinese national anthem appears here in a World War Two translation of a song composed by Tian Han and Nieh Erh after the Japanese invasion of 1931; there are other translations of the song extant. During World War Two it was sung around the world by those allied with China in their struggle against the Empire of Japan. In 1949 it was adopted as the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China.

  Much of the dialogue attributed to Marcus Messner on pages 101–103 is taken almost verbatim from Bertrand Russell’s lecture “Why I Am Not a Christian,” delivered on March 6, 1927, at Battersea Town Hall, London, and collected by Simon and Schuster in 1957 in a volume of essays of the same name, edited by Paul Edwards and largely devoted to the subject of religion.

  The quotations on pages 167–168 are taken from chapter 19 of The Growth of the American Republic, fifth edition, by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager (Oxford University Press, 1962).

  Olaf (upon what were once knees)

  does almost ceaselessly repeat

  “there is some shit I will not eat”

  —E. E. Cummings,

  “i sing of Olaf glad and big”

  CONTENTS

  Under Morphine

  Out from Under

  Historical Note

  Indignation

  Under Morphine

  ABOUT TWO AND A HALF MONTHS after the well-trained divisions of North Korea, armed by the Soviets and Chinese Communists, crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea on June 25, 1950, and the agonies of the Korean War began, I entered Robert Treat, a small college in downtown Newark named for the city’s seventeenth-century founder. I was the first member of our family to seek a higher education. None of my cousins had gone beyond high school, and neither my father nor his three brothers had finished elementary school. “I worked for money,” my father told me, “since I was ten years old.” He was a neighborhood butcher for whom I’d delivered orders on my bicycle all through high school, except during baseball season and on the afternoons when I had to attend interschool matches as a member of the debating team. Almost from the day that I left the store—where I’d been working sixty-hour weeks for him between the time of my high school graduation in January and the start of college in September—almost from the day that I began classes at Robert Treat, my father became frightened that I would die. Maybe his fear had something to do with the war, which the U.S. armed forces, under United Nations auspices, had immediately entered to bolster the efforts of the ill-trained and underequipped South Korean army; maybe it had something to do with the heavy casualties our troops were sustaining against the Communist firepower and his fear that if the conflict dragged on as long as World War Two had, I would be drafted into the army to fight and die on the Korean battlefield as my cousins Abe and Dave had died during World War Two. Or maybe the fear had to do with his financial worries: the year before, the neighborhood’s first supermarket had opened only a few blocks from our family’s kosher butcher shop, and sales had begun steadily falling off, in part because of the supermarket’s meat and poultry section’s undercutting my father’s prices and in part because of a general postwar decline in the number of families bothering to maintain kosher households and to buy kosher meat and chickens from a rabbinically certified shop whose owner was a member of the Federation of Kosher Butchers of New Jersey. Or maybe his fear for me began in fear for himself, for at the age of fifty, after enjoying a lifetime of robust good health, this sturdy little man began to develop the persistent racking cough that, troubling as it was to my mother, did not stop him from keeping a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth all day long. Whatever the cause or mix of causes fueling the abrupt change in his previously benign paternal behavior, he manifested his fear by hounding me day and night about my whereabouts. Where were you? Why weren’t you home? How do I know where you are when you go out? You are a boy with a magnificent future before you—how do I know you’re not going to places where you can get yourself killed?

  The questions were ludicrous since, in my high school years, I had been a prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student who went out with only the nicest girls, a dedicated debater, and a utility infielder for the varsity baseball team, living happily enough within the adolescent norms of our neighborhood and my school. The questions were also infuriating—it was as though the father to whom I’d been so close during all these years, practically growing up at his side in the store, had no idea any longer of who or what his son was. At the store, the customers would delight him and my mother by telling them what a pleasure it was to watch the little one to whom they used to bring cookies—back when his father used to let him play with some fat and cut it up like “a big butcher,” albeit using a knife with a dull blade—to watch him mature under their eyes into a well-mannered, well-spoken youngster who put their beef through the grinder to make chopped meat and who scattered and swept up the sawdust on the floor and who dutifully yanked the remaining feathers from the necks
of the dead chickens hanging from hooks on the wall when his father called over to him, “Flick two chickens, Markie, will ya, for Mrs. So-and-So?” During the seven months before college he did more than give me the meat to grind and a few chickens to flick. He taught me how to take a rack of lamb and cut lamb chops out of it, how to slice each rib, and, when I got down to the bottom, how to take the chopper and chop off the rest of it. And he taught me always in the most easygoing way. “Don’t hit your hand with the chopper and everything will be okay,” he said. He taught me how to be patient with our more demanding customers, particularly those who had to see the meat from every angle before they bought it, those for whom I had to hold up the chicken so they could literally look up the asshole to be sure that it was clean. “You can’t believe what some of those women will put you through before they buy their chicken,” he told me. And then he would mimic them: “‘Turn it over. No, over. Let me see the bottom.’ ” It was my job not just to pluck the chickens but to eviscerate them. You slit the ass open a little bit and you stick your hand up and you grab the viscera and you pull them out. I hated that part. Nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done. That’s what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.

  Our store fronted on Lyons Avenue in Newark, a block up the street from Beth Israel Hospital, and in the window we had a place where you could put ice, a wide shelf tilted slightly down, back to front. An ice truck would come by to sell us chopped ice, and we’d put the ice in there and then we’d put our meat in so people could see it when they walked by. During the seven months I worked in the store full time before college I would dress the window for him. “Marcus is the artist,” my father said when people commented on the display. I’d put everything in. I’d put steaks in, I’d put chickens in, I’d put lamb shanks in—all the products that we had I would make patterns out of and arrange in the window “artistically.” I’d take some ferns and dress things up, ferns that I got from the flower shop across from the hospital. And not only did I cut and slice and sell meat and dress the window with meat; during those seven months when I replaced my mother as his sidekick I went with my father to the wholesale market early in the morning and learned to buy it too. He’d be there once a week, five, five-thirty in the morning, because if you went to the market and picked out your own meat and drove it back to your place yourself and put it in the refrigerator yourself, you saved on the premium you had to pay to have it delivered. We’d buy a whole quarter of the beef, and we’d buy a forequarter of the lamb for lamb chops, and we’d buy a calf, and we’d buy some beef livers, and we’d buy some chickens and chicken livers, and since we had a couple of customers for them, we would buy brains. The store opened at seven in the morning and we’d work until seven, eight at night. I was seventeen, young and eager and energetic, and by five I’d be whipped. And there he was, still going strong, throwing hundred-pound forequarters on his shoulders, walking in and hanging them in the refrigerator on hooks. There he was, cutting and slicing with the knives, chopping with the cleaver, still filling out orders at seven p.m. when I was ready to collapse. But my job was to clean the butcher blocks last thing before we went home, to throw some sawdust on the blocks and then scrape them with the iron brush, and so, marshaling the energy left in me, I’d scrape out the blood to keep the place kosher.