The Human Stain: American Trilogy (3)

Loved early Roth (Goodbye Columbus etc.) but he has been going straight downhill for several years. This misshapen thing is terrible -- not least because of the cardboard cutout cliche Vietnam veteran character. A beginning writer would cringe at stooping so low; from one of America's previously better novelists it is appalling. Not many groups left to pick on and be PC -- Nam vets and rednecks are the only two that come to mind -- but this think is fatally flawed and ugly.

I found the book densely written, overly long with interminable descriptions of minutia about a sorry lot of characters. The characters come across as cartoons living in a cartoon world. The author's purpose was not clear and the book left me with the feeling that he was only trying to convey loneliness, futility and despair. The reader would need to be of like mind to enjoy it.

Undoubtedly it is a masterpiece. The plot is capturing with some really intriguing twists. The characters are very complex resembling real life people and not fiction characters. The pace is somewhat slow consisting of many deep, long esoteric monologues which might be very interesting but in some times they can be boring, too. The style of writing is sometimes tiresome (for a non native speaker like me) due to very long and complex sentences. But there is also an emotional intensity which can become mesmerising.

Choppy narrative. Elongated sentences that take you know where. I really wanted to like it - no big surprises, thin plot. Characters under developed, flat characters with long inner monologues. You don't get to see inside the mind of even the main character.This book could have been so much more- big book club disappointment. Author's opinion of himself is grand; of everyone else not so much. Seems to be a real piece of work; misogynistic charasterization of women.

Really underdeveloped characterization BUT agree with another in pointing out that the characters seem like caricatures. What was the point of the French professor - another stain? The mistress, the protagonist, the family itself should have been developed more in a show me style instead of an omniprescent soloquied narrative. The story takes you no where, rambling, rambling, rambling. Skip 100 pages and you won't miss anthing.I did like the Monica Lewinsky stuff at the beginning but no need to dredge it up later and that certainly was not the book's theme. Maybe it was a theme of lonliness and being super flawed. Note- I am thrilled with long pieces of interesting work but this book can not sustain.

I finished this book just as this controversy about a women claiming to be black is exposed as a fraud by her white parents. In this novel, Coleman Silk is undone with charges of being a white racist even though he was born black and chose to reject that identity. Ms. Dolezal on the other hand is unmasked as being `white' and she claims she has been subjected to hate crimes. Step back and realize what we have. Two individuals have chosen their identity. They risked exposure, ridicule and humiliation because American society has decided that choosing a racial identity is taboo.

This Dolezal moment comes on the heels of Caitlyn Jenner who very publicly has chosen a gender identity which we celebrate as being much less taboo than it once was. Ms. Dolezal is ridiculed for choosing her racial identity while Ms. Jenner is called courageous for choosing her gender identity.

There are good reasons for differing reactions between these two acts but it is instructive to remember that identity is a construct. The "Human Stain" deals extensively with the various ways character choose identities and how this helps and hinders them through their lives. Silk's choice to be white is the central identity for this novel but is hardly the only one. Another character choses to take a diagnosis of PTSD and wear that as an identity. Still another is an incest victim. Still another choses to become an orthodox Jew. The narrator has the identity as a writer which at the end of the book is demeaned. Is he a writer of mere mysteries?

Silk is a humanities professor who we witness teaching the Iliad that foundational text for Western Civilization. Silk's job is to teach students what it means to be fully human. Surely this effort involves issues of identity but does this uber text reach out to us as beyond identity? Does it say that we aren't all divided up and separated by these masks we wear that allow us to succeed or give us solace if we don't? Do we lose our humanity by clinging to tightly to a construct that walls us off from others?

Silk's choice to pass as white isn't something he has to work at. Once made, he never has to announce it or support it. He is bestowed with that identity by society as he is charismatic and smart. It is as if he gets the gift of this identity as a reward for being exceptional. Yet in the end he becomes ensnared in by it. His anger at his college, the professors and students is portrayed as a monumental rage and once we understand the irony of this black man being called a white racist we can also understand that rage as fueled by all that he lost by claiming to be white.

Yes this is a book about identity but it is also a book about America and in this country racial identity is still that which is most charged. Being white in American is an identity perpetuated by racism. Being white is important only as it pertains to not being black. White people voted for Obama in hopes of putting race behind us. Look, a black man and woman with their black children now occupy the White House. What could be more symbolic of overcoming the racial divide than giving the keys of the kingdom to a black man?

Thing was that for the vast majority of black people in America, prison, crime, poverty, lousy education and healthcare were their shackles. Of course we were told that this was because of their culture of victimhood and but then in the past few years technology has allowed us to see what it is like to be a black person in the hands of the police. What we see, now almost daily, is that police abuse can't be blamed on the culture of black people. It has everything to do with white power and privilege that still pervades our society. These "incidents" are simply the most obvious and painful intersection between race and power but what we saw made it clear that our black president hasn't been able to wave a magic wand after all. The author of the "Human Stain" couldn't have known this would happen in the decades after his book's publication but I know it wouldn't surprise him.

Roth's Shaming of the PC Speech Police as Censors, and the Religious/Moral Right (as well as Feminists) as Imposing Moral Values Judgments as the Law of the Land or a Reason for Disqualification

Coleman Silk, a professor of classics at a local esteemed college, has been accused of racism by two African American students in one of his classes, after he notices upon calling roll that these two enrolled students never attend his class, and mumbles : "Do they exist or are they spooks?"

Roth brilliantly uses the most ambiguous word that has many more legitimate meanings than the sole racially derogatory meaning to African Americans. The most comprehensive definition is provided by Wiktionary which indicates the term's many meanings, a few of which fit the context of the professor's statement, only one of which is the racially offensive, pejorative use. The primary other use which appears to fit the context unless some evidence of a racial animus could be shown is of an apparition who is present but cannot be seen. This latter meaning is in fact its primary English meaning since its etymology revolves around various references to "ghost" or "apparition": cognate Dutch spook (“ghost"), Middle Dutch spooc (“spook, ghost"); liken German Spuk (“ghost, apparition"), Middle Low German spok (“spook"), and Norwegian spjok (“ghost, specter").

Silk says he used the word "spook" to sarcastically imply the "possibility" that the students might be attending as ghosts or spirits. That, since they did not attend class and he didn't know who they were, he could not even know their race.

I won't get too sidetracked on "political correctness" run amok in this country, particularly in academia, and misused as a tool amounting to censorship, but I'll footnote excellent, reasoned quotes from a nonfiction book about the cultural revolution changing this country since the 1960s as well as two late iconoclastic hyper-intellectuals: David Foster Wallace and Christopher Hitchens.**

The narrator is Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Roth based the novel on an incident involving his friend, a professor at Princeton University. Silk resigns his post in anger and raises the stakes (and ire of campus feminists) when he starts dating an illiterate, but intelligent, female custodian who's about 30 years younger than he is (she's 34). She has a former lover who has serious "issues" arising from his stint in Vietnam.

The piercing irony is in Silk's disclosure that he is an African American who's been "passing" as Jewish and white since he served in the Navy. He married a white woman and had 4 children with her. His wife recently died and he never told her or the children of his/their ancestry. Silk decided to "take the future into his own hands rather than to leave it to an unenlightened society to determine his fate." Zuckerman frames novel and retells the back story in flashbacks as conveyed to him by Silk.

Against a present backdrop of the 1998 Oval Office Orgasm Scandal of former President Bill Clinton, Roth develops what I believe is his best novel, one raising trusty old questions of identity and self-invention, i.e., questions of whether one can change the past (Gatsby) or whether the past is ever even past (Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun). Two passages on these issues that I considered especially poignant were:

“There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.”

“I couldn't imagine anything that could have made Coleman more of a mystery to me than this unmasking. Now that I knew everything, it was as though I knew nothing.”

**From Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America:

“As with most revolutions, the counterculture's call for total freedom quickly turned into a demand for total control. The phenomenon of 'political correctness', with its speech codes and other efforts to enforce ideological conformity, was one predictable result of this transformation. What began at the University of California at Berkeley with the Free Speech Movement (called by some the 'Filthy Speech Movement'} soon degenerated into an effort to abridge freedom by dictating what could and could not be said about any number of politically sensitive issues.”

From David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays:

“There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact--in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself--of vast[ ] ... help to conservatives and the US status quo.... Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed using taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PC progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as "low-income" or "economically disadvantaged" or "pre-prosperous" rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates. [...] In other words, PCE acts as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.”

“I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument.”
― Christopher Hitchens

I finished this book just as this controversy about a women claiming to be black is exposed as a fraud by her white parents. In this novel, Coleman Silk is undone with charges of being a white racist even though he was born black and chose to reject that identity. Ms. Dolezal on the other hand is unmasked as being `white' and she claims she has been subjected to hate crimes. Step back and realize what we have. Two individuals have chosen their identity. They risked exposure, ridicule and humiliation because American society has decided that choosing a racial identity is taboo.

