Philip Roth's Indignation and the Question of Literary Art

A question of Philip Roth and the art of the literary novel:
What does a novel have to do to be "literary"? What makes a book more than just a story?

Is there a formal element that needs to be in place or criteria that we can apply to determine how to categorize a novel?

The most likely answer is that there is no single set of criteria and no simple formal device that will serve to categorize a book as "literary".

Certain writers, however, are clearly literary voices. Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, James Joyce - these are writers with a deep investment in the poetry of language, the importance of ideas, and who demonstrate a fundamental loyalty to theme in their work.

Other writers are not as easy to classify as literary. Philip Roth is a very well known writer who has been placed, historically, in the literary category.

His style is not one marked by dedication to metaphor or the poetry of language, per se. Instead, he writes with what can be called a "counter aesthetic", often choosing prurient subject matter and writing with great verve and attitude but not about ideas as such.

This leaves a question the question of theme. Does Roth display a loyalty to theme? Is he writing to make a statement that is greater than his story? Is he producing art?

Taking a look at his 2008 novel Indignation, I hope to answer this question, or at least approach an answer.

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In a retrospective narrative, Roth presents the story of a man virtually martyred by his obscurely understood convictions. A young Jewish man from Newark in 1951 leaves his family home to get away from a father who has grown crazed with worry about his son's future and who cannot help badgering and harassing his son.

The young man, Marcus, in his determination to break out of the working class and to escape his father's neurotic harassment, enrolls in a small liberal arts college in Winesburg, Ohio. There he meets a young woman who surprises and confuses him.

Marcus, for the most part, is a bouncing ball of surprise and confusion.

Indignation is a novel rife with confused characters. In the world of Indignation, fear of the unknown goes hand in hand with nervous, emotional confusion. Marcus is just as afraid of the possibility of getting drafted to fight in the Korean War as his father is afraid that Marcus will make a small mistake, any mistake, which will ruin his ever-so bright future.

All these fears are borne out over the course of the novel and fear is, ultimately, the force that drives the action of the book.

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(Spoiler alert: This section unveils secret plot points and surprising narrative tools.)

Roth's style in Indignation allows for a comparison to Saul Bellow's retrospective style. In all of his major works, Saul Bellow utilized a format that set the protagonist at the end of his personal history, looking back over the actions, the twists and turns, the mistakes and the people who brought him to that end.

Here, Roth sets his narrator in a similar position - with an odd and questionable choice. Roth's narrator-protagonist Marcus speaks from the afterlife.

Marcus is dead.

A short section in the middle of the book explores the blandness of the void from which Marcus looks back over his life and the events that lead him to his death.

This is something Bellow never tried.

To use Bellow further as a point of comparison, we can see a fundamental difference between the two writers in their attitude concerning humanity.

Where Bellow clearly sees the weaknesses of the people in his stories, he ultimately emphasizes his own sense of compassion. Saul Bellow, as a narrator at least, believed that people were good at bottom and deserved to be loved - and pitied.

Philip Roth chooses to focus on the fears that make people pitiful and the insecurities that keep us from being good people.

In Indignation, there is a single principle character who begins to gather the strength to accept other people's flaws and to love despite those flaws, overcoming her own insecurities and fears and confusions.

Then she goes crazy.

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Roth may draw a focus on the prurient and on the behaviors that stem from weakness, but he is a talented writer who is tenaciously loyal to his themes.

Of course this ends up being a little depressing when those themes consist mainly of how people fail to achieve any high moral stature due to their inability to cope with the unknown, but, then again, who says good books have to be light-hearted.

It should be mentioned here that Philip Roth is funny too. His skill as a writer lies in part with his wit and his patient repetition of certain details that, when plucked out of an initial context and set down again in a new one, become sharp and funny insights into the way that we talk to each other.

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As a quick read, Indignation is a worthwhile novel, formally wooden at points (it slips into lectures that read like theatrical monologues which would be fine on stage but in the novel serve to break the natural stylistic flow) but largely entertaining and illuminating.

In the character of Marcus we are given a person who is too often confused to extend any sympathy to others. He is not too shallow for compassion, necessarily. He is just too busily nervous.

An ambitious ideologue and atheist, Marcus is challenged to read through the foibles of his family and his girlfriend to discover a shared, sensitive heart. He almost finds it.

Bridging the gap, finally, proves impossible. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the story is essentially cut off at one point. The action just...kind of...stops...and Marcus doesn't reach the logical end of his growth.

This abruption is characteristic of the novel stylistically as well. For the first two thirds of the book, the action and dialogue are presented fluidly in a loosely comic-stream-of-consciousness format. A section about the narrator's whereabouts in the afterlife sets up the terminal third of the novel by breaking away from the stream-of-consciousness into a form defined by numerous monologues and a more traditional dialogue format.

Metaphorically, this concatenation of styles follows the path of the narrator who presents us with the novel's central dilemma.

Marcus is brought to a point of indignation when he is asked to set his intense convictions aside. He is asked to live at a lower pitch so that he can get along. He is asked to be two things at once.

This kind of compromise is unacceptable.

As Marcus recites a Chinese war song from World War II in his head, he stands up to all those who would blunt his intensity with some punchy and pointed profanity.

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The final question of the novel, if I may hazard to identify one here, is this: What happens to a person locked in a confused world who cannot tolerate confusion, who would like to accept the unknown, conceptually, but cannot accept it personally?

The nature of this question is certainly literary. Because the question is self-reflexive and conjectural, we can also say that it is artistic. It is a question of art because, in posing it, Roth moves to deepen our sense of what it means to be human, in all the smallness and struggle humanity implies.

Perhaps it will be in another book that Roth takes up the same question and uses it to lead us to the more expansive, generous implications of our humanity. But, here, in Indignation, Roth earns his position as a creator of art, imperfect though it may be (like nearly every novel, of course) and defends his reputation as a literary writer.

Resources & More on Philip Roth:
http://www.slate.com/id/2199978
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/sep/16/entertainment/et-rutten16