Indignation - Philip Roth

Meet Marcus Messner, a hard-working, focused, extremely intelligent young man from New Jersey. A straight-A student and prized only child, he works on the weekends at his father’s kosher butcher shop. At the outset of Philip Roth’s Indignation (Houghton Mifflin, $26), Messner’s appears to be the life of a perfectly successful and charming young man—but then we glimpse Messner’s shortcomings. His perfection and dedication alienate him from his family and his fellow students, and his incredible intelligence pits him against his school’s administration. With some of the most ingenious narrative twists and turns I have encountered, Roth hands us a tale in which this boy falls prey to the only dishonest thing he’s ever done. I loved the humanity I saw in Marcus, his intensely inquisitive nature, and I would challenge anyone to find an equally compelling tragic-comic character in the season’s fiction lists.