A Dead Man Tells of His Too Short Life

The narrator of Philip Roth’s new novel is a corpse.

INDIGNATION
By Philip Roth
233 pages. Houghton Mifflin. US$26.

Like the narrator of the Billy Wilder movie “Sunset Boulevard,” he is recounting the story of his all too brief life from beyond the grave — or at least from beyond the realm of “corporeal existence.” What we are reading are either his last, morphine-fueled memories as he lies dying of fatal wounds, or his musings, from the afterlife, about “the series of mishaps” that resulted in his death at 19 in 1952.

The lesson the late Marcus Messner learns from all this concerns “the terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.” It’s a lesson, of course, that many earlier Roth heroes have learned too, but in Marcus’s case it has nothing to do with the unreckoned consequences of art or the unforeseen fallout of sexual liberation. For Marcus, unlike most earlier Roth heroes, is a complete innocent: an earnest, dutiful boy, who remains an earnest, dutiful boy until the day he dies — a boy whose only goals in his brief, truncated college career are to get straight A’s, lose his virginity and go on to law school.

He is not one of Mr. Roth’s conflicted heroes, like Nathan Zuckerman or Alexander Portnoy, who find themselves torn between duty and defiance, convention and transgression. Rather, he is a passive, diligent character, who reacts rather than initiates, who winds up a victim not of his own narcissism or foolishness, but of others’ folly and the sheer, stupid randomness of fate.

Read the full review at the New York Times online.