A Sterilized Philip Roth Adaptation

The music to listen to while reading Philip Roth’s “Indignation,” if you can bear to use it as background music, is Beethoven’s last quartet, his sixteenth, in F Major, Opus 135, his final completed composition. The piece—or, rather, a record of it—figures prominently in the novel. The college student at the center of the story, Marcus Messner, the son of a Newark butcher, is assigned, in the fall of 1951, to a dorm room at Winesburg, a college in rural Ohio, with three other roommates. One of them, the refined and cynical intellectual Bertram Flusser, insists on playing records of Beethoven loud and late, which annoys the studious and overtaxed Marcus, who finally pulls Bertram’s record of the quartet off the turntable and dashes it against the wall.