"there is some shit I will not eat" (E. E. Cummings) Philip Roth's latest novel "Indignation" is the first in some years to neither star Nathan Zuckerman, nor Prof. Kepesh. Marcus Messner, Newark son of a kosher butcher, is the (as we soon find out) dead narrator of this novel, which circles around "the terrible, the incomprehesible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result". Marcus, who had been in the debating team during his High School time, a reader and follower of the writings of Bertrand Russel, who chooses to leave his bohemian (and home town) Robert Treat College for the far from home Winesburg College to escape permanent surveillance of his father, soon finds himself in the narrowminded and boring surroundings of a typical american provincial college of 1951. Studying and achieving As being the only interest of his, he soon finds himself being the center of attention of the Dean. A affair leads to agonies, as he realizes himself being unexperienced in the way of life but overwhelmed with emotions... "Look at me, so pathetically conventional upon his arrival here that he could not trust a girl because she blew him"... What Philip Roth achieved with "Indignation" is a young man's coming-of-age, his quest for the possibility and right to live by his own moral rules, without "eating shit" and bowing to "clergical ass-lickers", even if this means expulsion and the secure ticket to Korea. A very powerful, a very concentrated and poetical novel, written with beautifully sparse prose. Philip Roth at the height of his literary power, "Indignation" a tour-de-force, crying to be re-read soon.