Indignation? Lots of it: I was indignant throughout the book at what Marcus was going through, the choices he was trying to make along a straight line of achievement and duty (“I learned from my father … you do what you have to do“), and later lust and love too (“I had fallen in love with — or I had fallen in love with the folly of falling in love with — the very girl my father must have been imaging me in bed with on that first night he’d locked me out of the house“), and all amidst a cacophony of disapproval and expectations and rules.  There is a particularly painful and exquisitely written scene (written to cause pain, indignation, and frustration in the reader, as well as for Marcus) in which Marcus is brought into the Dean’s Office to discuss (explain) his flurry of room changes. The meeting ends up being Marcus’ opening salvo in his war for independence. Indignation!

Independent and intelligent in thought, nevertheless Marcus is never able to achieve independence in action. He bows to others while screaming inwardly and in the end, he is undone. Life offers choices and life offers rules, but no matter whether you side with family duty, religious dictates, societal conventions, or turn around and rebel against everything, you can lose. And lose big: “one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.”

Fear of losing, fear of making the wrong choice and failing, fear of dying, is why people look for rules in the first place. Its why colleges like Winesburg had straitlaced (and choking) restraints protecting its young women, why religions insist on commandments and rituals, why fraternities have their own traditions. But the rules cannot protect Marcus; staying within the lines cannot keep danger away. Not only because it is human nature to both seek the rules and to break them (indignation!) but because Marcus is just one person interfaced with many others and a layering of many choices (his father double-locking the door at night, Marcus paying another to go to Chapel, Marcus changing dorm rooms, Flusser fouling the room under the rafters and sending Marcus to Sonny’s care) defines Marcus’ fate. The final question of responsibility for Marcus’ fate is shared among all the characters.  Chills ran down my spine: so much can happen from so little, and what roles have any of us played, known and unknown, in the outcome of someone else’s life?  The degree to which there is no independence — just indignation — is frightening, and Roth makes it real.

Roth is a writer who shows us through his novels both the folly and the wonder of living. His characters are pushed around, buffeted between obligations and desire, and yet somehow they manage to find moments, like Marcus’ “brief bliss” with Olivia, that takes them — and us, the reader — out of  the struggle for survival long enough to make all the struggle worthwhile. But always, misery, loneliness, and death are lurking at the door just waiting for us — or someone close to us — to make the wrong move. Indignation!