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Cambridge Forum Director Patricia Suhrcke introduced Sunstein and Harvard Business School professor Alvin E. Roth served as moderator for the event...
Portnoy (one always wants to type Porn-toy) was born, like Roth, in 1933; Marcus Messner, the hero of Indignation, is a year older. Like Portnoy, Marcus comes from a smotheringly protective Jewish family in Newark, N.J. ("You are a boy with a magnificent future ahead of you," Marcus' father tells him. "How do I know you're not going to places where you can get yourself killed?") Like Portnoy, Marcus escapes to college in Ohio, where he is baffled and inflamed by the attentions of a sexually unfettered shiksa. Unlike Portnoy, Indignation is a weird, flawed little book, full...
There is one thing, however, that works in Indignation. Like Updike, Roth could be said to belong to the literary Me generation: writers (Norman Mailer was another) who traffic in thinly veiled alter egos, whose own internal dramas are their primary source of material. David Foster Wallace called them the Great White Narcissists, and it's true: Portnoy's awareness of the world around him more or less stopped at the end of his erect penis...
...faults, the Roth of Indignation is interested in subjects outside himself: war, politics, history, death, things that impinge on the warm bubble of self and family. Whereas Portnoy tells his story from a psychiatrist's couch, Marcus narrates Indignation from beyond the grave (or possibly from a morphine coma). He has been drafted into the Korean War--a draft for which Portnoy was a year too young--and he has fallen on the battlefield. You could read this as Roth's quasi-Oedipal execution of his younger alter ego, but it plays more like a correction: Wake up, Portnoy, there...
...Widows and Indignation Updike and Roth are gently upbraiding their younger selves for their narrowness of vision, for their lack of interest in the world around them, in A Mercy, Morrison is urging her younger self, the tortured soul who fashioned the infernal vision that is Beloved, to look even further--beyond the veil of pain and anger, however righteous, to hope. There was a time before the present misery, Morrison seems to be telling herself. And therefore, maybe, there will be a time after...