This Dolezal moment comes on the heels of Caitlyn Jenner who very publicly has chosen a gender identity which we celebrate as being much less taboo than it once was. Ms. Dolezal is ridiculed for choosing her racial identity while Ms. Jenner is called courageous for choosing her gender identity.

There are good reasons for differing reactions between these two acts but it is instructive to remember that identity is a construct. The "Human Stain" deals extensively with the various ways character choose identities and how this helps and hinders them through their lives. Silk's choice to be white is the central identity for this novel but is hardly the only one. Another character choses to take a diagnosis of PTSD and wear that as an identity. Still another is an incest victim. Still another choses to become an orthodox Jew. The narrator has the identity as a writer which at the end of the book is demeaned. Is he a writer of mere mysteries?

Silk is a humanities professor who we witness teaching the Iliad that foundational text for Western Civilization. Silk's job is to teach students what it means to be fully human. Surely this effort involves issues of identity but does this uber text reach out to us as beyond identity? Does it say that we aren't all divided up and separated by these masks we wear that allow us to succeed or give us solace if we don't? Do we lose our humanity by clinging to tightly to a construct that walls us off from others?

Silk's choice to pass as white isn't something he has to work at. Once made, he never has to announce it or support it. He is bestowed with that identity by society as he is charismatic and smart. It is as if he gets the gift of this identity as a reward for being exceptional. Yet in the end he becomes ensnared in by it. His anger at his college, the professors and students is portrayed as a monumental rage and once we understand the irony of this black man being called a white racist we can also understand that rage as fueled by all that he lost by claiming to be white.

Yes this is a book about identity but it is also a book about America and in this country racial identity is still that which is most charged. Being white in American is an identity perpetuated by racism. Being white is important only as it pertains to not being black. White people voted for Obama in hopes of putting race behind us. Look, a black man and woman with their black children now occupy the White House. What could be more symbolic of overcoming the racial divide than giving the keys of the kingdom to a black man?

Thing was that for the vast majority of black people in America, prison, crime, poverty, lousy education and healthcare were their shackles. Of course we were told that this was because of their culture of victimhood and but then in the past few years technology has allowed us to see what it is like to be a black person in the hands of the police. What we see, now almost daily, is that police abuse can't be blamed on the culture of black people. It has everything to do with white power and privilege that still pervades our society. These "incidents" are simply the most obvious and painful intersection between race and power but what we saw made it clear that our black president hasn't been able to wave a magic wand after all. The author of the "Human Stain" couldn't have known this would happen in the decades after his book's publication but I know it wouldn't surprise him.

** spoiler alert ** Philip Roth's 2000 The Human Stain is an artful, psychological tale of a Classics professor disgraced by a false accusation of racism, a novel that not only explores the conflicts of race and gender and class but also examines issues of hypocrisy, modern education, and, perhaps most important, the personal construction of "self."

After serving as professor at the traditionally ivied Athena College in picturesque rural New England, and then as the Dean who swept out the desiccated academic mummies shambling to class with decades-old lecture notes and replaced them with vigorous new talent, Dr. Coleman Silk planned to spend the last few semesters of his career in a return to teaching. One day, however, when the waggish Silk wonders aloud if two students who still have not appeared by the sixth week of class are merely "spooks," or ghosts, the remark somehow gets back to one of the students, who happens to be African-American, and soon the predictable charges of racism are thrown about until they pile up like kindling and spontaneously ignite. The President who once used Silk as a bulldozer for change is gone, the new Dean, an intellectually and sexually insecure Frenchwoman whom Silk now regrets ever hiring, becomes Silk's chief self-righteous persecutor, and none of his supposed fellow seekers of truth in the ranks of the faculty even attempt to defend him from the contrived accusations. Silk resigns in disgust, and shortly afterward his wife dies of a stroke that he bitterly blames on the scandal. For two years the former academic seethes, writing Spooks, the enraged memoir of the injustices done to him and to his supposedly martyred wife.

All of this is the quick background, though, for where Nathan Zuckerman, the professional novelist who narrates the story, really picks up the tale is with the affair the Viagra-reinvigorated 71-year-old man is having with Faunia Farley, the 34-year-old woman serving as janitor at Athena and part-time cleaner of the post office, who also helps with milking at the local dairy farm in exchange for rooming there. Yet not only is Faunia dirt-poor, but she also purports to be illiterate. Thus in addition to the May-December aspect of the relationship at which gossipers might sneer, the suspicious might consider the wealthy, well-educated Silk something of a calculating predator only a half-step up from a rapist. Aside from Lester Farley, Faunia's ex-husband who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder from the Vietnam War and who sometimes stalks the pair, Silk's friend Zuckerman is the only one who knows about the secret relationship.

The secret does come out, of course, and it is no plot spoiler to mention that the secret lovers will be dead only months after the book opens--Zuckerman, after all, clues us into this quite early on, so offhandedly that at first it almost could be missed. That life-and-death part of the plot holds up well, and yet so, too, does the narrative's investigation into the carefully hidden past of Coleman Silk, a curly-haired man apparently of Mediterranean descent, who for decades has identified as "white" and Jewish. Almost no character in the novel is who he or she outwardly appears, however--not Silk, with his origins as a high-achieving "colored" youth of the 1930s and '40s; not Faunia, with her two children killed while she was out cheating on her husband, and the diary that turns up after the supposedly illiterate woman's death; not Delphine Roux, whose hatred of Silk stems as much from her hidden attraction as from her trendy principles; not Herb Keble, the African-American professor hired by Silk long ago, who knows full well of Silk's innocence but does not come forward until too late; not even Zuckerman, intrepid and all-knowing narrator whose control of his own bladder has been robbed by surgery for prostate cancer.

I would suggest that there is not a single thread in this tangle of characters, motivations, and secrets that fails to intrigue and delight. Roth's style is interesting, too, to readers of patience and open minds; paragraphs sometimes are huge and sentences long enough that occasionally they must be traced back and restarted for full comprehension, and references to Classical mythology are not entirely lacking, shall we say, but all of these things are perfectly appropriate in a "literary" work rather than one of middling, muddling style or lack thereof.

Point of view is perhaps even more of an artful puzzle, for while the novel begins with the first-person POV of Zuckerman as author, it soon dips into the secrets of Coleman's boyhood--which very near the end of the book, we learn that Zuckerman does yet even suspect until after the man is buried--and it also dips, in third-person-limited fashion, into the otherwise-unknowable inner lives of both Faunia and Les Farley. How can Zuckerman know these things, when Faunia, whom Zuckeman met only briefly, ends up killed in a car accident, and Les is portrayed as cagily insane? The meeting of Coleman's sister after the funeral explains one track, but for the other two...well, as Zuckerman comments, his job is telling stories, so apparently all the unknowable details of Faunia's and Les's thoughts, at first presented as narrated fact, have been fictionally extrapolated, hypothesized, or--let's face it--simply made up by Zuckerman. This, too, is part of the subtle art here, the final, somewhat surprising result making the supposedly real narrator little different from the godlike third-person-omniscient narrators floating disembodied in the narrative heavens high above other works.

In short, The Human Stain--by turns witty, gritty, lyrical, earthy and casually profane, and sorrowfully painful--is a fascinating novel for the reader of discernment as it plumbs the depths of the human mind and the conventions of modern academia and wider society alike.

Roth's Shaming of the PC Speech Police as Censors, and the Religious/Moral Right (as well as Feminists) as Imposing Moral Values Judgments as the Law of the Land or a Reason for Disqualification

Coleman Silk, a professor of classics at a local esteemed college, has been accused of racism by two African American students in one of his classes, after he notices upon calling roll that these two enrolled students never attend his class, and mumbles : "Do they exist or are they spooks?"

Roth brilliantly uses the most ambiguous word that has many more legitimate meanings than the sole racially derogatory meaning to African Americans. The most comprehensive definition is provided by Wiktionary which indicates the term's many meanings, a few of which fit the context of the professor's statement, only one of which is the racially offensive, pejorative use. The primary other use which appears to fit the context unless some evidence of a racial animus could be shown is of an apparition who is present but cannot be seen. This latter meaning is in fact its primary English meaning since its etymology revolves around various references to "ghost" or "apparition": cognate Dutch spook (“ghost"), Middle Dutch spooc (“spook, ghost"); liken German Spuk (“ghost, apparition"), Middle Low German spok (“spook"), and Norwegian spjok (“ghost, specter").

Silk says he used the word "spook" to sarcastically imply the "possibility" that the students might be attending as ghosts or spirits. That, since they did not attend class and he didn't know who they were, he could not even know their race.

I won't get too sidetracked on "political correctness" run amok in this country, particularly in academia, and misused as a tool amounting to censorship, but I'll footnote excellent, reasoned quotes from a nonfiction book about the cultural revolution changing this country since the 1960s as well as two late iconoclastic hyper-intellectuals: David Foster Wallace and Christopher Hitchens.**

The narrator is Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Roth based the novel on an incident involving his friend, a professor at Princeton University. Silk resigns his post in anger and raises the stakes (and ire of campus feminists) when he starts dating an illiterate, but intelligent, female custodian who's about 30 years younger than he is (she's 34). She has a former lover who has serious "issues" arising from his stint in Vietnam.

