'Indignation' revives old plot

"INDIGNATION," by Philip Roth, Houghton Mifflin, 256 pages, $26

If you are at all familiar with any of Philip Roth's previous 28 books, you won't be surprised by his 29th, "Indignation."

It's about a young man with overbearing parents growing up in the Jewish section of Newark, N.J. He dashes off to college in Ohio, where he learns about sex and frustration, repressive social norms and his own insistent, sexual desire.

We have been here before with Roth, most notably in his first book, "Goodbye, Columbus" in 1959, and again in the scandalous "Portnoy's Complaint" in 1969.

But returning to Newark and the well-worn themes of his early work doesn't suggest repetition or an exhausted imagination. It's a sign that Roth knows he has found his best material, the subjects that allow him to ask the most important questions about sex and dying and being human. (Other great writers have spent entire careers on a single subject, right? And nobody complains that Jane Austen wrote too many books about marriage among the landed gentry.)

Roth's earlier books were written in the moment, as it were, of the sexual revolution. But "Indignation" comes to us as historical fiction. It recreates a time in American history, 1951, that's hard to imagine now, when college students were mostly celibate and required to attend chapel, men were not allowed in the women's dorm and college administrators acted like strict parents.

The main character, Marcus Messner, worries legitimately that if he is caught having sex, he could be expelled from college, face the military draft and be sent to Korea, where he could die in the trenches of a far-off war. "It's about life," says his worried father, "where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences."

"Indignation" begins with vivid scenes of Marcus working in his father's kosher butcher shop in Newark, cutting up steaks, grinding meat, gutting chickens and mopping up blood. It's a brief, well-crafted moment, but the images of knives, blood and death infuse the rest of the book.

Marcus runs off to college because his father has become obsessively worried that his son will do something stupid and get himself killed. It's ludicrous to Marcus because thus far he has been nothing but "a prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student."

But he never fits in at conservative Winesburg College. He buys the buckskin shoes and the tweed jacket, but he hates the "constricting rectitude" of the place. He's constantly befuddled by his starchy professors, his annoying roommates and the self-righteous dean of students.