Roth, particularly in his novels of the 1980s and early 1990s, devoted a great deal of energy to the vexed question of what it means to be this ‘kind of person’. Much of the comic brio of his writing from this period derives from its portrayal of the frustrations of an author caught between the conflicting demands of life and art. A certain ruthlessness is required to treat all of one’s experiences as potential material – as Zuckerman in The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and the fictional Philip Roth in Deception (1990) both claim to do – and throughout the first Zuckerman trilogy this exploitative stance toward life gives rise to a feedback loop, in which appropriating and imaginatively transforming reality provokes antagonism, often due to confusion between the fiction and the life of its author, which is in turn fed back into the creative process.

As a direct consequence of his writing, Zuckerman is drawn into an escalating series of affronts to common decency. Stung by the suggestion that his fiction is anti-Semitic, his thoughts tumble into a fantasy that Amy Bellette, the attractive young woman he meets at the beginning of The Ghost Writer, is in fact Anne Frank – that precocious literary talent and symbol of Jewish victimhood – and he imagines he might marry her for the cheekily self-serving reason that this would blunt the accusations against him. In the next book in the series, Zuckerman Unbound (1981), Zuckerman – unchastened, clearly – outrages the entire nation with an obscene best-selling novel, Carnovsky, whose title indicates its affinity with Roth’s famously ribald Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) – the Latin carnis, meaning ‘flesh’, being the etymological root of both ‘carnal’ and ‘carnival’. Zuckerman spends much of the novel dealing with the consequences of his invention. Carnovsky is routinely assumed to be a work of erotic autobiography. His brother refuses to forgive what he regards as the book’s wicked caricature of their mother. His father, with his dying breath, calls him a ‘bastard’.

By the third Zuckerman novel, The Anatomy Lesson, Roth’s embattled protagonist has had enough. He contemplates giving up writing altogether. Yet he is drawn back into his imaginative life in spite of himself. Annoyed at criticism of his work by the writer Milton Appel, he exacts revenge by assuming Appel’s identity and spinning a long-improvised monologue to a stranger on a plane, in which he claims to be the publisher of a pornographic magazine with the delicious title Lickety Split. (And what better occupation for someone named Milton Appel?)

Zuckerman’s rudeness springs from his exasperation at the world’s refusal to accept a simple proposition. ‘Life and art are distinct,’ he thinks, ‘what could be clearer? Yet the distinction is wholly elusive. That writing is an act of imagination seems to perplex and infuriate everyone.’ But there is a disingenuous quality to this self-justification. His reactions contain an obvious element of one-upmanship. Even as he throws up his hands in mock innocence (what’s everyone so upset about?), he is being deliberately and defiantly naughty (if you think that’s outrageous, then get a load of this). Then he becomes offended when others take offence.

The early Zuckerman novels are not among the most admired of Roth’s extraordinary career, but they enact a drama of the self that is central to his work. The blogger who, on hearing that Roth’s new novel was to be called Indignation, observed that this could have been the title for any of his books was pointing to something significant. As Ross Posnock argues in his densely written but illuminating study, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The art of immaturity (2006), the ‘one big book’ that Roth claims to have been writing for the past half-century ‘draws energy, wit, and outrage from his assault on maturity and self-control’. His fiction is best understood as part of a countertradition that rejects the Cartesian separation of mind and body, rejects any suggestion that we are essentially, or even primarily, rational creatures. That we are imperfect beings is a proposition few would dispute, of course, but Roth’s obsession with subversive and often destructive impulses – lust and obscenity, anger and indignation – portrays this imperfection as radically constitutive, not as some kind of postlapsarian complication of our otherwise admirable natures. Desire – almost always male and heterosexual in Roth, though the point has general application – is important because it is fundamental, but also because it is disruptive. Its impurity is a standing rebuke to order and rationality. Humankind is inescapably tainted by what Zuckerman in The Human Stain (2000) calls ‘the contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are’.