The piercing irony is in Silk's disclosure that he is an African American who's been "passing" as Jewish and white since he served in the Navy. He married a white woman and had 4 children with her. His wife recently died and he never told her or the children of his/their ancestry. Silk decided to "take the future into his own hands rather than to leave it to an unenlightened society to determine his fate." Zuckerman frames novel and retells the back story in flashbacks as conveyed to him by Silk.

Against a present backdrop of the 1998 Oval Office Orgasm Scandal of former President Bill Clinton, Roth develops what I believe is his best novel, one raising trusty old questions of identity and self-invention, i.e., questions of whether one can change the past (Gatsby) or whether the past is ever even past (Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun). Two passages on these issues that I considered especially poignant were:

“There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.”

“I couldn't imagine anything that could have made Coleman more of a mystery to me than this unmasking. Now that I knew everything, it was as though I knew nothing.”

**From Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America:

“As with most revolutions, the counterculture's call for total freedom quickly turned into a demand for total control. The phenomenon of 'political correctness', with its speech codes and other efforts to enforce ideological conformity, was one predictable result of this transformation. What began at the University of California at Berkeley with the Free Speech Movement (called by some the 'Filthy Speech Movement'} soon degenerated into an effort to abridge freedom by dictating what could and could not be said about any number of politically sensitive issues.”

From David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays:

“There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact--in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself--of vast[ ] ... help to conservatives and the US status quo.... Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed using taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PC progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as "low-income" or "economically disadvantaged" or "pre-prosperous" rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates. [...] In other words, PCE acts as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.”

“I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument.”
― Christopher Hitchens

As the final book in Phillip Roth's trilogy about the chaos of post-war America, The Human Stain weaves the myth of a post racial society, the public's obsession with sex following Clinton's indictment, and the plight of a country flooded with veterans of the Vietnam War with the story of an exiled college professor and his lover a janitor.

Following the first two books in the series about the red scare and fear of communism and the shock of the political violence of the 1960s on the Greatest Generation, this story about the 1990s shows the conflicts from the first two novels coming down from boil to a low simmer. Much of the same paranoia is still present in this society, but at a much more subtle level.

*spoilers*

Race is not a biological category of the human race, instead it is a social construct determined by man for it's own arbitrary purposes. The revelation partway through the book that Coleman was indeed a black man posing as a white Jew immediately suggests the subversion of a racist culture. Instead of the overt racism of the mid 20th century, the movement towards extreme political correctness drove the black identity underground. The character of Coleman was always hiding from his true identity, as a black man and as a father. It wasn't until his strange affair that he truly lived in the moment and dealt with it as it was, and not in the context of the greater society and the future. I suspect that he married his first wife and had children because he felt pushed by society, not necessarily because he wanted to.

The relationship of Faunia and Coleman was really interesting, especially within the context of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. The entire scandal devalued a very competent President in the eyes of the American people and demonized sexual relations in the public eye. Once the scandal broke, everyone in the era was on a witch hunt for impure actions both within their communities and the government. As opposed to the Red Scare of the 1950s, this hunt was more hypocritical because everyone was demonizing a sexual act by certain people while doing the same acts on their own personal time. In addition to the affair, the fact that Coleman was disgraced by his community by an inadvertent racist remark harkens back to both the public witch hunt for impure actions as well as the rise of violent political correctness in society.

Finally, the character of Faunia's ex-husband struggling with PTSD showcased the fact that while the Vietnam war was far from over, the people in the United States were far from over it mentally and physically. I think one of the most arresting scenes in the book was when Les was describing his twisted thought processes for going after Coleman and Faunia.

After Faunia and Coleman had their fight, Faunia went to the Audubon Society to visit a caged crow that was housed there. When she was there she talked about the fallible nature of humanity and how we were all covered in a "human stain." This scene demonstrates another major theme of the work, that all humans have their problems and flaws but we all continue to live and exist as we are with one another.

Overall, this was a very interesting book. Roth did a great job of showing how the 1990s wasn't a decade of eventful clashes like the 1960s, but more of a reactionary decade. The country was still seething from all of the upheaval of the late part of the century, and all of this was clashing with the advent of the internet and other various events. I especially enjoyed the more mysterious aspect of this book and the foreshadowing of the deaths of Faunia and Coleman. While I really can't relate to any of the characters, the story was told in a very interesting manner which kept the pages turning. It was still a bit too long winded like the other books in the series, but the suspenseful story telling kept me interested.

The Human Stain is typical later Philip Roth: sharp insight into contemporary American mores, wicked humor, interesting characters, but rendered with a numbing prolixity that lessens the reader's enjoyment of the tale.

Others have recounted the story, and I won't repeat what they say. The story of Coleman Silk's passing as a white Jew, abjuring his Negro roots is told extremely well in a technical sense. Mixing that strand with his being run out of Athena College for an offhand remark about spooks, which he insists he meant only in the most basic, not the slang sense, and also with his having an affair with a college janitor one half his age would be a rich enough melange. But there are shortcomings. Mr Roth must always overdo. Roth pours on top of all that, classical reference, equating poor Coleman with rash King Oedipus, giving us the tincture of Greek tragedy, peppered with biting commentaries on the now receding into the mist melodrama of Bill Clinton and Ms. Lewinski.

I had not read Roth in several years and was mildly disappointed in what I saw here. He obviously has a good mind, a great heart, and a vigorous writing style. However I am left with the feeling that he is always writing as if he were driving a sports car down a winding country road at a constant 80 mph. No foot off the gas pedal, no foot on the brakes. It's all in the same manly assertive, raised voice. Admirable but tiresome. If he could have modulated that, I think he would be in the upper, upper echelon of American writers.

Philip Roth's The Human Stain is an excellent example of what T.S. Eliot described in his essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." First, let's note that "Roth" derives from the German word for red. And the surname of his petite French professor, Delphine Roux, whose interview costume of a mini-kilt and tights resembles the getup of a French poule, means reddish brown. The novel's hero, Professor Coleman Silk, aka Silberzweig, like Sammy Davis, Jr., is a pale-skinned Negro Jew who can and does pass as Caucasian. Like Hemingway's Robert Cohn, he is also an accomplished boxer. As dean of the fictional Athena College in the Berkshires, he comes to "Roux" having hired Delphine, who perversely has an unrequited crush on him. Her loneliness brings to mind the dictum of Zorba the Greek: "When a woman sleeps alone, it is a disgrace to every man." But at 71, Coleman, aided by Viagra -- whose properties I think Roth misconstrues and exaggerates -- prefers an uneducated but by no means stupid janitoress. The theme of overthrowing one's origins and succeeding in life on one's own terms seems like an illustration of Arthus Miller's essay, "The Family in Modern Drama." As in most novels, there are some improbable twists of plot, e.g., the narrator's naivete in thinking that by moving he can escape the story's villain, or the police department's failure to check Delphine's office for fingerprints after it has been trashed -- by her, not, as she claims, by the just deceased Coleman. The book contains one literary term not found in any dictionary I've consulted: diegetic; but its antecedent noun, diegesis, is defined in an online dictionary as a narrative explanation, i.e., a narrative exegesis, to which latter word it is obviously related etymologically. Roth's complex development of all the book's characters, his Jamesian sentences, and distilled wisdom render this work a tour de force well worth reading and highly recommended.

The Human Stain is Philip Roth's third selection in the American trilogy. Once again we have Nathan Zuckerman acting as narrator for Philip Roth describing the life of a slightly older once athletic Jewish New Jersey boy who built the American dream only to have it fracture. Coleman "Silky" Silk former professor of classics and one time Dean at Athena College has been forced into retirement in the face of an unjust claim that he is a racist. A female colleague at the school took advantage of a poorly worded if appropriate joke to ruin his career while advancing her own.

Along the way the professor has begun a very unlikely affair with an illiterate much younger cleaning woman. It seems necessary to clarify that the professor at this point is in his early 70s and his girlfriend is 34. It is manifest that she is her own woman, a strong woman and not some dewy eyed arm candy seduced by the notion of publicly associating with a PhD. In fact Faunia Farley has her own reasons for keeping their liaison away from small-town rumor mongering. Ms. Farley's main problem with going public is her ex, a Vietnam vet.

The human stain was published originally in 2000. The damaged and dangerous Vietnam vet had already become the clichéd literary figure. Less Farley is not one of Philip Roth's best characters. However in describing to us his personality and his psychology we're given a figure of complexity beyond of the limits of cliché. And again it becomes easy to get lost in the many corners and digressions in a Philip Roth novel.

In terms of storytelling and language, The Human Stain represents a Philip Roth who has returned from the weak second book to this far superior ending to his trilogy. Even as we hear the story recounted; again third hand Roth to Zuckerman from Silk, we find ourselves drawn into a world wherein we live the conversation that circulate around us. Silk is a man with secrets. Silk has been brought down on the charge of racism and ultimately we will find the cruelty behind this charge.

