Philip Roth definitively marks his territory only a few pages into Indignation, his novel that was published last September. In it, we meet Marcus Messner, a nice, young, Jewish boy from Newark who dutifully makes straight As and bashfully accepts the plaudits of a gaggle of approving adult Jews. He eagerly works for his father, a kosher butcher, absorbing homilies without resistance: "That's what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do." And, soon enough, Marcus develops daddy issues.Our nice, young, Jewish boy flees Newark and Robert Treat College due to the increasingly paranoid, controlling elder Messner little Markie once idolized. His destination? Winesburg, Ohio, a nod to the repressed Midwestern town of Sherwood Anderson fame. There, Marcus single-mindedly pursues his studies, diverting from previous Roth men in his continuing eagerness and devotion to duty: "I wanted to do everything right. If I did everything right, I could justify to my father the expense of my being at college in Ohio rather than in Newark. I could justify to my mother her having to work full time in the store again," Roth says. He gives another knowing nod in the novel to Marcus' father having to sacrifice Isaac, a young, Orthodox Newarkian, as a paid apprentice in the butcher shop.

This is no Alexander Portnoy, wracked with guilt, shame, bitterness and anger; Marcus wants to be valedictorian, to become a lawyer and above all to avoid being a private in the Korean War. But these desires are utterly passive, voiced with no inner conflict whatsoever. In a confrontation with the stolid, obsessively conservative dean, he says with titular indignation, "I am not a malcontent. I am not a rebel," and this is the most discouraging aspect of Marcus' character. While frustrating, it is not surprising that Marcus undergoes little development from his supine state throughout the course of Indignation. You see, Marcus is dead, recounting from some agnostic form of limbo the events that led to his tragic demise at age 19, which he casually informs us almost as an aside not far into this short novel: "And even dead, as I am and have been for I don't know how long."

In true Rothian fashion, he takes up with an emotionally disturbed shikseh named Olivia, to whom his parents object, and his fascination with ejaculation is only equaled by his conviction that a girl of breeding can't possibly enjoy sex or want sex. Olivia's desire, concludes Marcus, must be "an abnormality" because there exists no evidence that her "character was anything but solid through and through."

And again, this is Roth through and through. Roth expertly gives voice to Marcus' peculiar sort of apathy, writing the back story of this least conflicted character's death. The prose is, from our knowledgeable vantage point, ironic, darkly funny and expertly crafted. Listening to Marcus pontificate, be it to himself, to his roommates or to his authority figures, is painful. His indignant atheism, indignant rejection of fraternity life and indignant confrontation of any challenge to his excellence bring to mind the worst of the college student. But in the end, the most painful and captivating aspect of Indignation of all is how Marcus allows himself to be controlled by the flow of events with a minimum of anger or rage or resistance, which leads him exactly to that which his father warned him against: "The terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result."

In the end, Indignation is a wonderful read but is neither as memorable nor as evocative as some of Roth's earlier work. Self-indulgent down to the title (drawn from the Chinese anthem favored by both Portnoy and Marcus), Indignation is made less by its protagonist's relatively small helping of the sound and fury that made Portnoy and Zuckerman famous. He accepts sex. He does not accept lifestyles alternate to his, but he chooses to avoid rather than to confront.

In fact, throughout the novel Roth glosses over confrontation, and ultimately the only true conflicts and more exciting points of the novel become Marcus' Bernard Russell-ridden war of words with the moralizing Christian Dean Caudwell and the climactic panty raid, a sophomoric jaunt that, in the end, drives Marcus to his morphine-sodden demise. But it is a testament to Roth's talent that even this less successful effort provides an entertaining, occasionally disturbing look into the difference between and results of a character making a choice and a character allowing choices to be made for him.