Philip Roth's Righteous Indignation

Standing over her father's casket after the slow but steady unraveling of his wits and body towards death, the daughter of the anonymous hero of Philip Roth's 2006 novel Everyman quotes her father's code for surviving the cruelty and isolation of his spiritless world: "There's no remaking reality," he would say. "Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There's no other way." Separated from Everyman by 2007's Exit Ghost, Roth's newest novel Indignation grapples with the results of its hero's almost identical pragmatic code within a swirl of indiscriminant events in an equally random world.

It is the early 1950s and kosher butcher's son Marc Messner escapes the oppressive worries and smallness of his Newark, New Jersey family life for the bucolic but equally oppressive Winesburg College in quaint Winesburg, Ohio. There he tests a worldy wisdom - in words that Everyman himself might have uttered - learned eviscerating chickens at the back of the family store:

That's what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.

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Jennifer Zackin
Messner begins his career at Winesburg (a fictional stand-in for Oberlin or Kenyon College) girded by an immigrant-style steely will to "do what you have to do" in order to rise up the Jacob's ladder of the American Dream. He is determined both to study hard in order to become a lawyer and to stay out of trouble in order to avoid the draft the Korean War requires for non-matriculated young men his age. But within weeks of starting school, the foreignness and expectations of Messner's new surroundings thrust him into a rapid, fateful fall. Navigating the hypocrisy of Winesburg's sanctimonious WASP social system fractures his resolve to be a good boy, and in the moments before puking on Dean Cauldwell's shoes, desk, and trophies, Messner girds himself for a precocious change of course: "I inwardly sang out the most beautiful word on the English language: ‘In-dig-na-tion!'"

Once Marc Messner spews in every direction in front of the alumnus esteemed for his "drop kicks for Christ," his life is flung in a very similar direction. Indignation trumps the expected "do what you have to do" of getting the right grades and the right girl and the right job. Though the girl he gets is more than ready to give him everything he ever wanted, she is also suicidal, alcoholic, and pregnant. His job in an off-campus bar (where upperclassmen shout "Hey Jew" as he buses tables past midnight) along with his straight A's end abruptly when he is called to take up arms for Uncle Sam in Korea. Despite the danger Messner knows his indignation is certain to cause him, being indignant emerges as the epitome of "do what you have to do" - a son's inevitable interpretation of a father's immigrant creed.

Even with his sexual transgressions and personal failures - typical foibles in the heroes and anti-heroes (as if there is a difference) of the world of Roth - the hero of Everyman travels the well ruled road of an upper middle class career and family into oblivion. That is what he has to do. Marc Messner deigns to pull up such shoots long before they can grow.

The timing of the release of Indignation is compelling. In an election season once again pitting red state insecurities embodied by the morals of Winesburg, Ohio versus the erratic complexities of the Newark blues,  amidst a war without a convincing rational explanation echoing circumstances not unlike the Korean conflict Marc Messner dreads, Philip Roth continues punching out novels that nail today's America to the wall for its hypocrisy and missed opportunities. Indignation adds another link in a heavy rattling chain of parables for a nation imbedded in the imagined tale of single families' tragedy.

Winesburgs are Red, Newarks are Blue

In the early nineties, Philip Roth took a stroll with a reporter from the New York Times through his old neighborhood in Newark, the alternately gritty, vibrant, and decimated setting for so much of his fiction. While Roth dwells most often on the phenomena of the Jewish neighborhoods of his youth, in Indignation and elsewhere he notes the thick ethnic mix of which Jews were a part - Italian and Irish, Latino and Black: "They had a particular task, an American task, and a particular cultural burden," Roth reflected as walked with the Times:

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Newark is the battleground, one of many cities in this country, on which the struggle took place. The job they had was to stand between the European family of their immigrant parents and the American realities of their young children. They were a generation of negotiators, of constructors, with the tenacious, stubborn will of the constructor...The cultural struggle was bruising. The homes were full of conflict and tension; when you negotiate, there's always tension. And it created a lot of neurosis, too.

The Newark experience Roth describes - shifting ethnic dominances of ambition and risk, cycles of communities and communal structures setting out for the higher ground of the inner suburbs, and an abiding nostalgia for the old neighborhood despite leaving it behind - is indeed a narrative arc common to most American cities. Names and colors of skin blend and change along with allegiances to unions, industries, and religions.

Considering the most general but still telling of contemporary distinctions, these urban centers mark the ‘blue' of the so-called blue states - concentrated on the coasts, ethnically and culturally diverse beyond previous generations of American norms, conflicted about what their community means and what it might or might not become.

As a restless blues traveler coming of age amidst the honest to goodness Red Scare of the McCarthy era, Marc Messner dreams of escaping the claustrophobia of his family and neighborhood, choosing idyllic, cheery Winesburg, symbolic in its way of the great battle ground state of recent electoral chaos and a hell of a lot of still-unaccounted-for votes for John Kerry in 2004 - Ohio. He enters a conservative, church-going, white bread community of rules and traditions in which "[t}here was no face deriving from the Orient to be seen anywhere except for this colored kid and a few dozen more..." Jews and other malcontents on campus pay proxies to attend mandatory sessions of moral exhortation in chapel on their behalf and hope not to be caught; and as his fantasy of turning blue to red (or at least purple) for a spell fades to another color altogether, Marc longs to return to the Land of Pearlgreens and Spinellis, where his heart and intellect make sense.

Writing of Winesburg, Roth undoubtedly alludes to Sherwood Anderson's 1919 web of short stories Winesburg, Ohio. Roth speaks often of returning to the works that most influenced him in his own writerly youth. One can imagine him taking Winesburg, Ohio off the bookshelf while dreaming up Indignation, returning to Anderson's grotesque, often tragic portraits of small town life and the marked gap of urban and rural realms concretized by modern industry. The narrator of Winesburg, Ohio redacts tales of the frustrated voices of the town, a role that Roth - most often in the guise of his fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman who seems to have finally found his end in Exit Ghost - uses to take city and country, and academy and industry, to task.

Roth's portrait of Winesburg reveals of a mix of religious posturing, pent-up desire grown destructive, and political corruption, though the community is perhaps no more flawed than the motley, neurotic crew slugging it out back in Newark. Yet in the patriotic speeches, anti-intellectualism, and a reliance on either unquestioning belief or apathy before their public, Roth's portrait of the leaders of Winesburg refracts Anderson's critique of provincialism, echoes of the McCarthy era, and, most disturbingly, the red stars who have shined their light through eight years of the most disastrous executive leadership in the history of the United States.

Even more than being an indictment of the dizzying moral shenanigans of the reds and the discomfort of blues in their own skin, Indignation protests the circumstances that lead Americans of every color to accept the fog of war rather than looking squarely into the causes of a massive crisis of national meaning. And as troubling as it is to enter the fictional depiction of the cost of war and hypocrisy Roth relates, it is refreshing to witness a veteran, master writer still angry at the world, and energized and disciplined and brave enough to name it.

Stephen Hazan Arnoff's essay on Philip Roth's Everyman was awarded the 2006 Rockower Jewish Press Award for Arts & Criticism. He is Executive Director of the 14^th Street Y of The Educational Alliance in New York City.

All images by Jennifer Zackin.