On today’s WNYC broadcast of the Leonard Lopate Show, Philip Roth discussed his new novel Indignation, Communist national anthems (!?!)*, desultory oral sex, Newark (of course), and his work in progress, The Humbling. A podcast of the program can be found here.
And along the way, he revealed that the protagonist of Indignation, Marcus “Markie” Messner, was relating his tale not from the hereafter but from a hazy comatose state.
*(Incidentally, was the line “Indignation fills the heart of all our countrymen,” from which Roth’s title derives, ever truly part of the Chinese national anthem? A Google search of these words turns up only links to Roth’s novel—which admittedly proves nothing at all, of course, but we would still be curious to know the song’s provenance…)