Indignation, by Philip Roth
Indignation, Philip Roth’s 29th book, is about the sophomore year of its narrator, Marcus Messner, who attends college in 1951, a time when the Korean War hangs in the background, waiting to devour America’s youth. Marcus is a brilliant student, the first of his family to enter university, but he has recently suffered unrest. He spent his freshman year at college in his native Newark, which enabled him to live at home. It should have been ideal for a quiet boy such as Marcus, who wanted nothing more than to achieve good grades, but his normally easy-going father had a breakdown of sorts which made him irritable and intrusive to the point where Marcus could no longer live with him.
At the beginning of the novel Marcus is in Ohio, having left the family home and enrolled at the fictional Winesburg College (a nod to Sherwood Anderson, author of the 1919 short-story collection Winesburg, Ohio).
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