This novel tells a very compelling story of a young man’s attempt to escape an increasingly protective and obsessive father by transferring to an out of state college for his sophomore year. While this isn’t a story line that would usually appeal to me, it was so well written and the characters were so funny and interesting that I found it to be a very quick and enjoyable read. -- Melissa Sokol (9/15/09) ( )

This book is a good demonstration of a young man's fight for individuality against society. It's also a good demonstration of stubborn youth. Marcus Messner is trying to make his way in the world. It is 1951 and he is desperately trying to avoid being drafted during the Korean War, yet still trying to have his own life away from his over protective father. The results are disasterous for the main character. My favorite passages:"Almost from the day I entered robert treat, from the day I graduated high school to the day I entered college, my father became obsessed with the fact that I might die. " "Maybe his fear for me stemmed from a fear for himself. At the age of 50, after enjoying a lifetime of robust good health, this sturdy little man began to develop the persistent rackIng ciugh t at troubling as it was to my mother did not stop him from keeping a lit Cigarette forever at the corner of his mouth all day long. For whatever the cause, or causes fuelIng the abrupt chae in his previously benign eternal behavior he manifested his fear by hounding me day and night about my whereabouts...it was as though the father with whom I had been so close during all these years practicallt growi up at his side at the store had no idea of who or what his son was...and crazy with the frightening discovery that a little boy grows up, grows tall ove shadows his parents, and that you can't keep him then. You have to relinquish him to the world. ""I hadn't the stomach to do battle with the dean of menanymore than I had the stomach to do battle with my fathermy roommates, yet battle I did despite myself.""Cartwell was right there will always be somethingdriving you nuts, your father, your roommate, your havingto attend chapel 40 times so stop thinking about transferringto another school and concentrate on graduating as first in your class." ( )

Not vintage Roth but better than the disappointing Exit Ghost, with flashes of his old magic. I was left indignant at what happened to the narrator, Marcus Messner, but I'm not sure the indignation planted throughout the rest of the novel was fierce enough.

I do feel Roth is at his best when writing, as here, about the 1950s. Simultaneously he manages to get across the absurd hypocracies of the time with a sense that it was still a better time.

A good book from a man who has written many great books. ( )

Lots of indignation here, but not from me. Roth's protagonist, Marcus Messner, is filled with enough of his own youthful and idealistic indignation to justify the book's title. But the title word could just as easily apply to Marcus's butcher father, to the Winesburg college dean and president and a number of other minor characters, as well as to the Chinese Communist hordes swarming down through North Korea in that frigid and often nearly forgotten conflict of the fifties, which forms an ominous and omnipresent background to the story. Indignation, which is a surprisingly slight book, nearly a novella, marks a return to the kind of stories that made Roth famous over forty-some years ago. Like Good-Bye Columbus, it looks at college life and all the excitement, mysteries and sexual frustrations that accompany it. Winesburg College is, of course, an obvious nod (or perhaps eye-rolling shaking of the head) to Sherwood Anderson's classic collection of interconnected stories, Winesburg, Ohio - a book which I first read in my own college days in the sixties. I was reading Anderson, in fact, around the same time I first discovered Philip Roth, in his then-bestselling and then-scandalous novel, Portnoy's Complaint. A novel which finally put the sin of Onan right out there in the open. I thought it was about time too, as I nodded and chuckled my way through Alex's adventures with milk bottles, a slab of liver, and, finally, the Monkey. In fact, I was naive and stupid enough to adopt that book as required reading in one of the first Lit classes I taught in 1970. And I actually got away with it. I have read many other Roth books since then. My favorite is one of Roth's earliest novels, Letting Go, which I have re-read several times and would highly recommend. More recently, The Human Stain is, I think, one of Roth's best realized works, and its film version, with Sir Anthony Hopkins, is equally good. (Which makes me remember Richard Benjamin and Ali McGraw in the classic film, Good-Bye Columbus. Benjamin also brought Alex Portnoy to life on screen, an effort which was less successful.) Indignation, with its showers of semen high into the air, stained socks and the unstable but beautiful "Olivia the Expert" does indeed mark a kind of restrained return to the Portnoy days, albeit under a shadow of war and imminent death. I read this book in just two sittings. It's funny, it's disturbing, and it's immediate, despite its setting of over fifty years ago. A real page-turner, entertaining and real. ( )