October 30, 2008
I think it was Calvin Trillin who said the generation gap was widest not between the “Greatest Generation” and the baby boomers, but between men who attended college in the 1950s and those who enrolled just a few short years later.
The older graduates watched with envy as the younger students enjoyed all that was denied them in the repressive ‘50s: lax rules, coed dorms, and the kinds of encounters that are possible when you have lax rules and coed dorms.
It’s either a simplistic or profound explanation for the “Sixties” and all that word implies. It would take someone with a novelist’s imagination and a lifelong interest in men’s libidos to explain the ways sexual frustration and the costs of war commingled to create a social revolution.
It would take, in fact, Philip Roth.
In his latest novel, Indignation, Roth returns to the Newark of his youth to tell the tale of Marcus Messner, a butcher’s boy and dutiful Jewish son who escapes his father’s meaty grasp to attend college in WASPy Winesburg, Ohio. Roth being Roth, there is a hint of autobiography: Roth famously attended Bucknell University before making his mark at the University of Chicago and beyond. And there are familiar scenes of a vanished Newark that he, and certainly readers in these parts, remember with a mixture of nostalgia and rue.
Marcus doesn’t escape the butcher shop immediately — there’s a one-year sojourn at the fancifully named “Robert Treat College,” probably a stand-in for the Rutgers-Newark campus of the day, and a knowing reference to one of Newark’s founding fathers. (It’s also a neat bit of foreshadowing: Treat was a famous religious dissident; Marcus, as we’ll see, will find himself a voice of dissent on the Winesburg campus.) But his father becomes obsessed with protecting his son from all that can befall an 18-year-old boy with a war raging in Korea, and Marcus laces up a pair of white bucks to sojourn among the gentiles.
You can take the boy out of the city and all that: Messner is a willful loner, shunning contact with roommates and a Jewish fraternity in favor of marathon sessions of study and work at a local restaurant. But this isn’t a campus comedy: Marcus also fears the war, and convinces himself he’ll be vulnerable for the draft if he doesn’t become the school’s valedictorian.
Marcus is no monk, however, and dates another in a long line of Roth shiksas, the beautiful but troubled Olivia Hutton. Their sexual encounter in the front seat of a borrowed car sets in motion a plot that will include a confrontation with the school’s daunting Dean of Men, Messner’s violent break with his latest roommate, and an ultimate act of rebellion that will thrust Marcus into the jaws of the very war he had tried to avoid.
One of the longest set pieces in this very brief novel is The Great White Panty Raid, in which frustrated college men invade and lay waste to the women’s dorms. Tossing underwear and makeup out the windows, they enact a dark and evocative pantomime of the kind of violence waging thousands of miles away, in Korea’s frozen no-man’s-land. The college’s president reminds them of such, in a long speech comparing their frivolity with the sacrifices being made by their peers overseas.
That Marcus will join those soldiers in the blood and stench of battle is apparent early on in the book. And throughout, Roth hammers home the contrasts between home front and battlefield, manhood as understood by a college dean and manhood as understood by a commanding officer.
It is a dichotomy that has only widened since the draft was abolished. America has ended military service as a universal rite of passage, and transformed service into either a profession for the elite or an option for those with few others. Roth’s book laments the waste of war even as it mocks the self-seriousness of the college-bound.
The panty raid also plays as a sort of dress rehearsal for the 1960s, when college administrators broke down the doors of the women’s dorms, and protests were aimed not at a college’s quaint rules but at yet another war.
The very title of the book hints at this transformation. In times of stress, Marcus distracts himself with the words of what he’s told is the Chinese national anthem: “Indignation fills the hearts of all of our countrymen/Arise! Arise! Arise!” It’s what he hums as he argues against the college’s requirement that he attend chapel. It’s what he hears when waves of Chinese soldiers sweep over a hill in Korea.
Indignation is not a great book, but it is an evocative one. And it arrives as America is about to conclude what has seemed like a generational battle as much as a political one. Obama, 47, defines service in the terms of the community organizer-turned-academic-turned-politician that he is. McCain, 72, reminds crowds that he has been fighting for America since he was 17, “and I have the scars to prove it.”
Indignation doesn’t take sides, but acknowledges the paths that open and close for young men — ball field and battlefield, classroom and theater of war. It’s about America at one crossroads, and it appears with America at another.
