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Content snapshot
Flag an inaccuracy →What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.
Violence
Barely any
No significant violence; the Korean War is an offstage threat that claims the protagonist
Language
Barely any
Mild profanity
Sexual Content
A lot
An explicit oral sex scene that becomes the pivot of the plot; frank discussion of sexuality
Substance Use
Barely any
Social drinking in a college setting
Emotional Intensity
A lot
Paranoid anxiety passed from father to son; the waste of young life; the narrator speaks from death with bitter clarity about what he lost
What this book is about
Marcus Messner, a brilliant Newark boy desperate to escape his father's paranoid anxiety, transfers to a conservative Ohio college where he clashes with the dean over chapel attendance and finds himself undone by a single sexual encounter and an undeclared war. Narrated from beyond death, Roth's slim, fierce novella indicts the conformist pressure cooker of 1950s America that destroys promising young men by sending them to Korea.
Notes for sensitive readers
Reader-flagged moments and themes that may affect your experience.
Explicit sexual scene
Death of the young narrator as frame device
Critique of 1950s social conformity
Reader Verification
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