EARLY; LATE; priapic; prostatic; Zuckerman; non-Zuckerman; good; bad: there are so many ways to categorise the novels of Philip Roth. Categorising is a natural tendency of Roth's readers, who have come to expect so much and have intermittently been surprised and disappointed.

Each new book summons up a desire for context. (“Like Goodbye, Columbus, but with death.” “Streamlined like The Ghost Writer, but funnier.”) In part, Roth brings it on himself by revisiting characters, locations and themes. But maybe the desire to categorise is also a function of readers' anxiety. For what do we do with all the stuff that this non-stop writer has given us over the decades in such delicate and durable prose?

Instead of simply being overwhelmed (along with appreciative, annoyed, outmatched), we organise, busily trying to examine side-by-side plots, underdeveloped or adequately developed female characters, as well as language, tics and fixations.

Indignation, Roth's 29th book, may fit into various slots, but classification also distracts attention from a gratifying novel in its own right, powered by cringing, sex, death and indignation. Set in 1951, the second year of the Korean War, the book follows Marcus Messner as he begins his sophomore year as a transfer student at Winesburg College in Ohio. Marcus, a butcher's son, had previously lived at home and attended school in Newark, New Jersey, until his father's anxieties for his welfare made life unbearable: “I had left the house at eight-thirty that morning and been away attending classes and studying, and the first thing my mother said was ‘Your father's out looking for you.' ‘Why? Where is he looking?' ‘He went to a pool hall.' ‘I don't even know how to shoot pool'.”

As the novel gets underway, we don't think only of previous Roth novels; Winesburg College and the middle-American setting also bring up Sherwood Anderson (or what we recall of Anderson and his small-town grotesques), and a casually planted plot revelation evokes a cool trace-memory of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Marcus Messner, it is established, is dead, and Indignation is a tale told from the nebulous afterlife.

Marcus had held high hopes for Winesburg, having scoured the college catalogue and stared longingly at a cornball photo of coeds: “Why had I chosen Winesburg? Because of that picture! There were big leafy trees on either side of the two happy students, and they were walking down a grassy hill with ivy-clad, brick buildings in the distance behind them, and the girl was smiling so appreciatively at the boy, and the boy looked so confident and carefree beside her, that I filled out the application and sent it off and within only weeks was accepted.” But for the Jewish, indignant outsider, Winesburg turns out to be a grim stew of conventionality, panty raids and isolation. Forced to tolerate Christian sermons during mandatory chapel, Marcus distracts himself with the words to “what we were told was the national anthem of our Chinese allies in the war begun by the Japanese”.

In one of the novel's set pieces, after Marcus has switched roommates twice, he is asked to pay a visit to “Hawes D. Caudwell, Dean of Men”. (Roth is pitch-perfect with names of small-bore authority; he also gives us “Coach Portzline,” and “Dr. Chester Donehower” of the religion department.) The conversation in the dean's office is comical and absurd, with the pomp of the Dean matched by Marcus's tenacity and self-regard: “‘Tolerance appears to be something of a problem for you, young man.'

“‘I never heard that said about me before, sir,' said I at the very instant I inwardly sang out the most beautiful word in the English language: ‘In-dig-na-tion!'”

We don't “root” for the collegiate hero, exactly, for we know he's bound to lose. His rage and desire for self-preservation may be admirable, but they can't save him. Neither can Olivia Hutton, a mentally fragile young doctor's daughter with a scar on her wrist. Marcus's emotional limitations and sexual greenness convince him that he knows Olivia's reason for having willingly performed fellatio on him: “Nor could I believe that what Olivia did she did because she enjoyed doing it ... No, what she did would have to have been caused by an abnormality. ‘It's because her parents are divorced,' I told myself. There was no other explanation for an enigma so profound.”

Heightened self-consciousness stirred with dumb blindness propel Marcus through his last days on earth. His fears of being kicked out of college, and, as a result, winding up dead in the Korean War, only accelerate that fate. Roth makes us desperately invested in the circumstances of Marcus's pre-ordained death and in his father's subsequent devastation: “‘Double-locking the door taught him nothing. And now he's gone. Our boy is gone. I was right, Marcus, I saw it coming - and now you're gone forever! I cannot bear it. I will never survive it.' And he didn't.”

A brainy young Jewish man; a father and son entangled; a graphic sex scene with a humiliating climax: sure, none of this is entirely unfamiliar territory. Even the words to the Chinese national anthem were quoted by Roth long ago in Portnoy's Complaint.

Anxious readers who absolutely have to classify this new novel within the larger body of work will find multiple, interesting ways to do so. But the most obvious one is this: Indignation is, unquestionably, seriously “good” Roth.

Indignation by Philip Roth
Cape, £16.99; 256pp Buy the book

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