Roth is generally not at his best with women characters. Indeed neither Faunia Silk's new woman nor Prof. Delphine Roux the woman who engineered his fall are ever as well developed as most of the Roth male characters. This said neither woman is condescended to by the author nor are they likely to be underrated by any of the males within the storyline.

As is true in each of the three books of the American trilogy Roth will take some time to set up his character and his story. It is worth your while to let him do so. Roth is a master storyteller. The Human Stain is a complex story line. Along the way you will be rewarded by reading the language of a man who is an artist in the use of language.

This book was rather hard to follow at first. However, after reading through a few chapters, it gets a grip on you. This is a story of a young black man who was light skinned. He came from a home full of love and motivation; however, when he went to college in DC, he was called slang words for blacks. He was not accustomed to this harsh treatment of being unaccepted. He quit and joined the service where he signed in as white. Upon leaving the service, he told people he was a Jew. In order to marry a white woman, he felt he must never let her know his roots. Therefore, he made a visit to his mother, disowning his family for good. Such a sad story of how a young man feels he must give up his roots in order to be accepted and successful. He indeed did become successful as a college professor. However, the end of his life did not end so well at all.
This is a book that really makes us ponder how people can get past their roots regardless of their race. There are economic hindrances, illiteracy in families, and so many things that sometimes a young person must make decisions if he wants to have a different life for himself. This book addresses those concerns.

It really makes us ponder the hardships that people face when they want to go beyond what perhaps society would allow under their present circumstances. The author did an excellent job of keeping the reader interested while making the mind view so many different important truths.

The protagonist is one of Roth's classic characters and the POV (that of the non-neutral, no holds barred Nathan Zuckerman) is the perfect vehicle to display the magnificent fabric of this man's life even as it is snuffed out by the stupidity of the times in which he finds himself. There are so many layers of delicious irony here, from Silk's having escaped from racism and wrapped himself in denial of particular notion of race at all, only to be destroyed by political correctness--the McCarthyism of the 1990s--to being trapped in events and somehow frozen in time that stupefied and paralyzed our nation during the Clinton impeachment fiasco. What a great snapshot of human stupidity and manipulation!

The Les Farley character is a bit of a cliche (another character trapped in time by his trauma) and Faunia's interior monologue is a bit of fashionable literary bling based on the trendy Marxist influence and core beliefs that the working class have deep sensitivities and complex interior lives. As one who grew up with the working class, I have yet to see such examples and these literary devices rarely ring true. However, Roth's writing and the story's structure are so finely crafted that I didn't really mind such lapses. The Delphine Roux character was wonderfully entertaining. Anybody who went through a graduate program in the humanities in the 1980s or 1990s knows her only too well and Roth does an amazing job of skewering the "underrepresented" voices that took over academia and the bizarre exigencies of this period.

This is quite simply a great read that captures the 1990s with razor precision and with Roth's earthy vigor that reaches inside one and grabs at the gut while playing tricks on the brain that are fun to examine in the days and weeks after finishing the novel. Like most great works, and like Coleman Silk, it keeps on giving long after being finished and shelved in history. I raise my glass to you tonight, my crusty crochety friend, and hope you're enjoying yourself with Faunia somewhere and laughing at the rest of us!

Smart, interesting, enthralling book. I loved it! I finished this book more than two years ago and I'm still thinking about it. This novel such a layered plot with some many captivating storylines. I figured out his "secret" fairly early on, but that in no way put a damper on my enjoyment. I still think about what choices I would have made if I were in his shoes, how his secret completely altered his life, and how awful it must have been for so many real-life mothers to endure the pain he put upon his own mother.

My only complaint was I didn't find some of the female characters to be completely authentic. It really felt like a man had written them without a complete understanding of how women operate. That said, they were all interesting characters and I was sad when the book ended.

This novel, the third in a trilogy that explores the American psyche from the 1950s through the 1990s, is rich but disappointingly uneven. The plot, which is narrated by Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, is simple and straightforward on the one hand: Coleman Silk, a classics professor and former Dean at a small Massachusetts college, is accused of using a racial slur in class; he resigns his position, and his wife dies shortly thereafter, causing him to blame the college for her death; he then begins an affair with an illiterate woman half his age, Faunia Farley. On the other hand, several secrets about Silk and others are revealed as the novel progresses, although curiously, the ultimate fate of Silk and Farley is revealed early in the book.

The novel is very much character-driven, and on the one hand, the major strength of the novel seems to be its depiction of the characters. Silk, for instance, is well delineated, although it isn't entirely clear just why Silk takes up with an illiterate janitor. On the other hand, the ex-husband of Silk's mistress is a stereotypical troubled Vietnam vet, and the mistress herself is underdeveloped as well, especially given the tragic events of her life. In addition, the focus on characters sometimes entails long soliloquies on their parts, and consequently the narrative doesn't always flow well.

The novel is set in a small Massachusetts college, and the depiction of academic politics is often amusing, especially those of the French professor who becomes Silk's bête noire.

The novel’s style is not particularly difficult or complex, although much of the writing is long-winded and drawn out, with extended sentences. The writing is generally good, although a bit too reliant on long lists that elaborate aspects of the characters' lives and personalities.

Beyond the story itself, “The Human Stain” – like the other novels in Roth’s trilogy – is an inquiry into the US during the second half of the twentieth-century and looks at the politics of race and sex, the Vietnam War, political correctness, the dumbing down of the academy, and President Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal. The latter serves as an example of the Puritan strain that leads to political correctness and Silk's "spooks" problem. In that sense, the novel gives the reader much to think about. On the other hand, it is thereby limited in its scope and tied to the mores and events of the decades on which it focuses.

This late-90's Roth masterwork revolves around Coleman Silk, a brilliant college professor whose poorly-worded question leads him to a hasty resignation. In his duress he begins an affair with Faunia Farley, a dark and lonely woman interested only in herself and the darker aspects of nature (read: faun). She in turn is married to Les, a Vietnam vet who carries extreme psychological scars from the war. They are all filled with rage at an America that, at the end of the 20th century, has failed to live up to its tenets and is instead a melting pot of hypocrisy. The book details how they think, why they think it, how they affect each other, and what that has to say about themselves, their country, and their live and times. Roth is at the peak of his powers here; beautiful scenes follow one after the other, and every character is succinctly drawn, with desires that are perfectly interconnected to the story. Roth perhaps goes off on tangents more here than in any other book I have read of his, but even those are expertly written. The book is like a time capsule of the happiness and despair that was faced at the end of last century, when the Lewinsky scandal floated spectre-like in the background, and America was made to come to terms with its own demons. Roth has funneled that into an accessible work that is intense in its feelings but smooth in its delivery. A must for any fiction collection, as it really is as good as anything that Roth has ever written.

Overall, I liked this book, despite the author's oftentimes wordy and dense prose. It was an interesting look at one man's history, a proud man who was brought to heel and hoisted by his own petard in a most ironic way. It seems that the main protagonist in his book, Coleman Silk, an esteemed classics college professor, who almost single-handedly put small, liberal arts Athena college on the academic map, finds himself brought up on charges by the college for using a word that has dual meanings, one of which is racially offensive to blacks, in connection with two students. Coleman has never seen the students at the heart of the brouhaha, as they missed all their classes. Consequently, he has no idea what their racial makeup is when he uses the word that is to cause so much offense.

Coleman is rightly outraged by his colleagues reaction towards him in connection with this incident and, in particular, by one colleague's virulent attempt to castigate him and paint him as the devil incarnate. Coleman then cuts off his nose to spite his face and resigns from the college, holding the college responsible for the death of his wife, when she dies shortly after learning of his disgrace. What the college does not know, and what makes the accusation so ironic, is that Coleman Silk is an African-American who has been passing for white. Therein lies the rub, as Coleman and his life slowly unravel.

Coleman, now in his early seventies, is fighting mad about the way his once promising and respected life seems to be ending. He is not helping matters any, however, when he takes up with Faunia Farley, an under-educated, emotionally troubled janitor at the college who is half is age and has a great deal of personal baggage from her own turbulent past, including an abusive, Vietnam vet ex-husband who stalks her. Coleman is like a man possessed and seems to go into an emotional tailspin, seeking to right what went wrong. To that end he reaches out to writer Nathan Zuckerman, whom he befriends, and asks him to write his story, as he himself is unable to write it. Of course, Coleman is unable to write it, because he cannot do so without revealing the secret that he kept for fifty years from his wife, his children, his colleagues, and his friends.

When tragedy strikes, Nathan Zuckerman is left to put the pieces together and discover what it was that made Coleman Silk the man that he was. This is a very compelling story. The most affecting parts of the book have to do with Coleman's early life, before he decided to pass. It is an indictment of race relations in America at the time of his decision, when someone perceived to be a black man was unable to be all that he could be. Coleman, a very bright and talented young man, seeking to be all that he could be without thinking about race, chose to pass. He was simply not interested in being a role model for those of his perceived race.

