FICTION: Indignation by Philip RothJonathan Cape, 233pp, £16.99
PHILIP ROTH'S VITALITY and productivity over the past 15 years have been nothing short of astounding; if one considers only the novels he has produced during this later period, he stands as one of our most significant living writers. His is an inspirational maturity, testament to a seemingly boundless creative energy.
That said, the intensity, exuberance and sometime vitriol of novels such as Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral or The Plot Against America have latterly given way to a different, less expansive form. Recent books such as Everyman and Exit Ghost, while not less ambitious, nor less spiked with rage, have nevertheless been compacted, or reduced, not only in length but in nature. It's as if Roth feels it sufficient to tell rather than to show, as if mere gesturing towards character or milieu is sufficient.
Such impatience with development is not unknown among older writers - Saul Bellow's late work changed in this way, as have Doris Lessing's later fictions. The writer, past 70, finally wise to what matters, has little time for the puffy niceties of detail, for the bourgeois comforts of scene-setting, just as one might lose interest in small talk or politesse.
The trouble is that the realist novel is an essentially bourgeois form, largely created out of those puffy niceties and mundane comforts. Strip away these trappings, and there is a risk that the entire structure might crumble. Details in a fiction are significant: as readers, we gather them like puzzle pieces, and strive to create a meaningful whole. When a work of fiction contains fewer details, each of them matters all the more; and when characters are drawn only in their most general outlines, the result might indicate emotion, but it will not create it.
Indignation, Roth's new novel, is told from the point of view of a dying, or dead, young Jewish man from Roth's beloved Newark, who has, through a series of bleakly banal mishaps, ended up a soldier in Korea. Set in 1951, the book records Marcus Messner's first months of his second year of university. The son of a kosher butcher, he has transferred from a local college in urban New Jersey to a small, private institution in northwest Ohio, pointedly named Winesburg College (after Sherwood Anderson's classic portrait of small-town American life), in order to escape his father's overbearing terror that Marcus will be drafted and die in Korea: "I wanted to do everything right . . . At the heart of my ambition was the desire to be free of a strong, solid father suddenly stricken with uncontrollable fear for a grown-up son's well-being."
The transfer is, from the outset, unfortunate. Marcus's first year of college, in working class, cosmopolitan Newark, "was the most exhilarating and most awful of my life"; Winesburg, on the other hand, is intolerably bland, a homogenous, repressed Christian enclave, where Marcus is one of a handful of Jews. Roth draws thumbnail sketches of Marcus's contemporaries - his first roommate, fussy Bertram Flusser, "a lanky, raven-haired boy in glasses" whose homosexuality leads him to torture Marcus; his subsequent roommate, Elwyn Ayers Jr, "a strapping, laconic, decidedly non-Jewish boy who studied hard, took his meals at the fraternity house . . . and owned a black four-door LaSalle Touring Sedan built in 1940"; Sonny Cottler, head of the Jewish fraternity, who "had that smooth, confident, easygoing way about him that reminded me of all those magically agreeable, nice-looking boys who'd served as president of the Student Council back in high school and were worshiped by girlfriends who were star cheerleaders or drum majorettes"; and Olivia Hutton, the young woman Marcus has his eye on, "pale and slender, with dark auburn hair and what seemed to me an aloofly intimidating, self-confident manner".
It seems entirely plausible that Marcus would have no more incisive aperçus about his peers than these wan, unrevealing descriptions, and this may be Roth's purpose in writing so apparently lazily. Even so, it is surely an author's task to render the dull interesting, the familiar new; and yet Winesburg, a cliché in its very name, is never any less than a cliché in its nature and its constituents, as anodyne and perniciously provincial a vision of the mid-century American midwest as one could conjure.
It is a place of fraternities and panty raids, of chapel attendance and illicit blow jobs, a horrid little idyll over which the threat of the Korean War hovers largely, and dangerously, forgotten. That this ghastly banality is what the Korean War is, in principle, intended to safeguard, and that to be party to it is Marcus's only protection from being drafted into the war, are the ironies at the novel's heart. As contemporary readers, we can see, too, the parallels between the mid-century and the new century, between Korea and Iraq, between the fatal smug provincialisms of both eras. Roth's anger is powerful, as is his desire to give voice to the most ordinary of dead soldiers. That there are only a series of silly mishaps standing between any of us and the battlefield, or between any of us and death - this is the book's reverberating echo.
Nevertheless, these parallels and the discussions they evoke are, in some way, too clear and too near the novel's surface to elicit any emotion whatsoever. At Winesburg College, Marcus inhabits a cartoon world, surrounded by cardboard cutouts. The book only comes alive when evoking Messner Kosher Meat, the butcher shop of Marcus's childhood that he strives to escape. Eviscerating chickens, slaughtering cows, scouring bloodied bins - this, for Marcus, for Roth, and hence for us - is vivid and memorable. But even as we cling to these scenes, we are all the more aware of how little the rest matters; aware that these scenes alone do not a novel, nor the experience of indignation, make.
The rest seems too much like the outline for a book that might have been, born of some good ideas, but never carried beyond the typical into real, or fictional, life.
• Claire Messud's most recent novel is The Emperor's Children (Picador, 2006 )