Most significantly, desire is selfish. And this egotistical quality brings it into conflict, not simply with notions of restraint and respectability, but with all those seemingly impersonal forces – social, cultural, historical – that are more powerful than the individual will. The defining American myth of self-invention is, in Roth’s fiction, constantly being tested against the responsibilities and pressures of inherited identity. That his novels often include scenes in which his characters are needled in some way and respond with a kind of reflex outrage is a dramatisation of the paradox of individualism, which requires that the self asserts its autonomy in defiance of determining influences, thus proving that the act of self-definition is not, in fact, independent of those influences. For Roth, it is the reflex nature of such reactions that is especially telling. An uncontrollable surge of passion always points to some essential desire or sensitivity, some core of self-belief or identity. Roth’s characters are, in this way, buffeted by circumstance and betrayed by their wayward imaginations, which are forever giving shape to impulses that fail to respect the limits of propriety. They are pulled in two directions at once. Zuckerman’s ‘I did’ and ‘I am’ are an affront, but they are also incontrovertible. They make him vulnerable to criticism precisely because he cannot deny them.

An indignant response is the self’s rebellion against the world’s uncontrollability, and, in this sense, it is inherently immature. Furthermore, as Roth’s fiction dramatises over and over again, its reactive quality makes it dangerous. One of the crueller ironies of his work is its insistence that we are especially prone to a retreat into self-defeating inflexibility when we are in the right. For Herman Roth in The Plot Against America (2004), for example, the rise of the Nazi sympathiser Charles Lindbergh to the presidency is experienced as a personal torment. With an anti­Semite in the White House, the national mood is tainted, every small insult is amplified, and he becomes consumed with frustration at being unable to make others see the danger he knows to be real. Similarly, in The Human Stain, the classics professor Coleman Silk is enraged when his career is destroyed after he describes two unseen African American students as ‘spooks’. The accusation of racism that is made against him is never depicted as anything other than spurious, a manifestation of a strain of violent puritanism that runs through American culture, but it is only when Coleman steps back from his rage that he is able to recognise that righteous anger is itself a kind of poison:

He knew, from the spooks incident, that indignation on such a scale was a form of madness, and one to which he could succumb. He knew that indignation like this could lead to no orderly and reasoned approach to the problem ... And it wasn’t from the spooks incident alone that he knew about what can corrode and warp a man who believes himself to have been grievously wronged. He knew from the wrath of Achilles, the rage of Philoctetes, the fulminations of Medea, the madness of Ajax, the despair of Electra, and the sufferings of Prometheus the many horrors that can ensue when the highest degree of indignation is achieved and, in the name of justice, retribution is exacted, and a cycle of retaliation begins.

This is, Posnock argues, the treacherous terrain that Roth’s novels negotiate, finding within it both the comedy and tragedy of life. The immaturity Zuckerman displays in sullying the memory of Anne Frank and railing against Milton Appel’s ‘militant grown-upism’ is an exaggeratedly indignant rejection of the tempting ‘myth of purity’ that, in its denial of humanity, leads to destructive fanaticism. But, at the same time, Roth’s fiction understands that the self-reliance and flexibility that is ‘the antidote to fanaticism’ can easily spill over into a form of ‘malignant autonomy’ that enrages and isolates; that renders a person incapable of negotiating life’s unexpected difficulties.

The ferocious sequence of late novels known as the ‘American Trilogy’ – American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain – is united by a fascination with this issue of self-sovereignty, so essential to the modern concept of individuality, and, in particular, the way it contains the seeds of tragedy. Coleman, a light­skinned black man who spends his adult life passing himself off as a Jew, dares to take the promise of American individualism at its word, reinventing himself in defiance of the determining factor of race. Zuckerman speaks with a degree of admiration for Coleman’s refusal to be bound by the social expectations he was born into, for his taking charge of the ‘raw I’. But ‘raw’ can be read in two ways here. The ‘raw I’ is shapeless, unformed, capable of being moulded; but it is also raw like a wound, sensitive to the touch.

