Indignation

Locations
Call Number: Fiction
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf

What impact can American history have on the life of the vulnerable individual? 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.--From publisher's description.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Bad submitted by lawrencekl57 on August 30, 2016, 8:13pm I checked out this book because I loved the movie and remember enjoying Philip Roth's work when I was in high school. But I can't read books where paragraphs go on for multiple pages. In fairness, I only read about ten pages.

Four Stars submitted by MH17 on June 29, 2017, 8:26pm This is an engrossing coming-of-age story set in a small Midwestern college during the 1950s, amid the backdrop of the Korean War. Roth takes some risks with point of view, which kept me reading, and I enjoyed the shift and distancing moves he makes to broaden the context late in the novel. The novel offers some wonderful insights on masculinity, being an outsider, mental illness and work. Here's one of my favorite lines: "Work--certain people yearn for work, any work, harsh or unsavory as it may be, to drain the harshness from their lives and drive from their minds the killing thoughts." Four out of five stars.