| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9780547054841 | | Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company | | Publish Date: 9/16/2008 | | Buy.com Sku: 207945478 | | Item#: | | Dimensions (in Inches) 7.75H x 5.75L x 1T | | Pages: 256 |
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| | | Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life’s unimagined chances and terrifying consequences.
It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad -- mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy.
As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father’s fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.
Indignation, Philip Roth’s twenty-ninth book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.
Annotation:
Trying to escape his overbearing Jewish parents Marcus Messner flees his 1950s New Jersey home to attend college in Winesburg, Ohio, where he quickly becomes marked as one of the few Jews on campus. As the Korean War rages in the background, Marcus's moral upbringing undergoes a serious test in the form of Olivia, a psychologically troubled (and sexually experienced) girl. In INDIGNATION, Philip Roth switches from a contemplation of old age and impotence as in EXIT GHOST (2007) and returns to the themes of youthful angst and sexual craving that marked early work like PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT (1969) and GOODBYE, COLUMBUS (1959). Selected by the New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 2008.
| Praise| "The book has a taut, elegant symmetry..." (starred review) 06/01/2008 "Of all Roth's recent novels, [INDIGNATION] 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....[Roth's] power and intensity seem undiminished." - David Gates 09/21/2008 |
| Author Bio| Philip Roth | | Philip Roth is the son of an insurance manager (Milton Roth, whose life is described in his son's book PATRIMONY) from Newark, New Jersey. He grew up in Newark and earned both critical praise and popular success for his first book, GOODBYE, COLUMBUS, a novella and collection of short stories published in 1959. Roth has published a number of novels since then as well as an autobiography. He has been one of the leading American novelists of the late 20th century, and many of his novels have caused controversy for their unvarnished, often satirical depictions of Jewish Americans, neurosis, sexual obsession, and the writing life. |
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