Roth’s fiction, notoriously, presents itself as an exercise in self-projection. Few writers have gained as much mileage from the blurring of fiction and autobiography. His protagonists are almost invariably Roth-like in their age and background; sometimes they are called ‘Philip Roth’. And this sense of defiant self-dramatisation contributes to the impression that, as Posnock puts it, ‘Roth has been conducting a career-long pre-emptive strike, telling his readers before they form their own opinions or hear it from the critics that he (or Zuckerman or Tarnopol or Kepesh) is, among other things, overly clever, self-absorbed, emotionally vacant, compulsively manipulative, and, of course, a disaster with women.’

But what affects to be a form of self-exposure turns out to be something more interesting. As Posnock astutely notes, Roth’s questioning of his own fictional practices has the opposite effect to metafiction, working to create illusion rather than undermine it. His novels are speculative rather than confessional, and the slippery ironies that are cultivated across their sprawling, complex, multilayered unity are a response to life’s limitations and uncertainties. As Mickey Sabbath, the irrepressible anti-philosopher of Roth’s vitalism, observes in Sabbath’s Theatre (1995), ‘the direction of life is toward incoherence’; each of us is ‘destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind’ (his emphasis). Faced with this radical contingency, the key notion of a ‘counterlife’ comes in Roth’s fiction to signify a process of understanding the world through literature. It represents an ideal of imaginative flexibility that allows for the negotiation of ructions and affronts, without succumbing to the destructive rigidity of egotism or the crushing force of expectation. All experience is instead drawn into Roth’s perpetual literature machine, which projects and exaggerates and offends but, more importantly, puts everything in motion.

If the ultimate aim for a fiction writer is, as Zuckerman puts it in The Counterlife (1986), to become ‘theater, pure theater’, the defining feature of Roth’s peculiar genius is that he arrives at this negative capability, not through a stance of godlike aloofness, as Flaubert recommends, but through a diabolical inversion that achieves Flaubertian detachment by contrary means. His work moves away from respectability and restraint toward a creatively liberating embrace of immaturity, in which the depiction of a rampant, overstated egotism has the paradoxical effect of dissolving the self in its own theatricality. Posnock’s study stops short of Exit Ghost (2007), which was billed as the last Zuckerman novel, but that book contained the unmissable message that, whatever the fiction might mean, the key is not to be found in the life of its author.

The first indication of Roth’s literary talent for ‘comic destruction’, he claims in the autobiography he titled, with heavy irony, The Facts: A novelist’s autobiography (1988), was a polemical article he penned for a student paper that transformed ‘indignation into performance (and, of course, got him into trouble). His failure to project in this way becomes the core complaint in Zuckerman’s critique, which Roth appends to The Facts as a way of bringing that notionally non­fictional work into contact with the fictional realm. The failure to exaggerate, the failure to step outside the bounds of politeness, the ‘refusal to explode’, Zuckerman argues, renders Roth’s self-depiction suspect and unconvincing. Because a picture that is restrained and reasonable is liable to be sanitised and self-serving, Roth’s fiction reaches for the truth that is revealed in extremes. ‘We are writing fictitious versions of our lives all the time,’ Roth has said. Life and art are distinct, yet they are not. ‘Aesthetic distance,’ Posnock argues, ‘becomes the condition whereby literature can traffic in the unbalanced, the realm where the uncensored, the anxious and exaggerated come to imaginative life.’

The writer thus appears as the supreme egotist, the supreme exploiter, the ultimate ‘bastard’. He embraces opposites, becoming, like Sabbath, a free-flowing stream of energy that unites ‘the villainous and the innocent, the genuine and the fraudulent, the loathsome and the laughable’. He becomes ‘a caricature of himself and entirely himself, embracing the truth and blind to the truth, self-haunted while barely what you would call a self’. He works outside expectations, but at a social cost. The obscene puppeteer Sabbath is an ‘ex-son, ex-brother, ex-husband’, a position reminiscent of Zuckerman’s at the end of Zuckerman Unbound: ‘You are no longer any man’s son, you are no longer some good woman’s husband, you are no longer your brother’s brother, and you don’t come from anywhere anymore, either.’ When someone asks ‘Who you supposed to be?’, Zuckerman gives the only possible response: ‘No one.’

