So, I’ve had a bit more time with Charles Simic’s review of Indignation , and it’s prompted this unplanned penultimate entry in my Summer of Roth ruminations.
I include a cursory look at the different responses to the novel in my final post, but two things struck me in particular about the Simic review that I wanted to take up with you. First, on my second, closer reading, I noticed this error in Simic’s review: "Olivia has a scar across the width of her wrist that Marcus noticed the first night." That’s incorrect. Marcus fails to notice the scar, and makes much of this later in the book. In a letter to Olivia, he does write "I did see the scar at dinner," but immediately after the letter, the narrator admits "I didn’t know what I was doing by lying to her about noticing the scar ... " (p. 76)
It seems to me there are two ways of looking at this. The first is simply that honest mistakes happen - reviewers are human after all. &...
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