Because Philip Roth is one of our country’s most important living writers, any new work by him must be regarded with serious attention and consideration. Just over the course of the last 11 years alone, Roth has taken on the American vision in a trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain); reflected the underside of our national consciousness in the counterfactual novel The Plot Against America, and addressed the realities of aging in its most unromantic manifestations — both in Everyman and in the final installment of his Zuckerman series, Exit Ghost.

So where does that leave us with Roth’s latest, Indignation? Back to a place early admirers of Roth will recognize — the college campus.

Set during the Korean War, the novel follows Marcus Messner, a young New Jersey college student. Inexplicable fear has overtaken his father, a kosher butcher, manifesting itself in the ever-present belief that something terrible is bound to happen to his only child. Burdened by his father’s anxiety and over-protectiveness, Marcus transfers to the genteel Winesburg College in rural Ohio.

At Winesburg, Marcus struggles to fit in, both as a Jew and as a burgeoning progressive intellect. With every innocent detour he takes from Winesburg’s de rigueur traditions, he’s cast as a troublemaker in the eyes of college administrators and fellow students — or, at the very least, as someone who has no regard for institutional conventions. Marcus is proud, and believes he is being misrepresented. As he defends his positions through logic and reason, he only further reinforces his reputation as a heretic.

Beneath this larger picture is a young woman whom Marcus becomes involved with, furthering the domino effects of misunderstandings. All of this serves to underscore Marcus’ ongoing moral dilemma: be true to himself and risk expulsion (thus having to go to war in Korea), or abandon his individuality and Jewish upbringing in order to conform to the waning middle-American Winseburg traditions.

Perhaps as a reply to our current national narrative, Indignation shows individuals contemplating every decision based on the fear they have been sold. For some, such as Marcus’ father, the idea of fear is paralysis; while for Marcus, the very concept of fear is something to try to escape. But more pointedly, in Indignation, fear becomes an object, something by which people define and shape their lives; and, as seen throughout the novel, the tragedy is that fear can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the characters slowly begin to inhabit the very things they are most afraid of.

Abraver@verizon.net