At the heart of this process is Roth’s supple prose, the most conspicuous of his literary gifts. Even those critics who weary of his obsession with sex and death are willing to concede the remarkable fluency of his style, evident from the publication of his very first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), fifty years ago. That instantly compelling voice, which, as E.I. Lonoff tells Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer, starts below the knees and reaches all the way over his head, gives Roth’s fiction its distinctive momentum, contributing to the impression in many of his novels that his writing rides a wave of intellectual energy that rages, crashes, and dissipates, rather than moving toward any form of clear-cut dramatic resolution. But it is more significant than this. ‘Show, don’t tell’ is the creative writing school cliché, but Roth frequently does neither. He analyses. The rhetorical techniques of the essayist or pamphleteer, including polemic and denunciation, are drawn into the game, dissolving the distinction between fictional and discursive prose. This is done in combination with Roth’s ability to move fluidly between different levels of narrative and different points of view. There are passages in The Human Stain, for example, in which Zuckerman switches, without warning, from contemplating Coleman Silk’s thoughts and experiences in the third person to narrating them in the first person, as if in stepping into a stream of reflection he quite naturally becomes immersed. In this sense, Roth’s fiction, though seemingly dominated by his singular presence, is in fact many-voiced. His books often contain substantial passages of unmediated dialogue and one – Deception – is all dialogue. This openness and fluidity of technique is a reflection of the importance of ‘flow’ as a defining concept in his writing and the means by which, as Posnock observes, Roth’s fiction ‘resists the hollowing out of experience by allegory and tidy parable’.

Indignation (2008), Roth’s twenty-ninth book, is a trim novella that gives concise expression to a number of the key ideas Posnock identifies. It is set in 1951. Like The Plot Against America, it does not quite qualify as an ‘historical’ novel, falling as it does well within the life of its author, but it is a depiction of a very different time. It fixes upon the relative innocence of the early-1950s, not for nostalgic reasons, but as a moment of transition when one set of social values began to give way to another. Indeed, a degree of assumed historical knowledge is an important part of the novel’s dynamic, casting its events as a fore-echo of the sexual and cultural revolution that was to take place in the following decade.

The hapless protagonist is Marcus Messner, a good Jewish boy from New Jersey who is beginning to outgrow the stifling influence of his parents. Filled with a youthful desire for independence, and heedless of his anxious father’s warning that in life ‘the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences’, he enrols in a college in Ohio as a way of placing some distance between himself and his origins.

Marcus’s belief in his own maturity becomes, in a typically Rothian fashion, a focal point for the novel’s concerns. He is, of course, far less sophisticated than he would like to believe. One of his college roommates, Bertram Flusser, a rebellious actor who is given to hissing Malvolio’s exit line from Twelfth Night (‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’) – and who bears more than a passing resemblance to David Kepesh’s college roommate Louis Jelinek in The Professor of Desire (1977) – detects Marcus’s callowness straightaway. He goads him for being precisely the kind of obedient, respectable, diligent son Marcus imagines he is not, eventually forcing him to seek new accommodation. But the decisive scrambling of Marcus’s illusion of maturity comes when he scores a date with the attractive Olivia and the evening ends, to his great surprise, with her fellating him in a parked car. Though not entirely displeased with this development, he is utterly unprepared for it. He has not the slightest notion of how to respond. Though his subsequent actions are driven more by a fug of emotional confusion than caddishness, in the days that follow his behaviour towards Olivia falls short of acceptable standards of gentlemanly conduct.

A number of early notices of Indignation sought, with an element of implicit eye-rolling, to characterise Olivia as a beautiful but crazy shiksa, something of a stock character in Roth’s fiction. And it is true that there is a tendency in his novels for women to be viewed firstly as objects of desire and, when they cease to be desirable, to become overbearing and difficult. But Olivia, though both beautiful and psychologically frail, does not quite fit this mould. Though her character is lightly sketched, her position in the novel is crucial to its exploration of the historical moment.