There are parts of the novel, however, that do not ring true. His affair with the janitor is a little hard to believe. I suppose that that the reason that Coleman and Faunia come together, other than the obvious sexual one, is because of the inherent, personal pathology that each one brings to the relationship. Of course, the relationship makes Coleman feel young again. Still, it is more distracting that enlightening in terms of the issues contained within the pages of this book. I also found her ex-husband to be more of a caricature and distraction more than anything else, though he is necessary to the plot.

Still, there is much to like about this novel, if one can overlook the somewhat self-indulgent prose that probably could have used better editing. The issues of racial identity are interesting and are the ones that provide much food for thought. It is in these issues that the strength of the book lies, even though the questions that they raise remain unanswered. This is a good book that could have been a great one.

In a long writing career, Philip Roth has progressively deepened his themes and his understanding of human character as well as his skill at the novelist's craft. His novel, "The Human Stain" is both entertaining and thought-provoking. It is a worthy addition to American fiction of the early 21st century.

The title of the book sets forth its primary theme. A major part of human life is tied to human sexuality and to physicality. People ignore or downplay this aspect at their peril. This theme is reflected throughout the book. Roth, even more than John Updike and with a different perspective than Updike, writes with a passion about the central role of sexuality in human life.

The story unfolds against a backdrop of the Clinton impeachment hearings. The chief protagonist of the book is Coleman Silk, a 71 year old former professor of Classics and Dean of a small New England College. Silk has resigned from the college as a result of an investigation over a classroom remark that some found racist. His wife of many years has died, and Silk has become romantically involved with a 34 year-old divorced woman with little education who works as a janitor in the college. Silk's former colleagues, his four children and his acquaintances are leery of his affair. Silk befriends Nathan Zukerman, an alter ego who appears in many Roth novels, who tells Silk's story.

Silk has become highly successful but has done so in part by denying important components of his life. He is of African-American ancestry but light enough to pass. (Many American novels utilize the theme of "passing" for white.) He callously walks away from his family at the age of 27 in order to marry a white woman for fear that she would reject him if she were aware of his ancestry. He never reveals the secret. Roth's book suggests in a poignant way how difficult it is for one person to claim to know another.

The theme of individual self-determination in life choices, as opposed to following the course of the group into which one was born, is another major theme of the book. Roth develops it well, with all its pain and ambiguity, in exploring the choices Zuckerman has made. Many people probably would assert that people need to stay and develop within their group. This isn't Roth. He seems to me more quintessentially American by celebrating the room modern secular democracy gives people to change and follow their stars. But, very simply, this is a different matter from denying one's origins altogether.

The book is full of great scenes, particularly of Coleman Silk's early fascination with boxing, and of literary allusions. There are allusions to Homer and Euripides, as befitting a professor of classics. Euripides, with his naturalism and recognition of the power of sexuality, is an excellent choice for emphasis in this book. There are also fine passages emphasizing the power of music, including a lovely description of Coleman's 19-year old lover, when he was young, dancing in his college flat. Mahler's music, with its feel for the earth, also figures prominently as does the powerhouse pianist, Yefim Bronfman.

Coleman's 34 year old lover is well described. She helps teach Coleman, very late in his life, the importance of sexuality and of human contact, to try to see and accept things for what they are, and to understand the inevitability of change.

Readers who enjoy this book might also enjoy Saul Bellow's novel, "Ravelstein" which raises many of the same issues. Bellow's novel tells the story of a philosophy professor who, like Silk, specializes in the ancient Greeks -- Plato rather than Euripides. Both books are narrated by a friends of the protagonists who are novelists and who request them to write narratives to remember their lives. Both involve stories of sexual passion and speak of the promises and difficulties offered in the United States where people can, in a real sense, become who they are. Roth's novel and Bellow's novel, the products of two of our finest writers in their old age, present good pictures of the potential of American life in our modern day.

I really enjoyed this book on a number of levels. There are spoilers in this review so don't read on if you don't want to know the "secret" of the book, although the secret is really not that important, the character studies are.

This is the story of Coleman Silk, a professor of Classics at a fictional school called Athena, who is unjustly accused of racism. His career is ruined by the accusation. Meanwhile, although he is in his early seventies he is having an affair with a woman half his age who works as a janitor at Athena.

The university community seems outraged that he is involved with a working class woman, Faunia, who is forty years his junior and they immediately assume he is exploiting her. Meanwhile Faunia has had a terrible life and is not entirely free of her ex-husband, a troubled Vietnam vet who blames her for the death of their children and is determined to seek revenge.

Coleman turns out to be a light-skinned African American who has been "passing" his entire life. Although I was skeptical about some of the plot details (I'm in academia, and despite our reputation we are not PC fascists who would "ruin" someone over an inadvertent comment like Coleman's-trust me, everyone would have believed his explanation, and besides, with tenure you can't get rid of anyone) but it was still a surprisingly touching story on a number of levels, and it had many dimensions.

Coleman's "passing" brings up a number of troubling and interesting issues regarding race relations in America. Since race has no real biological meaning and isn't some inherent "essence" in the "blood", why shouldn't Coleman take advantage of his light skin to escape society's suffocating prejudices and preconceptions? Is he denying who he "really is" by doing this, or just rejecting the whole category of race that would force him into a confining group identity? On the other hand, he does cruelly turn his back on his own family and that brings up a whole host of other issues.

Another major plot that is compelling is his romance with Faunia. Society seems ready to judge the relationship and condemn it, but it becomes increasingly clear that they have no idea what is actually going on between these two troubled people who have clearly found a kind of bond and mutual understanding which is rather beautiful in it's own way. It gives one pause about rushing to judgement about other people's relationships.

Another fascinating character is Les Farley, Faunia's very disturbed ex-husband. Roth treats him with sympathy and gives him three dimensions. He convincingly portrays Les as someone unfairly destroyed by his experiences in Vietnam, a man who now has to return to "normal" life but has no idea what that entails.

There's also comic relief as well. Some of my favorite parts of the book involved the ridiculous French professor Delphine Roux and, among other scenes, a really hilarious one where Coleman overhears some professors discussing the Monica Lewinsky case. Our country's obsession with the president's intimate life serves as a kind of backdrop to the unfolding of this profoundly American story.

Highly recommended-much sensitive and interesting insight into humanity, emotions, American history, all the things you look to Roth for!

Very few authors can write sentences like Philip Roth: erudite, profound, humorous, ironic, raw -- he can do anything with the English language. And his insights into the human psyche and "how the world works" are astounding. Frequently, I found myself shaking my head and saying "wow" after reading a passage. eg His descriptions of: A woman connecting spiritually to crows; the insane thoughts going through the mind of a Vietnam war veteran; a teenage boy's experience in the boxing ring. So 5 stars for the sublime prose. (Although, as others have pointed out, Roth is sometimes a little wordier than necessary.)

My big complaint is that I didn't find the major plot events totally believable: specifically, the identity change and the spooks incident. Also, most of the final chapter (70 pages) was unnecessary and heavy-handed.

This was the third book of the American Trilogy; I read them in order. Hard to believe a man, late in his career no less, produced these three amazing novels in the span of four or five years.

This is extremely well written, the characters, the narration, the dialogue, they all have this very thoughtful, measured quality that makes the whole thing seem incredibly believable. Yet the human stain feels, somehow, not exaclty dated, but maybe just too much of its time. The way it touches upon the fallout from the Lewinsky scandal and the often asinine identity politics of 90's academia struck me as just too concerned with the sort of petty moral dramas that seem almost laughable in light of the past 10 years or so of American history. Now obviously, it isn't fair to fault Roth for writing something that is concerned with the issues of the time it was written, which to be fair, he deals with far more intelligently, far more adultly than a lot of writers do. I guess I just prefer the Roth who writes so searingly about private, familial rage, a la American Pastoral, to the Roth who tries to find some sensible middle ground amidst a tidal wave of cloyingly righteous public rage. Admittedly, I haven't read that much Roth, but I think I prefer him when he's foaming at the mouth to when he's trying to be reasonable

This book pretty much has a little bit of everything: a scathing attack on American sexual and racial pathology, an impassioned defense of un-castrated male and female sexuality, an unapologetic celebration of the sexual instinct regardless of age or class boundaries, a full frontal assault on the inanity and hypocrisy of the politically correct American academy, an examination of our nation's tortured racial and class history, an existential meditation on the power of imminent mortality to upend and transform our everyday lives---this is in short, an incredibly rich and dense book, happily carried along by Roth's incomparably superb prose style.

Yes there are slow spots where he rambles a bit too much and gives us a lot more social history than we particularly care for, but once you learn to skim through those sections it is really a brisk read. I kind of wish there was less about Lester, the nutty Vietnam vet's interior landscape, and more about the relationship between Faunia Farley and Coleman Silk. The ending has an interesting Zen-like, not-knowing/unknowable quality to it that is both ominous and fascinating. If you are looking for a neat, all-questions-answered resolution this is not the book for you.

