Infuriated by all this possessiveness, Marcus leaves New Jersey and goes off to Winesburg College in rural Ohio. There he is no less diligent, no less responsible than he's been in Newark. But Marcus is not a mixer; he refuses to join a college fraternity, makes few friends and spends most of his time buried in his law studies.

Yet however much he absents himself from the world, dark fatalistic forces are shaping his destiny. He falls for a fellow student, Olivia, with whom he enjoys some rare moments of accord. Olivia, though, is beset by dark forces herself, as the knife scars on her wrist reveal. Marcus also becomes increasingly aware of his Jewishness and of the undertow of anti-Semitism that permeates college life. Some of this may be paranoia, as he acknowledges, but not all: to be Jewish amid the sporting jocks of Winesburg College in the early 1950s is to be an object of both curiosity and disdain.

Not a great deal happens in Indignation - it's a very short novel of fewer than 60,000 words. But later on Marcus will have ample opportunity to replay these deliberately spare events in his mind. He will also have cause to reflect on the precariousness of life, the way in which we are buffeted by chance while clinging desperately to notions of self-­determination. In the end, Roth is saying, life is just a chapter of accidents - an endless litany of "if onlys" - with some chapters being more randomly curtailed than others.

Here, as everywhere else in Roth, there is ample evidence of his fascination with people's working lives. Despite the brevity of the book, he still manages to cram in a good deal about the mechanics of butchery. You will, for instance, find a brief but memorably graphic description of how to eviscerate a chicken: "You slit open the ass a little bit and you stick your hand up and you grab the viscera and you pull them out."