Posted on June 25, 2008 by Steve Pollak
I was remiss in not posting something about this earlier. But heck, the book hasn't even been published yet so I guess it's not too late.
It seems that last April Hollywood producer Scott Rudin (pictured right) purchased the rights to Philip Roth's new novel, Indignation. The book will be published by Houghton Mifflin in September.
Rudin, who shared the 2008 Academy Award for the Best Motion Picture with the Coen Brothers for 'No Country For Old Men,' reportedly bought the rights to Indignation immediately after reading the book.
Here's the publisher's description of the novel:
Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life's unimagined chances and terrifying consequences.
It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad — mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy.
As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father's fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.
Indignation, Philip Roth's twenty-ninth book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.
This will be sixth Roth novel to be turned into a film. Most recently, Ben Kingman and Penelope Cruz stared in 'Elegy,' an adaptation of Roth's novel, The Dying Animal. The Human Stain hit the big screen in 2003 and The Ghost Writer hit the small screen in 1984. Before that, Portnoy's Complaint was made into a film in 1972 and Goodbye, Columbus became a movie in 1969.
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