Needless to say, it's worth reading even if you've seen the movie, which is actually pretty good for a novelistic adaptation.

Coleman Silk (known as the boxing champion "Silky Silk" in his youth) age 71, works as a professor at the Athena College. He has been accused of racism. His remark was made in class, about two students who never showed up for his lectures. "Do they exist or are they spooks?" he asked his class. It turned out that these two non-performing students were African-Americans, and (I didn't know) "spooks" were (still are?) considered racial slur.
Coleman Silk had until then, run the college with a firm hand. He is respected amongst his colleagues, but I guess, not much liked. So for his enemies at the college this racial slur incident was a "too good to be missed" opportunity. A formal complaint is handed in. Silk is a proud man, and he refuses to defend himself. He choose to step down from his position.
Nathan Zuckerman, a friend of the protagonist, Coleman Silk, narrates "The Human Silk". Zuckerman's narration is interesting albeit at times a bit confusing. He alternates between present and past time, and swaps between "being inside someone's head" and then reports just from a spectators perspective.
This is one of the few novels that I have read where I felt that all characters were very well developed. As I was reading this book, I felt as if I was a part of the story, and at the end I felt as if I knew them all very well. The characters were not always likable, in fact more often were they unsympathetic and despicable than sympathetic, but indeed very well developed.
Actually, the characters worked often as independent stories within the story. Silk is having a romantic affair with Faunia Farley (34). An (supposedly) illiterate, cleaning lady at the college. Via her, we are introduced to her nutty ex-husband Lesley Farley. He is a Vietnam Vet, still struggling with post-war traumas. We meet Delphine Roux, an arrogant French woman, and member of the staff whom Silk hired years ago. And of course, Nathan Zukerman, the narrator, and friend of Silk.
But the best independent story is that it turns out that for his entire adult life, Coleman Silk has been covering up the fact that he is a black (!) man. Silk is light skinned enough to pass for white. And it was after the WWII war that he decided to reinvent himself as a Jew, so he could have his dream fulfilled, to have a career as a professor. Each page I read I waited for Silk to be "caught", convinced that he couldn't possibly "pull that off", but it never happened... Quite ironic that he fifty years after "going white" is being charged with a racial complaint, hm??
This was my first Philip Roth novel, and I enjoyed it very much. I will definitely read more of Roth's novels.
Anyway, like I said, this was a great read. "The Human Stain" fully deserves its' PEN/Faulkner award.

There is something marvelous about reading the work of a superb writer at the peak of his form, and Roth's prose is so delicious one is hard put to criticize this work; yet "The Human Stain" must be criticized because it has many fundamental failures; so many, in fact, that in the end the book fails to convince or to satisfy.
The author starts testing the contract with his readers by asking us to believe in this hardly credible platform: a perfect black child, valedictorian of his class, great athlete, superb boxer (unbeknownst to his family), intellecually brilliant, without racial hangups, with green eyes and a skin white enought to "pass," aims for and succeeds in a brilliant career in academia with a specialty in Greek and Roman classics, all along pretending to be a Jew. Well, maybe. In the course of the book the contract is further encumbered by dozens of improbable details, unlikely coincidences, and unbelievable misunderstandings (which cannot be cited here without interfering with the enjoyment of the book by others), until one can no longer participate in the suspension of belief the writer asks from us. The big picture that undelies this novel is surely not believable; but the details? Ah, the details are masterfully drawn, so that the reader proceeds, no longer trusting the ground on which he is stepping, but loving the meticulously crafted scenery that strokes and lulls all his senses so precisely. There is much to learn and to love in those details, even if the plot fundamentally fails.
I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and would not want to have deprive myself of its many pleasures. If in the end I was left unsatisfied, it was because it had an effect similar to that encountered in a flight simulator: one receives the milliard sensory imputs, and one's body and mind reacts realistically to the flight conditions; but one leaves the machine knowing full well that it never got off the ground. This book will not fly you, either, although at times you will feel for sure that you are in the air.

Coleman Silk, ("Silky Silk") a humanities professor at Athena College, resigns from his job in disgrace because of a supposedly racist remark he has made about two black students. The ensuing brouhaha leads to the death of his wife. Silk then begins an affair with Faunia Farley, (surely one of the most engaging, earthy seductresses in modern fiction) the school janitor, who is thirty-four years his junior.
Silk's relationship with Farley, who is being stalked by her ex-husband and his confessions to Rothian alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, fuel the narrative for this novel.
But what is absolutely brilliant in this novel is the unraveling of the metaphoric strands of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in which Silk finds himself enmeshed in the web of contradictions of contemporary America and its past.
The novel also goes beyond the facile reading of race. This novel questions the political construct of race and asks, Are we ONLY products of our past? What is the price we pay for the personal and collective fictions we construct to become ourselves? What do we really know about anything or anyone? Does self-actualization mean killing one's past and by extension one's biological parents? Can a successful identity be built on a lie? What does it mean to live an authentic life given the constraints of race, gender, etc.? If an authentic life is built on the contradictions of a society, does this diminish the validity of all subsequent lives that are built on the original fiction?
Roth probes the question of identity deliberately and provocatively, and the structure of the novel is fascinating because of the multiple perspectives on events-visited and revisited by Silk, Zuckerman and Faunia.
And those sentences! Wow!
The Human Stain is a brilliant work of a modern master.

The Human Stain is one big messy novel. There are numerous sub-themes and superfluous passages and bits that tell us about Roth's well documented sexual urges but not much else (for example Zuckerman ponders Monica Lewinsky being pounded up the a*, and whether this would have shut her up). Very much what Henry James would call a 'baggy monster'.

I found Roth's treatment of racial piety and identity in 90s America to be intelligent and interestingly written. His 'campus novel' style passages on the lonely anguish of a young female French Professor - detailing crucial paradoxes and strains on the lives of attractive, career focused young women - are excellent.

Also laced through this novel is a disquisition on the current state of education in America - the fact that it used to be the person that fell short of the curriculum, but now anything that can't be apprehended by the educationally incurious has to go (Moby Dick) as it is too elitist. As a young teacher struggling to get a job in the socialist bunker ethos of modern London high schools, I sympathise with this exposition.

One of Roth's novels well worth reading, even though it is a bit of a loose limbed splatter at times.

"The Human Stain" is very polished literature, oftentimes building its power quietly, set off in the reader's reflection as though time-released. Or so it was for me.

Several tenants of the book initially strain believability, or lack conviction: Coleman Silk's long-kept secret, the Les Farley character and the mere fact that Coleman is booted from the college for his misconstrued inquiry. Yet given Roth's reputation for cynical humor these elements tend to work as caricatures of the world the book is satirizing (though I now realize that Coleman's secret is not as uncommon historically as one might assume). As such, it all works to convey poignant commentary on matters still persisting today. While focusing its crosshairs more so on the overheated political correctness of well-meaning-yet-mutant university liberalism, Roth sets as a backdrop to the story the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, ensuring we never forget that both sides then and now are/were embroiled in the mad "ecstasy of sanctimony".

As other reviewers have pointed out, the Vietnam veteran Les Farley is markedly unconvincing as a flesh and blood character. Not only are his sections overreaching cliches, but they are stream-of-consciousness 'written' by the book's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman. Maybe this explains WHY they're cliched, but it is simply unbelievable to pretend that an author is writing inside the head of someone else. It put me at a distance, especially because it's Roth writing as Zuckerman writing as Farley. Too many layers. The same critique could be made of other characters such as Coleman's young feminist enemy Delphine, but the effect is less noticeable because it is less strained. Coleman Silk as a character is a fine achievement, as we are alternately sympathetic and repulsed by his story and some of his behavior.

After reading Roth, I had better stop complaining that there is notghing left to read except to reread what you have thought was worth reading in the first place.
Roth here describes how one cannot know, really know, another: what makes that other the other way from others that that other is.
Then, he attempts to understand.
What the title means I'll leave to Roth to tell the next reader.
I'll be the next reader of another Roth book.

