I’m reading Philip Roth.

I didn’t plan to, I’m not that big a fan. I found “American Pastoral” to be tedious. But I read the reviews of the filmed version of “Indignation” and I became intrigued. I’m a sucker for boy meets goy at small college in the fifties stories, especially when the protagonist is flummoxed and misunderstood.

But “Indignation” was only playing at the Landmark and the screening times were never right and I decided what the hell, I’ll read the book first.

I haven’t read that much Roth. But I loved “Goodbye Columbus.” How can a seminal film be so marginalized? It was Ali MacGraw’s debut. she’s remembered for the execrable “Love Story,” but playing Brenda Patimkin, that’s been forgotten.

But the novella was even better.

Even better than “Indignation.”

But “Indignation” blew my mind.

It started with the blow job.

You’re reading along, to the words of a septuagenarian. You expect dignity. This is not Jennifer Egan testing the limits of noveldom, this is an old hand proceeding forthrightly.

And then Marcus gets an unforeseen blow job and just can’t handle it.

What do they say, you never want your dreams to come true?

Anybody that interested in him, he wants nothing to do with.

So he ignores her and she ignores him and he becomes further infatuated, he can’t do his school work, all he wants to do is see her again, but she refrains.

He sends her letters…

Do you know the torture of being a red-blooded American male? Neither the techno-nerd nor the movie star? The movie star can get laid whenever he wants. The nerd holds his own, until his wealth allows him to penetrate a member of the opposite sex, sometimes the same sex, and be seen all over the media as triumphant. While the rest of us, in the middle…live in our heads.

Oh, if you could see inside. Into the men who never share, because it connotes weakness. You’d see the over-inflation, the feeling that Jennifer Aniston is just an ask away. And the incredible denigration, the belief that we’re not attractive to anyone and we’ll never get laid again.

So we plot. And we write. And we fantasize. And we think. And when someone deigns to actually like us, for us, we can’t believe it. After all, we don’t even like OURSELVES!

And then comes the famous eighteen minute scene. That’s what the reviews have focused on, one extended interaction between student and dean.

Do you fit in?

Maybe you do. But not me. Not only have I often felt to be the outsider, I’ve chafed at the system, I can recite countless times I got in trouble with the authorities.

Like the time I put my feet on the desk in law school. The professor challenged me, believing I was a sleeping doofus who had not done the reading. But when I asked him a question he couldn’t answer he kicked me out of class, told me to never come back.

But that was in L.A.

In Middlebury, Vermont… I was way out of my element. I went to a melting pot high school with plenty of Jews. I ended up at a college where 45% of the students went to prep school and they all thought studying was the highest calling of a student. Give me a break. What about skiing and music? No, got to go to the library.

I’m lucky I escaped. Sometime I’ll tell you the story.

But in “Indignation” the dean criticizes Marcus’s personality. Says there must be something wrong with him because he keeps changing rooms.

Has this ever happened to you? Where your whole being has been brought into question? How you live your life is seen as false, and you must change? They can break you these people, you’re the only one on your own team. And if you screw up and get kicked out what are you gonna tell your parents? Yes, even back then, when college was comparatively cheap, our parents slaved to pay for it. And they didn’t care what grades you got, as long as you stayed in.

In this case Marcus didn’t stay in. Because ultimately he told the dean…FUCK YOU!

Have you done this?

I have.

I don’t anymore. You lose. You have to learn how to play the game. Took me fifty years to realize that. My father never played the game, he taught us to do what was right, not to jump off the bridge just because everybody else did.

And “Indignation” closes with the remark that…

“…and thus have postponed learning what his uneducated father had been trying so hard to teach him all along: of the terrible, incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices, achieve the most disproportionate result.”

It’s true. Be yourself all the time, don’t calculate, swing for the fences.

And you’ll find yourself outside the stadium wondering who stole your glove.

Life is about not making mistakes. Ignore the words of the techies, all the hogwash about failure. The truth is America is a game and either you’ve got to stand outside it, which is almost impossible to do, or you’ve got to play it, by its rules. Permanent record indeed. What you’ve done in the past will come back to haunt you.

And I highly recommend “Indignation.” It’s short, not always easy to follow, but you’ll get there.

And I’ve yet to see the movie, it’s so hard to get out of the house, show up at the appointed time and slow down. Yes, even if I make it to the film I might be too antsy, thinking about business, about life, it’s not the seventies anymore, we’ve got the world at our fingertips, with our mobile devices, and it’s so hard to relax.

But I did start another Philip Roth book, “Sabbath’s Theater,” it’s much harder going.

I triangulated, I researched. Although hated as well as loved, people I trusted said this was the best of his late period work.

And Mickey Sabbath is a puppeteer in a bad marriage who can’t stop shtupping and fantasizing about his mistress, who is imperfect but exudes raw sexuality.

Those models, those famous people… They’re two-dimensional, they’re not really who guys have a hard-on for.

Guys go for the chubby ones. The voluptuous ones. The ones who can tie them in a knot, not the ones who haven’t eaten since last Tuesday. Can’t be thin enough? Then chances are you’re not getting laid enough.

Drenka is the wrong side of normal weight. And she’s got a very flat nose. But her curves, Mickey is obsessed.

And neither she nor he likes to screw their spouse.

Extramarital activity… It offends my sense of morality. But the truth is we only live once, and Mickey is over sixty and soon his functionality will decline and…

WHY NOT?

That’s not the school I come from. I come from the school of suffering, of duty. I bitch about the rules but I obey them. Totally messed up, I know, that’s why I go to the shrink. You’d think a rule-breaker like me would fit perfectly into our entrepreneurial society. But no, I want to win in the old world even though I am not fit.

And I’m trying to plow through “Sabbath’s Theater.” I have a pact with my Kindle, if I buy it, I finish it. But the book is hard going, despite the occasional titillation.

And then I read something so poignant, so right on, that I literally slapped my forehead with my palm, I saw myself in the book, my life became clear.

Sabbath and his goyishe wife are arguing, they’re on the verge of breaking up, after decades, and when Mickey’s wife tells him to stop shouting…

“‘Shouting is IRRATIONAL!’ she cried despairingly. ‘You cannot think straight if you’re shouting! Nor can I!'”

“‘Wrong! It’s only when I’m shouting that I BEGIN to think straight! It’s my rationality that makes me shout! Shouting is how a Jew THINKS THINGS THROUGH!'”

Whew!

Have you seen “Hannah and Her Sisters,” where Woody Allen falls in love with the beautiful goy Barbara Hershey (who in real life is Barbara Herzstein and JEWISH, talk about a mindbender…) There’s a dinner scene therein where everybody’s talking over each other.

That’s a Jewish family.

And many Jewish men go for shiksas because they want to avoid that, they want someone to listen to THEM, they want to escape from the craziness, they don’t want an authoritative balabusta to terrorize them.

But these non-Jewish women…

They’re terrorized by us.

Not a single girlfriend, and they’ve all been non-Jews, at least the long term ones, has not accused me of of shouting.

My father shouted. I never thought twice about it.

Now I’ve learned to be calm. But I feel like I’ve adjusted my personality, like the dean wanted Marcus to do. It’s not me.

But then I read this Philip Roth book and he gets it exactly right. The truth is when I am shouting I’M MY BEST SELF! The finest thinker. I don’t shout and stutter, I’m clear as a bell, I’m an orator on the dais, I’m laying it all out in an orderly fashion.

But the shiksas are horrified.

I’m trying to figure it all out.

Indignation