Indignation

Philip Roth has written another witty, snappy coming of age novel.  He once again has set the scene in Newark NJ with a young high school graduate about to leave his family and his job assisting his father in the kosher butcher shop as he heads off to college.

This wonderful novel has been also turned into a movie that I went to see last night.  I find it interesting that someone would want to make a movie from this title.  The movie stayed very close to the original, just two changes are made to the original story that I guess make it easier to explain the story line in less time.  Seeing the movie made me pull the book off my bookshelf and reread the plot to delve back into Roth's world of a Jewish young man facing being Jewish on a Midwestern college campus and the Anti-Semitism on colleges campuses in the 1950s.

The protagonist in this story, Marcus Messner,  is also faced with the challenge of a relationship with a young troubled woman.  He gets involved romantically with her, though he knows it will lead to trouble.  All the problems he experiences on his first journey into the larger world, from his protected childhood, are experiences of growing up.  He grapples with foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual experimentation, courage and error.  Trying to escape what he perceives as overprotectiveness of his father and the Korean War, Marcus heads to a small college in Ohio.  He is assigned to a dorm room with other Jewish students who make up a very small minority of the students on campus.  He is rushed by the Jewish fraternity and resists at first.  He gets romantically involved with a beautiful blond girl, who he doesn't realize has a troubled past.  The choices he makes in each of these relationships pushes him further into the final results of his follies.

The book is a statement of the times and of how the choices we make in life lead each of us in the direction our lives will take.  That each of us, while we are in the middle of life cannot see where we are heading, but that each decision leads to the next.