One OF THE ways to recognize truly great writers is that even their mistakes engage us.
Philip Roth is our greatest living novelist, and his new book, "Indignation," is an irritating, puzzling and fascinating bundle of mistakes, miscalculations and self-indulgences. (This being Roth in a slightly retrospective humor, there's also a great deal of what used to be called self-abuse, actual and symbolic, but that's another story.)
Readers familiar with Roth's 28 previous books will recognize familiar territory, characters and preoccupations in "Indignation." The year is 1951, and Marcus Messner is the brilliant but overprotected son of lower-middle-class Jewish parents in Newark, N.J. -- in this case, a second-generation kosher butcher and his wife. Marcus makes straight A's at the local college, helps out in the store and, increasingly, chafes at a father whose overwhelming preoccupation with his gifted only child's welfare and physical safety seems to be moving from the merely obsessive to the genuinely pathological.
Marcus, suffocating from his father's emotional terror over the fragility and capriciousness of life, resolves to escape by transferring to a small Midwestern institution, Winesburg College in Ohio. (The literary allusion is intentional, but it's hard to know what Roth intends by it, since Sherwood Anderson's fictive city was a place of unexpected virtues; Messner's is the outer circle of hell.)
Marcus has chosen his new school based on its sunny catalog; he even buys clothes that mimic those of the models in the brochure. What he finds there is unexpected -- Gentile, insufficiently appreciative of his striving and, worst of all, pious in that most goyische of ways, mandatory chapel too.
Fresh from the protective bosom of his tight-knit -- OK, claustrophobic -- Jewish family, he finds it impossible to fit in. He shatters the phonograph record, a Beethoven quartet, of one roommate who insists on playing music through the night, ends up in a fistfight with another roomie whose Protestant silences Marcus can't bear. He works weekends in the local inn's taproom, enduring imagined anti-Semitic insults and prissily disdaining the tobacco and beer others might find convivial because he neither smokes nor drinks alcohol.
