52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
60. Indignation.
I’ve not read any of Roth’s classic works: the Zuckerman books, American Pastoral. I’ve only read Everyman, The plot against America, and now this, and I’d say the title and its concern encapsulates my feelings about Roth and his writing: he is a deeply angry man, incredulous at much he sees around him. He looks back in anger. Indignation follows the tragic career of a young co-ed at Winesburg College in Ohio during the Korean War, a Jewish Butcher’s Son who can make no sense of the traditionalism of White Christian America and is hard pressed to deal with the many stereotypes he finds there. He runs there from a suddenly overbearing father, and falls in love with a troubled, beautiful young woman, but cannot infer from her many cues that she’s been sexually abused. Everyone he meets there makes him angry. He jumps to wrong conclusion after wrong conclusion until he is expelled, drafted, and destroyed in the War. Roth seems to be dealing with the currently-fashionable anger over our ‘rights,’ and the bluster it spawns, and saying that we need to be careful what we get indignant about, since “banal, incidental… choices achieve the most disproportionate results.” I’m still curious about Roth’s earlier, well-regarded works, but I don’t anticipate that reading them will be pleasant.
wow. it sounds like it’s got a really serious tone to it. what i don’t get, is how we are expected to be “careful” about “incidental” choices?
i always feel like it’s a waste of time to go through life trying to be so absolutely careful about “banal” choices. clearly, blind indignation is not a good policy for hasty actions, but there are easier ways to arrive at that conclusion.
Brian. August 14th. 2010. 6:23 pm.