NEW YORK — Philip Roth, 75 and the author of more than 20 novels, is thinking about a strange and distant era: his college years.
“I think that what happens is that as the decades pass and one becomes older, one becomes conscious of history in one’s own time,” he said during a recent interview at the Manhattan offices of his publisher, Houghton Mifflin.
“History ceases to be what happens in the previous centuries and is what happens 40 or 50 years ago. And you have to get older to see it.”
In his new novel “Indignation,” Roth resurrects a world he can hardly believe existed — when male and female college students were required to live separately, when early curfews were enforced and panty raids the limit of sexual rebellion.
It was the early 1950s.
“This was just 50 years ago that life for undergraduates was like that,” said Roth, who majored in English at Bucknell University and graduated in 1954. “Kids now would think the way they live was in the Declaration of Independence.
“I still am startled that young men and young women live in the same dormitory. It is utterly foreign to me. … So I thought I could bring news, news from the past.”
“Indignation” is set at fictional Winesburg College, a fantasy of what kind of campus might have existed in “Winesburg, Ohio,” Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 classic about a repressed Midwestern town.
The college is dull, predictable, Christian, and the novel’s narrator, Marcus Messner, is not.
Messner is a highly intelligent, innocent, well-mannered Jewish atheist from Newark, N.J., a kosher butcher’s son who has transferred from a small, hometown college.
He feels stunned, even violated, when pretty, sophisticated Olivia Hutton performs oral sex on him.
He fights with his roommates, refuses to attend chapel because he doesn’t believe in God, is accused of rape, curses a school dean and vomits on his rug.
If some writers are inspired by unhappy childhoods, Roth has been scarred more by the twists of adulthood. In the memoirs “Patrimony” and “The Facts,” he has written lovingly of his parents, especially his father, and described his early years as happy and secure.
But nothing prepared him for how the world changed, and how his life changed, from the notoriety of “Defender of the Faith,” to the fame and scandal of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” his million-selling novel of uncontrolled guilt and lust.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and many other awards, Roth insists upon difficulty and messiness.
“I’m interested in what people do with the chaos in their lives,” he said, “and how they respond to it, and simultaneously what they do with what they feel like are limitations.”
“Life is surprises,” he said, “and our capacity to absorb surprises is not great.”
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