Anyone who has read Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain will recall that around halfway through he springs a huge surprise. The central character is not, as we have been led to suppose, white and Jewish. He is in fact black.

Roth's new novel - his 27th - has a similar coup de théâtre at the heart of it, effectively turning the reader's assumptions on their head. This poses an awkward problem for the reviewer. Should one reveal the twist and risk being hunted down by infuriated Roth fans? Or is it best to skirt coyly round it? For reasons of consideration - or cowardice - I'm plumping for the latter.

Marcus, Indignation's teenage narrator, is rooted in familiar Roth territory. He's raised in the early 1950s in Newark, New Jersey, where his father is a kosher butcher. "I grew up with blood," as he says - and blood, as well as the instruments used to shed it, forms the leitmotif of the book. This is a world abounding in sharp edges.

Marcus's father dotes on his only child. However, he becomes fixated on the idea that something terrible is going to happen to him - more specifically, that Marcus will be killed in the Korean War. The boy may be diligent, responsible and teetotal, yet his father is convinced that for Marcus, as for everyone else, disaster is ever-­present. Repeatedly and with mounting desperation, he tells him: "The tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences."