Every few months, I encounter a book that simply defies being put down. Try as I might, I must read until I have either finished the book or collapsed with exhaustion. Today (yesterday, actually), I discovered that Philip Roth's latest book, Indignation, is one of those books. I started it at 2:30, read until the moment class started at 3:30, picked it back up again at 5:00, pried myself away from it again at 6:30 and pretended to be interested in the various German possessive adjectives, picked the book back up the second class ended at 9:00, and only now am I able to do anything else.
It is brilliant. There are few other ways to describe what I mean and most of those involve me shouting at the top of my lungs. Beautiful. Wonderful- the kind of wonderful where I think I might need to read it again tomorrow (today, in fact).
Writers like Philip Roth- who even after 29 novels has not run out of things to say- are rare and books like Indignation, which have a 224-page buildup to an elegantly delivered punch-in-the-gut conclusion that leaves the reader in total awe are doubly so.
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