“Beyond your dormitories, a world is on fire and you are kindled by underwear.” Such is the world of Marcus Messner in 1951: attending Winesburg College in rural Ohio, he becomes torn between sexual desire and a need to avoid expulsion — pursuits that frequently collide in the uptight 1950s. To get thrown out of uni means getting drafted and probably killed in the Korean War, but his eventual graduation will mean this as well. So the virgin Marcus must take his chances: “I was determined to have intercourse before I died”.

This conflict is enriched by further contradictions: the Jewish Marcus both adores and despises his father, a kosher butcher in New Jersey; Marcus feels immediately alienated by his Wasp-ish uni but dislikes Jewish classmates as well; he fights with equal intensity against the college dean and the class rebel; he pursues a woman who is as inviting as she is troubled.

This is a great book for several reasons. While many novelists try to prove their worth through (endless) description, Roth goes light on details but makes each one count. When a snowstorm hits, repressed male students build “a large, breasted snowwoman” with “a tampon placed jauntily in her lipsticked mouth like a white cigar”. The image is funny, eerie and believable, all at once.

Marcus’s various conflicts revolve around a single theme: the insidious powers of social convention. This is the book’s true subject and stands at the heart of Marcus’s religious, academic, familial and romantic tensions, culminating in a duty to fight to the death in the name of America. Such a structure might be overly schematic in the hands of a lesser writer, but with Roth these subjects coalesce beautifully, emotionally exposing how convention rules the most epic and intimate aspects of our lives.

As with other Roth novels, there are narrative innovations, and here they work well. The powerful ending, though, feels abbreviated. It would have been nice had Roth carried the reader through the resolution more closely.

Indignation by Philip Roth (Black Swan, £16.99; Buy this book; 256pp)

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