On an archetypal level, she is an Ophelia-figure, fated to encounter, in Marcus, a rather gormless Hamlet. More specifically, the novel leaves open the question of whether she is an early victim of the fast-approaching permissive society or a late victim of the primness that demanded that a young woman who stepped outside the strict codes governing sexual conduct pay a heavy social cost. In a sense, she is both. She is not in a position to be liberated and independent, nor can she rely upon the security of tradition and family, some of her frailty being attributed to her parents’ divorce at a time when this was rare and stigmatised. In some ways, her plight is more sympathetically depicted than that of Marcus, who bears greater responsibility for his own downfall.

Though the pivotal moment in Indignation is a sexual act, the central scene is a confrontation between Marcus and the dean of Winesburg College. Having fallen out with a second roommate in the aftermath of his date with Olivia, Marcus is called into the dean’s office to discuss his accommodation. The meeting escalates into a shouting argument when he begins to detect in Dean Caulwell’s line of questioning that certain assumptions have been made about him; that he is being prejudged. The scene’s tension is reminiscent of the Roth family’s ill-fated trip to Washington DC in The Plot Against America, in which the anti-Semitic prejudice they encounter is undeniably present, but is also magnified by Herman Roth’s hypersensitivity and agitation. Marcus knows, even as he reacts, that he is doing himself no favours, but he cannot help himself. He resents the dean’s insinuation that he brushed over his Jewishness on his college application; he reacts angrily and rudely to the suggestion that he is intolerant and has trouble getting along with people; he ends up objecting in the strongest terms to the tedious but compulsory Christian sermons that the college inflicts upon its students on a weekly basis. Unable to keep his cool, Marcus lectures the dean about his impeccable secular beliefs, quoting Bertrand Russell at him to denounce the superstition at the heart of all religion.

Marcus’s objections are not unreasonable, but his indignation becomes the poison in the system, giving an insidious, slightly paranoid edge to his interpretation of events. What brings him undone is less his reading of the situation than the vehemence of his response. With a line from the Chinese national anthem sounding in his head – the source of the book’s title: the relevant verse, remembered from his schooldays, contains what Marcus calls ‘the most beautiful word in the English language’ (in-dig-na-tion!) – he backs himself into a principled stance.

The obvious echo of Bertrand Russell’s name in ‘Bertram Flusser’ hints at their affiliation within the scheme of the novel. Both are an affront to the institutionalised values of WASP privilege that Winesburg represents. Both anticipate the coming social revolution. The mere mention of Russell – atheist, libertine, socialist, divorcé – has a predictable effect on the dean, who denounces him as a malcontent and an agitator. But his name is also evoked in a way that mocks the shallowness of Marcus’s high-minded stance. The memorised sections of Russell’s essay ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’ that Marcus recites are dredged up from his days as a high school debater, and even as he is using Russell to confront the dean, accusing him of argumentum ad hominem (attacking the man), Marcus commits the fallacy of argumentum ad verecundiam (appealing to eminence), mentioning the philosopher’s Nobel Prize several times as dubious proof of the respectability of his opinions. (There may also be an oblique joke buried somewhere here, given that Roth’s name invariably appears near the top of any list of estimable non-recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature.)

The scene ends with Marcus becoming sick – literally – all over the dean’s office, an inadvertent purging that represents a bodily rejection of the dean’s moralising. A symbolic variation of this sullying occurs later in the novel when Flusser breaks into Marcus’s new lodgings and soils his belonging by masturbating over them. The significant difference is intent. Where Marcus’s action is inadvertent, Flusser’s is a deliberate offence. His distasteful and nasty violation, a kind of symbolic rape, is an ugly representation of the ugly idea that lust is a close cousin to contempt. (That sex might be an expression of mutual love and joy, at least some of the time, has never held much interest for Roth.) But within the context of the novel, Flusser’s act of sexual vandalism serves to underline the way Marcus’s striving for maturity and self-control backfires, rendering him ignorant of himself and others. Inflated with his own interests and desires, he cannot read the wider context and so is never able to orientate himself within the alien environment of Winesburg. Naïvely, he cannot understand why everyone does not simply leave him alone. Because he sees nothing coming, everything throws him. He is as bewildered by Flusser’s intimidation as he is by Olivia’s forwardness. His mother’s revelation that she is contemplating divorce similarly blindsides him, even though he knows full well how unsatisfactory her marriage really is.

