Indignation

Since The Plot Against America in 2004, Philip Roth, 75, has scaled back with three short novels in a row: Everyman, Exit Ghost, and now Indignation, the most blistering and successful of the three minor (only for Roth) books. His 1951-set tale follows Marcus Messner, a freshman who, suffocated by his overbearing father, leaves college in New Jersey and transfers, somewhat disastrously, to Winesburg College in Ohio, where he fears he’s just a transgression or two away from ending up a doomed rifleman in Korea. Roth’s bugaboos are his old favorites (e.g., sex, rectitude, conformity), and perhaps we’ve been around these bends with him before, but he is a master. And the short form serves the story: 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. A-