by Philip Roth (Jonathan Cape, £16.99)
Halfway through Philip Roth's new novel, Marcus Messner, a good Jewish boy from Newark, tries on a new suit. He wants to move from his local college, which is too near his possessive, adoring parents, to Winesburg, Ohio. He didn't need any special clothes for college in Newark. However, going out into the other America—Christian, respectable, 1950s America—he needs a new outfit: "I pulled off everything I had on and dropped it at my feet like a pile of rags. I put on the new clothes… The clothes I'd bought to be a new man in and to end my being the butcher's son."
It is a familiar moment in Roth. Like Ira Ringold in I Married a Communist and Coleman Silk in The Human Stain, Marcus is trying to reinvent himself. Like Portnoy and Zuckerman, he finds Jewish Newark too confining and needs to break away. And like all of these characters, Marcus will find reinvention and moving into the other America a more difficult, even catastrophic, move than he thought when he stood alone, naked, in his parents' home.
Yet there's something strange about the way this move is handled in Indignation. It reads like early Roth, from the late 1950s and early 1960s: like something out of his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), with its college blues, masturbation and young Jewish outsider who can't fit into 1950s conformist America. Gone are the old men of late Roth, with their prostate operations and battles against old age, decline and death. These differences, however, are superficial. The real change is in the writing and the way Roth deals with America.
In early Roth—from Goodbye, Columbus to Portnoy's Complaint— the question of America was framed around the question of Jews, and in particular of Jewish assimilation. America in his early fiction is that which is not Jewish, a monolithic world beyond Newark. It drives his young characters crazy. They rage against its sexual and social conformism. For many readers, it was just too crazy, too full of anger and sex; crucially, it was also too narrow, too Jewish.
Roth's writing changed in the late 1970s and 1980s. From The Ghost Writer to The Counterlife, he tried to find a different voice. Still Jewish, but more universal, more literary—and more European. Some readers still worried: were these novels too bookish, too clever, with their games about narrators and counterfactual history? Reading Roth criticism from the 1980s, you can see how puzzled critics were. They didn't really know what to make of him.
Then came Roth's great breakthrough, his American turn. Jewish, like the early books, but not too Jewish. Clever and bookish, certainly. All those references to Hawthorne in The Human Stain, those smart games with narrative; playing with time, but not too obscure. Four big American novels in five years—Sabbath's Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), The Human Stain (2000)—consolidated Roth's reputation as America's laureate, the greatest living American writer, perhaps the greatest modern American novelist.
A crucial image is the American flag. Mickey, in Sabbath's Theater, wrapped in his dead brother's flag. There, down by the sea, he "wrapped himself in it, and, in the mist there, wept and wept." In American Pastoral, the flag flies over the rural post office that Merry will blow up. And there it is, at the beginning of The Human Stain, flying over another small post office, a warning sign. The flag becomes a symbol not of hope and innocence but of loss and danger, and of Roth's great new innovation: the counter-pastoral, "the indigenous American berserk."
In these novels, Roth found a way of telling individual stories of flight and attempts at reinvention against a larger story—that of the American Fall. He did this, in part, by creating a mythical paradise and an elegiac voice to describe it. Unlike Saul Bellow's evocations of the past—his recollections of the family, the neighbourhood, the old country—in Roth this process is always very specific. Always the same neighbourhood, the same families, the same moment in history. The neighbourhood is Weequahic in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1940s. The families are hardworking, working-class Jewish families living tidy, law-abiding lives. And in the background is the "good war," the second world war, and the GI Bill, which gives men like Coleman Silk their chances in postwar America.
Then comes the Fall. The neighbourhood disappears. Newark is burned down by race riots, abandoned by the Jews. America changes: McCarthyism, Vietnam, Watergate. Even in the most beautiful small town, there is a teenager with a bomb, or a racist Vietnam vet with a car full of guns. This is where Roth struck a chord with contemporary American readers. He created a world where disaster could strike at any moment. A chance remark ("spooks") could ruin your career. Knowing the wrong person could cost you a scholarship. Illness could make you incontinent and impotent. And when disaster came, out of the blue, it destroyed you. Goodness was no defence. Working hard made no difference. Being smart couldn't protect you. All the values from 1940s Newark meant nothing.
This idea of terrible contingency, combined with a larger political sense of fragility, spoke to late 20th century America. Liberalism, goodness and reason could not hold. The homogeneous America that Roth's characters couldn't fit into in Goodbye, Columbus had gone. As Ian McEwan has become in Britain, Roth was the chronicler of a new, dark, frightening world. All this is told by Roth's greatest invention, Nathan Zuckerman: his body wrecked by prostate cancer, ageing, fleeing entanglements with the world, finding refuge in a small town in the Berkshires, and then, even there, catastrophe. There is nowhere to escape to. That is a terrible lesson for novels which are largely about flight.
Having found this new voice, this great narrator and a subject which spoke to the larger culture, Roth tried something new—again. Roth's career has always been about experimenting and changing. Like his heroes, he is restless and bent on self-invention. The contrast with Bellow is again interesting. Bellow's critics would say that he settled. Having found a voice that worked, he stuck with it and became formulaic (except in his late, great short stories). Roth kept experimenting, moving on, trying new combinations of characters and themes. All the time, he is tuning and looking for a new balance, partly because he's drawn to subjects—anger, compulsive sex, eruptions of verbal and physical violence—which threaten to overwhelm his writing. Perhaps that's why Zuckerman is such an austere and restrained figure, always proceeding by indirection.
This constant experimentation may also explain why Roth's work is so uneven, more than any other great American writer. So many bad novels. So many weak characters (especially the women and the grotesque children). So much reliance on melodrama (deaths, revelations, scandals). The endless sentences. Critics write as if these are seamless masterpieces. They're not. The novels are drawn to mess and disorder. There is a struggle going on, and when it works you get some of the great set-pieces in modern fiction. The high school reunion in American Pastoral, the Vietnam vets in the Chinese restaurant in The Human Stain, the scene in the Jewish cemetery in Sabbath's Theater.
Since 2006, Roth has written three short novels: Everyman, Exit Ghost and now Indignation. In the first two, he moved closer to subjects which were always there in the great novels: old age, illness and death. The style became sparer, more austere. In Indignation he changes again. He tries a young narrator, goes back to the 1950s. It's a dramatic shift and, once again, there's Big History in the background, this time the Korean war. It's powerfully evoked. But it is a long way from the visceral writing about Vietnam in American Pastoral or The Human Stain. There is something curiously flat about the prose and characters, a lack of drama. Crucially, Roth's America no longer works as a subject; and because Indignation, except for a brief epilogue, is set in the 1950s, there is none of that powerful contrast between the elegiac 1940s and the fallen present of his best writing.
You can't compare Indignation, a readable but slight work, with the greater novels. Roth has reinvented himself over and over again, changing his notion of writing and of America. In the process, he found a voice that caught something big that was changing in our culture at the turn of the century: a darkening mood, a sense of fragility. And he told it straight, without blinking or relying on false pieties and consolations. Sadly, it looks as if we may not hear that voice again.