Part of the insightful quality of Posnock’s study lies in its demonstration of how the outrageous comedy of Roth’s early satires can be understood as springing from the same source as the darker, more outward-looking novels that followed them. When American Pastoral appeared in 1997, a novel in which Zuckerman put aside the ‘dwarf drama’ of his self-obsession to confront the furies of late-twentieth century America, some commentators read the book’s tale of ‘Swede’ Levov as a recantation. Here was the author of an iconic work of late-1960s licentiousness and irreverence, someone capable of wringing an entire novel from an obscene psychiatrist joke, complete with punchline, the creator of Alexander (‘Up society’s ass, copper!’) Portnoy, writing a novel about the tragedy of an archetypally decent family man having his life torn apart by his daughter’s involvement in countercultural radicalism.

But Roth makes a strange and improbable champion of family values. As Posnock points out, this superficial reading misses the way the tragic hero colludes with the forces that bring about his demise. Merry Levov’s longing for ideological and spiritual purity is certainly depicted as having horrific consequences. Depredations of Sadean cruelty are inflicted upon her, leading to a psychological disintegration, which takes the form of a literally sick­making neglect of her physical well-being. Yet the novel depicts her decline as a grotesque inversion of the Swede’s belief in the purity of his all-American identity, the false ideal he has devoted his life to embodying. For Roth, this unsustainable ‘pastoral’ can only ever be a self-destructive lie. Contrary to Judea-Christian mythology, it is not knowledge that is sinful, but the tempting belief in our own innocence and goodness that is most apt to unleash hostile forces against us.

A similar historical understanding shapes Indignation. This college novel’s climactic scene is, appropriately enough, a panty raid. In keeping with the novel’s determinedly open-ended scheme, the symbolic significance of the moment can be read in various ways. It is, on one level, a transgressive and liberating act, an act of rebellion against a socially conservative institution. It is an irrepressible outbreak of desire that contains a predatory element. But it is also stupid and immature. As acts of rebellion go, it is adolescently repressed and nerdish. That this outbreak of collective foolishness is first heard in the novel as the rumbling of approaching thunder carries the implication that it anticipates a greater storm to come, in the form of the upsurge of irresponsibility in the 1960s that challenged the kinds of stuffy traditions and prejudices that Winesburg represents.

The raid, in a sense, acts out the trajectory of the cultural revolution of the 1960s in miniature, beginning as an outbreak of high spirits (it starts, innocently enough, as a snowball fight), spilling over into a lusty rampage, and finally becoming destructive and violent. This sense is reinforced in the aftermath of the raid, when the college President Albin Lentz admonishes the shame-faced perpetrators telling them that ‘history is not the background – history is the stage!’ In context, it is a beautifully ironic line. Lentz means to chastise the boys for their immaturity, for failing to appreciate that they cannot remain untouched by the serious conflicts that rage beyond the college walls, but history is about to deliver its own blow against the pious social conservatism he represents.

Indignation is not intended as a judgement on the time in which it is set any more than it explicitly comments on the social revolution that followed. The ultimate significance of the historical context is that it is beyond anyone’s control. As in much of Roth’s late fiction, it has a dramatic purpose akin to fate in classical tragedy, ‘fate’ being the name literature gives to our essential helplessness before life’s unpredictability. Ferocious, unappeasable, and amoral, history has its disproportionate revenge on Marcus, as it does on Coleman Silk and ‘Swede’ Levov. The fate of the individual is both tragic and absurd. In the face of this reality, as Posnock suggests, Roth’s fiction recognises that our only option is to be ‘game’ in the face of life’s challenges, to front up to them, day after day, without succumbing to the illusions that leave a person exposed and at odds with reality. That Roth has enacted this in his writing with unflagging energy for five decades has seen him create, to his everlasting credit, one of the most vital and extraordinary bodies of work in contemporary literature.

Main books considered in the article:

Indignation

by Philip Roth

Jonathan Cape, $45 hb, 233 pp, 9780224085137

Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity

by Ross Posnock

Princeton University Press (Footprint Books), $43.95 pb, 321 pp, 9780691138435