Indignation

Praise for
Indignation

“A gratifying novel …
Indignation
is, unquestionably, seriously ‘good’ Roth.”

—Meg Wolitzer,
The Times

“[Roth] still towers above just about every living English-language author.”

—
Toronto Star

“Roth’s secret … is his supreme confidence as a story-teller—and paradoxically, a supreme humility … Of all Roth’s recent novels, it ventures farthest into the unknowable. In his unshowy way, with all his quotidian specificity and merciless skepticism, Roth is attempting to storm heaven—an endeavor all the more desperately daring because he seems dead certain it’s not there.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“We can see again his shocking ability to bring history to bear on the present. As always, the prose is well built—sinewy and graceful—and, as always, the wit is as sharp as a German knife. There are simply no novels by Roth in which you cannot detect the hand of a master.”

—
O, The Oprah Magazine

“The implacable face of history … broods menacingly over everything else.”

—
The Globe and Mail

“Seethes with outrage … A deft, gripping, and deeply moving narrative.”

—
The New York Review of Books

“A fine taut narrative about the frustrations of youth … [A] potent blend of sharp-eyed nostalgia, biting cogency and engrossing social, psychological and moral complexity … As grippingly streamlined as Greek drama, Roth’s mid-20th-century tale of nemesis transmits it again, brilliantly renewed with all the intellectual and imaginative force of a great novelist writing at the height of his powers.”

—
The Sunday Times
(UK)

“Roth’s ferocious little tale ought to be handed out on college campuses … Here’s a novel to be witnessed as an explosion from an author still angry enough to burn with adolescent rage and wise enough to understand how self-destructive that rage can be.”

—
The Washington Post

“The interplay between a life just begun and ended, impulse and reflection, college high jinks and eternity is what makes it resonate. Four stars.”

—
People

“[
Indignation
] reads, in short, like Roth making a quick star turn with many of the elements we have come to expect from him over the years.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“It is Roth’s virtuoso skill to couple Marcus’s companionable pleasure in part-time butchering with his nightmare that the knives he wields so dexterously will be used on himself … [Roth’s reasons] are at once insane, plausible, and disastrous.”

—
The Boston Globe

“Demands to be read in one sitting. It’s that good. It’s that audacious. It’s that compelling …
Indignation
is impossible to put down until it’s finished. Then, it’s impossible to shake off the aftermath of this mesmerizing story.”

—
The Seattle Times

“A magnificent display of writerly talent: a lean, powerful novel with bold characters who command attention; scenes of impressive dramatic intensity and comic vitality; language that blasts the reader’s cozy complacency (it’s not called
Indignation
for nothing); and a theme that swells imperceptibly from a murmur to a satisfying roar.”

—
The New York Observer

“Roth’s prose is brilliantly engaging, the narrative engrossing and the limning of the characters masterful … Indignation provides breathless, eye-opening reading. It is a vital burlesque of youth and the waste of war … it is among the finest writing about post-World War II America.”

—
Canadian Jewish News

“Roth makes everything snap together, almost like a great short story. The brief final section—just a few pages long— masterfully sews together all the images and themes of the book … In
Indignation
Roth has reached back to Newark to breathe new life into all the old obsessions.”

—
The Daily Gleaner

“Roth, blending the bawdy exuberance of his early period and the disenchantment of his recent work, demonstrates with subtle mastery the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.”

—
The New Yorker

“Blistering … [Roth] is a master … The shocking rush from this book comes from watching Roth expertly and quickly build up to a half-dozen final pages that absolutely deliver the kill.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“This is a Philip Roth novel and a morbid, ironic surprise or two should be expected. It does not spoil the crisp dialogue, the rush of emotion, the assured storytelling.”

—
Winnipeg Free Press

“Intricately wrought, passionate and fascinating … [A] masterpiece.”

—
Financial Times

“A relevant and well-judged consideration of how national orthodoxy can have dire personal implications (particularly at a time of war) …
Indignation
is, among its many pleasures, a controlled expression of wrath.”

—
The Telegraph

“A superbly realised novel, which begins with the lighthearted tone of a coming-of-age tale, before unleashing a devastating narrative about dying and the pain of being forever separated from those you love.”

—
The Spectator
(UK)

“Beneath the engines of his rage, Roth cannot suppress his fierce love for the innocent—for Marcus on his road to destruction … for America itself, still innocent enough to dream of a better tomorrow.
Indignation
ought to be required reading for presidential candidates.”

—
Evening Standard

PENGUIN CANADA

INDIGNATION

In 1997
PHILIP ROTH
won the Pulitzer Prize for
American Pastoral
. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005
The Plot Against America
received the Society of American Historians’ Award for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.”

Recently Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award “for a body of work … of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship” and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career … places him or her in the highest rank of American literature.”

Roth is the only living writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.

BOOKS BY PHILIP ROTH

ZUCKERMAN BOOKS

The Ghost Writer

Zuckerman Unbound

The Anatomy Lesson

The Prague Orgy

The Counterlife

American Pastoral

I Married a Communist

The Human Stain

Exit Ghost

ROTH BOOKS

The Facts • Deception

Patrimony • Operation Shylock

The Plot Against America

KEPESH BOOKS

The Breast

The Professor of Desire

The Dying Animal

MISCELLANY

Reading Myself and Others Shop Talk

OTHER BOOKS

Goodbye, Columbus • Letting Go

When She Was Good • Portnoy’s Complaint • Our Gang

The Great American Novel • My Life as a Man

Sabbath’s Theater • Everyman

Indignation

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

(a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2008

First published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South,

New York, New York 10003, 2008

Published in this edition, 2009

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright © Philip Roth, 2008

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

Book design by Robert Overholtzer

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Roth, Philip

Indignation / Philip Roth.

ISBN 978-0-14-317042-6

I. Title.

PS3568.O855I33 2009 813’.54 C2009-903819-6

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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For K. W.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Chinese national anthem appears here in a World War Two translation of a song composed by Tian Han and Nieh Erh after the Japanese invasion of 1931; there are other translations of the song extant. During World War Two it was sung around the world by those allied with China in their struggle against the Empire of Japan. In 1949 it was adopted as the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China.