Roth, Philip. Indignation. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

As a child, I had sometimes been taken by my father to the slaughterhouse on Astor Street in Newark's Ironbound section. And I had been taken to the chicken market at the far end of Bergen Street. At the chicken market I saw them killing the chickens. I saw them kill hundreds of chickens according to the kosher laws. First my father would pick out the chickens he wanted. They were in a cage, maybe five tiers high, and he would reach in to pull one out, hold on to its head so it didn't bite him, and feel the sternum. If it wiggled, the chicken was young and was not going to be tough; if it was rigid, more than likely the chicken was old and tough. He would also blow on its feathers so he could see the skin—he wanted the flesh to be yellow, a little fatty. Whichever ones he picked, he put into one of the boxes that they had, and then the shochet, the slaughterer, would ritually slaughter them. He would bend the neck backward—not break it, just arc it back, maybe pull a few of the feathers to get the neck clear so he could see what he was doing—and then with his razor-sharp knife he would cut the throat. For the chickens to be kosher he had to cut the throat in one smooth, deadly stroke. One of the strangest sights I remember from my early youth was the slaughtering of the nonkosher chickens, where they lopped the head right off. Swish! Plop! Whereupon they put the headless chicken down into a funnel. They had about six or seven funnels in a circle. There the blood could drain from the body into a big barrel. Sometimes the chickens' legs were still moving, and occasionally a chicken would fall out of the funnel and, as the saying has it, begin running around with its head cut off. Such chickens might bump into a wall but they ran anyway. They put the kosher chickens in the funnels too. The bloodletting, the killing—my father was hardened to these things, but at the beginning I was of course unsettled, much as I tried not to show it. I was a little one, six, seven years old, but this was the business, and soon I accepted that the business was a mess. The same at the slaughterhouse, where to kosher the animal, you have to get the blood out. In a nonkosher slaughterhouse they can shoot the animal, they can knock it unconscious, they can kill it any way they way to kill it. But to be kosher they've got the bleed it to death. And in my days as a butcher's little son, learning what slaughtering was about they would hang the animal by its foot to bleed it. First a chain is wrapped around the rear leg—they trap it that way. But that chain is also a hoist, and quickly they hoist it up, and it hangs from its heel so that all the blood will run down to the head and the upper body. They they're ready to kill it. Enter shochet in skullcap. Sits in a little sort of alcove, at least at the Astor Street slaughterhouse he did, takes the head of the animal, lays it over his knees, takes a pretty big blade, says a bracha—a blessing—and he cuts the neck. If he does it in one slice, severs the trachea, the esophagus, and the carotids, and doesn't touch the backbone, the animal died instantly and is kosher; if it takes two slices or the animal is sick or disabled or the knife isn't perfectly sharp or the backbone is merely nicked, the animal is not kosher. The shochet slits the throat from ear to ear and then lets the animal hang there until all the blood flows out. It's as if he took a bucket of blood, as if he took several buckets, and poured them out all at once, because that's how fast blood gushes from the arteries onto the floor, a concrete floor with a drain in it. He stands there in boots, in blood up to his ankles despite the drain—and I saw all this when I was a boy. I witnessed it many times. My father thought it was important for me to see it—the same man who now was afraid of everything for me and, for whatever reason, afraid for himself.

My point is this: that is what Olivia had tried to do, to kill herself according to kosher specifications by emptying her body of blood. Had she been successful, had she expertly completed the job with a single perfect slice of the blade, she would have rendered herself kosher in accordance with rabbinical law. Olivia's telltale scar came from attempting to perform her own ritual slaughter. (157-161)

I include the all of the this because it's pretty much the whole novel right there, encapsulated. You can see all the conflicts, except also know that most of the action takes place at a small college in Ohio where the narrator, Marcus, meets Olivia. I also wanted to include the all of it because it's some of the best writing I've read in a while. Not because of the gore. I'm about calf-deep in a book on taxidermy and so I've got enough animal dismemberment to fill my hours. No, it's because of the strong plainness of it all.

Here's how a bad writer such as this one would handle such a passage:

As a child, my father would carve time out of the granite of his day-to-day to schlep me down to the slaughterhouses, where I would stand like a pylon in the middle of the killing floor, my father at my side with one heavy hand rested on my quivering shoulder, to watch the ritualistic killing of hundreds and hundreds of chickens. The blood, thin and flowing and orange. A new consistency to an old condiment. It ran like a waterfall to the floor, where it pooled around the feet of the butcher as though he were standing in a kiddie pool. And the animal just hung there, drained of its essence like a post-crystal podling.

I don't know anything about writing, and one thing I don't know more than I don't know everything else is confidence and trust in the strength of my material. Roth knows just to give us the blood and give us the details of the work and we'll make everything happen in our heads. We don't need a "fresh" and "vivid" smashing-up of new words to keep readers interested. Why can't I figure this out?

And it's not a matter of writing transparently either. Roth's sentences don't necessarily call attention to certain aspects of themselves, but they certainly hold my attention. I'm aware, in the above passage, of those deft little moments he switches from the simple past to the conditional tense and then back to the past and then into the present. I'm aware of the careful repetitions.

At any rate, I got this book and read it quickly because every single review I'd come across talked about something unprecedented and incredible that happens around the 50-page mark, and rather than have it be spoiled for me I had to buy it and read it quickly. It's not that earth-shattering, I guess. If you want to know everything there is to know (literally, a nearly page-by-page synopsis of the novella's entire plot from start to finish), just read Simic's review in the NYRoB. Why do they do this? Who wants to read a review of a book that reads like a Cliff's Notes synopsis, with minimal praise at fore and aft?

Oh, and Mr. Roth, if you want to talk about indignation, try charging $26 to what should by all sane people be called a novella. Oh wait, you did.