I had trouble deciding whether to give this novel 3 or 4 stars (they need give a ½ star option on here!). The novel brings up many interesting subjects, such as race, identity, extreme political correctness, and the tendency of many people to use moral righteousness as a weapon in bringing down those they don't like for more petty reasons. These issues were all dealt with in a fair and intelligent manner. In fact, having attended a very liberal university myself, many of the situations in this novel, such as a student claiming a class text is "sexist" to avoid having to struggle though it, and the tendency of many in academia to jump on any comment, word, or statement that could possibly be construed as politically incorrect, regardless of its context, came off as frighteningly realistic. Unfortunately, the ideas that are brought up are actually more interesting to think about in theory than as they are presented in the book. The biggest problem, as an earlier reviewer noted, is that too much of the story is TOLD vs. being SHOWN. In fact, the most major event in the novel, Coleman Silk uttering the word "spooks" in his classroom and the subsequent commotion it causes, is really just kind of briefly mentioned in passing as having happened. This is not to take anything away from Roth's skill as a writer; his prose is beautiful and flowing as always. However, actually seeing some of the novel's events in action as opposed to simply being told by the narrator that they happened would have made the novel a lot more interesting to read. Also, I found the character of Les Farley to be too much of a caricature. It seemed like Roth took all the stereotypes of a deranged Vietnam vet and threw all those characteristics onto one character. I also had trouble with the Delphine Roux character. I appreciated the fact that Roth tried to add depth to her as the novel went on, after initially having her come off as one-dimensional. However, I found her motivations for wanting to bring down Coleman Silk vague at best and silly at worst. "The Human Stain" is worth reading for the bold statements Roth is gutsy enough to make about our culture, but he could have addressed them in a more engaging way

The Human Stain, while vastly superior to most of what gets published in these times, is clearly the least component of a great trilogy.
It is the story of the rise and fall of Coleman Silk, a brilliant, light skinned black from New Jersey who, after returning from service at the end of WWII, decides to ditch his racial identity along with his loving family and the rest of his past to re-create himself as a Jew. A regal and distant power-broker (as dean of faculty) in a small college, he is respected but apparently not much loved by his colleagues. His downfall is brought about by careless referring to some underperforming black students as "spooks", apparently a racist term from the 1950s (this expression is used in such a fashion by one of the characters of a 1985 film, "Back To the Future", in a scene that takes place in 1955). No soon has he uttered the words when a baying crowd starts asking for his head. A proud man, he refuses to defend himself, and prefers to quit his position. His wife dies of a broken heart over his mistreatment by the college and he takes up as a lover a supposedly lower-class cleaning woman who saw her two children burn to their death while enjoying furtive sex with one of a string of beaus. This only compounds his fall, because it irritates a flighty and thoroughly nasty French lecturer, Delphine Roux who, feeling spurned by the ideal "father figure" starts vicious gossip that eventually coalesces in an anonymous letter (obviously written by Roux) sent to Silk. The cleaning-woman, on the other hand, has a psychopathic ex-husband, a Vietnam war veteran who eventually (and don't read this if you don't want the story spoiled) kills both Silk and his ex-wife. Meanwhile, bitchy, too-smart-for-her-own-good Delphine mistakenly sends to all the faculty an email describing her ideal mate, who (surprise, surprise) turns out to be a portrait of the now disgraced Coleman Silk. Then, in order to disguise her idiocy, she fakes a break-in into her office by Silk. Convently, Silk cannot defend himself and his debasement is complete. Two inherently decent, if unlikeable people (Coleman and his lover) die in disgrace, while two underhanded killers of both character and body (Delphine and the Vietnam vet) survive. Such is life.
Many readers will agree that the story is good, and very well told by Roth. His bleak worldview and trademark misoginy are well in evidence, his edenic descriptions of New Jersey in the 1930s and 1940s are still there too. He is very good at gripping descriptions of Promethean characters who initially triumph against long odds and are then dashed by the envious gods, who begrudge men the happiness that they have earned.
But Coleman Silk's fall is not as entrancing of that of "Swede" Levov in "American Pastoral" or Iron Rinn in "I Married a Communist". Perhaps because Silk's flaws are imperceptible (at least to me) his collapse generated less sympathy than decent family man Levov's and Communist violent firebrand Rinn's. Also, there is nothing in "The Human Stain" like the nightmarish dinner party where Jessie Orcutt, an upper-class alcoholic whose husband will eventually steal "Swede" Levov's wife Dawn, tries to gouge Lou Levov's eye for no particular reason. Lou Levov, the "Swede"'s father, is the (Jewish) incarnation of human decency, and even he ends the book speechless, with blood on his face, while the malignant laughter of nihilist Marcia Umanoff rings, mocking him and all he stands for. Of course, it would be unfair to demand that a writer who already has included one of those moments that one never forgets in his trilogy's first book should also manage to get one into the last one. There is no dishonour in a book being the least of a great trilogy.

I read this book based on recommendations from friends, I have seen the movie and found the actors from the movie getting in the way of the book. It took a significant amount of time to get rid of the images of Anthony Hopkins etc. Take it that the book is a very pale image of the work, and it would be better not to see the movie prior to reading the book.
The writing, as you would expect is exceptional. I did find a significant amount of the language quite crude, however it is still a masterpiece. There are elegant swipes at the academic pseudo-liberalism and infighting, a significant swipe at over-analysis, great characterisation and significant plot points interweaving throughout.
So the only quibble I have is the narrator - Nathan Zuckerman writes this book about his friend Coleman Silk, Coleman's secret is gradually revealed etc. however the narrative voice slips too often from Nathan to what can really only be Coleman's interior self. I think the slow revelation of Coleman's steely, inhuman determination can only be illustrated by a third party, the narrative therefore should not contain so much of what Coleman felt, even if sometimes it is expressed as Zuckermann's view of what Coleman might/must have felt. This aside, it's a tremendous read

The long section that describes Coleman's youth, from boxing to the decision to leave his family behind, is one of the miraculously sustained pieces of writing that Roth has ever done. There is not a single false note, and the imaginative identification is absolutely complete. This is not a novel about the problem of race in America, but about something that Roth has always been writing about: how to be an individual actor, a free agent, when you are tied inextricably, whether you want to be or not, to a group.
Now, I'm not sure how a writer of Roth's talent could throw in parts like the Lester Farley monologues, where the author has clearly not really felt his way into the consciousness of the character, but outlined it with some commonplaces about Vietnam veterans, is beyond me. I suppose I admire the effort to even try to see what's going on inside the head of such a character - more so, certainly, that his attempt, well, not to get inside Delphine Roux's head, but to create a straw woman to be seen through by the author and his readers. She isn't taken seriously enough, given enough life, to be effective even as a satire.
The book loses a lot of blood when Coleman is gone, but while he is walking through its pages The Human Stain is alive and vital. Worth your time as very few others are nowadays.

No one can dispute that Philip Roth tells wonderful, provocative stories and weaves intricate webs of descriptions when detailing his characters. However, I kept wishing thoughout this book that he would get a good editor for the following problems: he overuses metaphors, albeit cleverly doing so. In describing Coleman's wife's hair, three or four comparisons would do it. However, Roth seems to be the overachiever and in thesaurus-type detail, goes on for paragraphs, describing the hair feature. He does this often when observing some unusual detail of a character, but it becomes repetitive and I want to say, "OK, enough already, I get it!" It sometimes comes across that he is trying to impress his reader with his cleverness and erudition.
Another area Mr. Roth needs an editor on: long sentences that can go on for 10-12 lines or more. Now I am of a mature age and perhaps my memory is not as good as years ago, but I often find myself having to go back to the beginning of the sentence to see what he started talking about, before all the hypens, commas, etc. A good editor could take care of this. Having said all this, I would recommend this book to anyone. I also listened to it on tape and enjoyed that experience. He's a wonderful American storyteller, who just needs a good editor, or a smaller ego.

The Human Stain is a powerful and multi-leveled indictment of human hypocrisy. The initial plot element hinges on the hypocrisy of political correctness on a college campus. Coleman Silk, the central character, is driven from the campus where he has been a distinguished dean and professor because he has uttered the word "spooks", which is intentionally misconstrued as a racial epithet. His enemies and those who stand to gain by his downfall use this to achieve their own personal ends behind a mask of false piety. This enrages Coleman Silk, but not for the reasons the reader might expect.

Coleman Silk, like the novel itself, turns out to be far more complex than seems at first sight. There are hidden depths and passageways in Silk's biography (which is largely what this novel is) and not a little hypocrisy too, although he is a mainly sympathetic character. The Human Stain is not about black and white, it's about shades of gray. As always, Roth's writing is superb when he focuses on the details of his characters' stories, on how each of his characters became who they are. And, as always, his characters face and make moral choices, some conscious and some not, which have unforeseen consequences.

Although this is a five-star novel in many ways, I have deducted one star for what I think are two flaws in the book. The first is in Roth's attempt to set this study in hypocrisy against the backdrop of the national orgy of hypocrisy that was the Clinton "impeachment" of 1998. Although I am sympathetic to Roth's polemical point, I think it has a taste of just that, polemics, and that it doesn't add much to the novel. In any case, it's only a minor presence. The second flaw is more serious: I didn't find the central female character, Coleman Silk's lover, Faunia, believable. Roth's somewhat weird attempts to render her stream-of-consciousness thoughts on crows and other topics are not convincing; she never comes to life as more than a reflection of Coleman Silk's own desires and psychology.

That said, this novel is well worth reading. The final scene alone, a man ice-fishing in a secluded wilderness pond, a scene whose surface beauty and peacefulness conceals, as the ice on the pond's surface conceals the water, violence, fear, hatred, and everything that makes man "the human stain", is itself worth the price of admission. Perhaps this concluding scene ironically suggested the title of Roth's next book, American Pastoral.

