The title of Philip Roth’s novella Indignation is taken from China’s national anthem — “Indignation fills the hearts of all of our countrymen,” in one translation. They are words muttered by Roth’s Jewish-born hero to distract himself from the Christian hymns and sermons as he attends compulsory chapel services in a Midwestern university in 1952. He’s no communist, however, and one of his reasons for study is to ensure that at least he’s an officer when he’s drafted into the Korean War on graduation, and possibly avoid the draft altogether. He fails in both aims, is killed by a Chinese bayonet in that war, and the story (though we only learn this a third of the way through the book) is told by his ghost.
He fails, and dies, because he refuses to conform, and thereby confirms his half-crazed father’s warning that in this life the greatest results can come from the smallest causes. Cause and effect is an idea running around in Roth’s consciousness, you feel, and in the confrontation between the young student and his college’s dean of men, which is the book’s centerpiece, the boy quotes Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian on causes in general. Russell had argued that the religious believe that everything in the universe has a cause except God, who is the First Cause. But if the possibility of a causeless entity is accepted, why shouldn’t that entity be the universe itself? Roth’s hero may have been born Jewish, but by conviction he’s a confirmed atheist.
This all sounds rather intellectual, but this isn’t an intellectual book. Indeed, the dominant impressions it leaves are of rather elementary male teenage sex with a first girlfriend and anguish over the pros and cons of being Jewish, neither by any means new concerns for this author. Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint may have been published more than 40 years ago, but some things, it seems, haven’t changed.
In a nutshell, the middle-American values of conformity, Christian observance and sporting excellence are set against one man’s determination to tell the truth as he sees it, get some sexual experience before he dies, and study hard so as to continue the sequence of straight A’s he’s maintained since childhood. Tradition gets the better of him, however, and he pays the ultimate price. Seen like this, Roth’s fable appears disarmingly simple.
Of course, it isn’t simple really. There’s the boy’s relation with his parents, to begin with — confused and potentially emasculating in a way that, for Roth, is par for the course. Father is a kosher butcher, and the boy’s experience of drawing the innards out of chickens becomes the would-be model for life — there are some things that you don’t like doing, but which have to be done nevertheless. His mother, who visits him in the Midwest after an appendectomy, is — deliberately, you feel — made tall and unfeminine, to form a contrast with the boy’s nubile girlfriend, all the more maddening to him for being in a similar relationship with half the college and having tried to cut her wrists during a bout of depression. It’s emblematic of the opposing forces playing on him that his mother promises to stay with her problematic husband only on condition the boy abandons the only sexual playmate he has ever known.
As an evocation of the 1950s, as well of downtown Newark, New Jersey (Roth’s own birthplace) and a Midwestern education (Roth too attended college in that neck of the woods), this short book reads well enough, and indeed the central confrontation with the quietly anti-Semitic dean of men is very memorable. Nonetheless, the book has its shortcomings. A culminating “White Panty Raid” on the girls’ dormitories by the college hearties during a blizzard is gratuitous to say the least, and one wonders quite what fantasies it’s meant to stand for. Is Roth an intellectual who feels he must include these things to ensure a mass readership, or does he have deeper interests and symbolisms in mind? It’s hard indeed to know with this readable, annoying, yet in the final analysis not interestingly problematic book.
What does come to mind, though, is an old observation by the English critic John Bayley to the effect that while Europe’s literary strength lies in imagination, America’s lies in the incisive reporting of reality. As such, a book that has impressed me far more than Roth’s this week is Pulitzer Prize-winning Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains (Random House, 2003), now out again in a new paperback edition. It’s an account of time spent, mostly in Haiti, but also in Peru and Russia, with Paul Farmer, a doctor dedicated to helping their long-suffering populations. A book like this — hard-hitting, scrupulous, vivid, and as meticulous as it’s passionate — makes Roth’s symbolic fantasy, well-crafted though it is, appear adolescent and even irresponsible by contrast.
Great art can contribute to curing the world’s ills, if only through giving us an expanded vision of ourselves and our possibilities. Roth rarely aspires to that function, though. The fact that he’s currently considered, even by that most humane of critics, Harold Bloom, to be one of the US’ four greatest living novelists, makes you wonder about the state of the American novel in general. By contrast, Kidder’s narrative of an attempt to bring health care to the poorest of the poor is positively heroic in its dimensions. Human aspiration doesn’t come more elevated, and it’s immensely consoling to know that it is matched by very considerable achievements, notably in the fields of multi-drug-resistant TB and AIDS. The greatness is not so much in the writing itself, though that’s thorough and everywhere strongly committed, but in the sheer magnificence of its theme.
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