It all started with American Pastoral. I was introduced to this great author who really is, to me, one of the last living great writers around. After American Pastoral, I read some of his newer books like Indignation, but did not like them. I thought that after writing American Pastoral, maybe that was all he had in him as far as greatness. Not so. I gave Human Stain a go, and it amazed me even more than American Pastoral. I really cannot fathom who a writer is capable of writing both American Pastoral and The Human Stain. How is a writer capable of that many rich, but altogether different characters and plot lines? I was simply amazed all throughout the Human Stain and liked it even better than American Pastoral. And it surprises me that Roth is not a bigger name in the mainstream. They know their stepehen kings and danielle steele's but not philip roths. That is sad, but also what makes these books a little more precious to those who revere such great works of art.

Coleman Silk, the central character of The Human Stain, is a classics professor at Athena College who is forced into retirement as a result of a comment in the classroom which is misinterpreted as a racial slur (readers will be reminded of the real-life Washington D.C. bureaucrat who in 1999 was briefly forced from his job for saying the word "niggardly"). Silk in some respects brings to mind David Lurie, the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize winning novel Disgrace. Both men hurl themselves into a sort of self-imposed exile from academia by stubbornly abandoning pragmatism and refusing to bend to the politically correct forces that confront them.
There is a lot going on in The Human Stain. Roth takes on academia, political correctness, race, identity, the Vietnam War, and family, all against the backdrop of Clinton's impeachment proceedings and our country's headlong rush into a culture of puritanical condemnation. In the end Roth asks some big questions. What is an individual's responsibility to community? What is the community's responsibility to the individual? When these links fail, Roth asks the reader to challenge his or her beliefs about where the blame lies.
The non-linear style of Roth's storytelling is captivating, but I found the change of viewpoint to be at times distracting. Sometimes the reader is inside the head of the characters, tracing his or her thoughts and motivations. Other times we're an outsider looking purely through the eyes of the narrator (Roth's alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman). It's not until the end of the novel that we understand why this is.
In my opinion some of the big questions are convincingly addressed, and most of the elements tie together. Some don't. The novel is set in 1998, which makes one wonder why Roth decided to incorporate post-traumatic stress of Vietnam veterans as a competing plotline, given that Saigon fell some 23 years earlier.
In the end Roth leaves some strings dangling, and I suppose it's a testimony to the richness and depth of the characters that we read the last page wanting to know a bit more.

Harold Bloom considers Philip Roth one of America's best writers. Perhaps Roth wrote The Human Stain for Bloom. It certainly centers on one of Bloom's favorite themes: the decline of the level of education in America. Coleman Silk is not an easy professor - he goes against the popular belief that, if a subject is hard, universities should refrain from teaching it. He has little patience with a female student who does not wish to read Aristophanes because it is offensive to women - or with the pseudo-enlightened teacher who supports her decision. The world of The Human Stain is an increasingly petty, judgmental, and hypocritical America during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. In this era of hyper political-correctness, Coleman asks if the students who never bothered to show up for his class are "spooks." When it turns out that the two students are African-American, Coleman's enemies on campus turn it into a racial epithet in order to disgrace him. The joke: Coleman is himself African-American, and has been "passing" for white ever since his twenties.

The Human Stain has one of the more sensational plots to be found in a Philip Roth novel, which is perhaps why it was made into a movie. The heart of the story focuses on the relationship between the 71-year-old Coleman, and his 32-year-old lover, Faunia. This is one of Roth's favorite themes: an older man having a good time with a younger woman. Of course, everything ends badly. That is either the fault of Coleman, America, or both.

The interesting thing about the novel is that it is told from the perspective of Nathan Zuckerman. Yet Zuckerman writes with the authority of a third-person-omniscient narrator. He describes thoughts in his characters' heads and scenes that he never witnessed. Eventually, Zuckerman is forced to admit that he is just using his imagination to make things up because that is his job.

There are weaknesses to the book. Roth gives into his desire to pontificate. He is in love with his own writing style and the book would have benefited from some more editing - it is about twenty percent too long. Yet, it is one of Roth's better novels and shows him in fine form later in life.

Philip Roth has written a penetrating novel that illustrates something very important about university life today. He treats the threat from the political left, now the power elite on campus, as something more ominous than a misguided fashion that will soon pass; he sees the desire purge dissenting faculty as an effort to degrade and dehumanize any dissidents and destroy what remains of genuine learning. Even more importantly, he has dissected and displayed the psychological basis of the desire to reconstruct or muzzle old-school faculty, and created compelling archetypes easily recognizable to anyone familiar with the current academic game.
The events are described in the voice of several characters, each with a dramatically different but always pathetic take on things. Roth has an amazing ability to inhabit the minds and souls of all his characters, but none better than Delphine Roux, the young French literary theorist whom Coleman Silk--the 71-year old classicist--hired in a weak moment. She uses the apparatus of deconstructionism and its rarified vocabulary, along with a relentlessly feminist take on the world, to immunize herself from attack from colleagues and to belittle classics and traditional critics she either has not read or cannot understand.
In Roth's portrayal of this woman, her style masks a lack of learning and scholarly confidence, and her political ideology is a weapon to use against anyone who threatens to expose her as the flake that she is. She, of course, was glad to see Silk purged from the faculty after accusations of racism, on grounds that he is also an obvious sexist. He once showed no sympathy for a student who complained she couldn't understand his lecture on Euripides because of his "engendered language." Roux takes the side of the student. Silk responds with magnificent sermon on the slovenliness of political correctness.
In the end, Roth's story emerges as a deft but deadly attack on what has become of the university. But he also treats the story of Coleman Silk as a metaphor for what has become of the entire political system, run by official victims who slay and consume those who dare bring into question their absolute power. A very effective and compelling read.

Literary critics who have written about "The Human Stain" like to discuss how well it describes the "public zeitgeist" and how Roth is one of America's best examples of "aesthetic relentlessness," both of which are true, but I prefer to say this is simply a great book by a fantastic author. Roth is more accessible then critics would like you to believe--his unique style flows well, he creates realistic and lively characters and he tells compelling stories.
"The Human Stain" is about Coleman Silk, a long time professor, who resigns in disgrace after being accused of racism. After the resignation, he battles the college hoping to regain face, but he also beings dating a much younger woman who works as a janitor at his former school. Through the narration of Nathan Zuckerman, this intense action plays out and Silk's unique and hidden life history is revealed.
This book is a great examination of political correctness, higher education, love and especially race. It is a tremendous novel, certainly one of Roth's best, and I would highly recommend it to all readers, especially those who enjoy excellent prose, fiction and controversial themes. More specifically, I would also recommend it to people who have experienced a small New England college town--it will be an excellent reminder, both good and bad, of that life and will challenge the memories you have. This is a truly great book.

In this dense, sometimes difficult, but extraordinarily insightful novel Philip Roth has woven a captivating, tragic, ironic, and distinctively American tale in which among other things he skewers the excesses of contemporary political correctness, the foibles of post-feminist academic posturing, and the pompous and petty dreariness of academia generally. But above all else Roth deals sensitively and skillfully here with historically troubling matters related to racial identity and the ways in which the tragic legacy of American racism forced some individuals to sacrifice family and heritage for the sake of personal advancement.
In telling the fascinating but sad tale of Coleman Silk, Roth also shows a commendable ability to "put himself inside the heads" of various American character types, including the post-traumatically stressed Viet Nam veteran and the scarred and jaded female victim of childhood molestation. All in all, Roth has created a densely woven novelistic tapestry in which lives that have been shaped by variously dark, troubling, and yet irresistibly potent American cultural and political forces intersect in fascinating and sometimes surprising ways.
Some readers surely will find the book too densely written for their taste, as Roth tends regularly here toward a manic, unrelenting, stream-of-consciousness style in which sentences can seem never-ending and paragraphs can extend over pages. To appreciate this book requires immersion, concentration, and a willingness to surrender to the prose, to go along for the sometimes wild ride on which Roth takes the reader. There are some sections that seem a bit slow-moving, especially portions of the chapter which delves ever more deeply into Coleman's Silk family background in East Orange, New Jersey. Overall, however, I found the book absorbing, edifying, and sometimes ever exhilarating, and certainly brilliantly written by one of America's master novelists.

Philip Roth has done it again � made a novel of the time that will speak to many generations. The Human Stain is a novel about America pre-9/11. It deals with the major forces that shape that world � sex, race, politics and angst. It is a world dominated by people who demand perfection in others, yet cannot see themselves for what they really are.
The opening pages are probably the best summary of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal written by an American. The self-righteous feeling that dominates the landscape is more than just a temporary storm; it is a national warming of fevers that will come to destroy the body politic.
Roth captures the dizzying contradictions of the times in the person of Coleman Silk, a college professor and former Dean whose fall from power and prestige is as maddening as any in all literature. Coleman turns out to be less and more than he seems � unfairly accused of making a racial remark, in fact, he turns out to be the worst kind of racist.
This novel owes much to Faulkner�s Light in August. In both, the author deals with the effect of racism on society and the American dream of transforming oneself into another person merely by force of will. Moving on into another part of the country � physically or socially � an American can make him or herself into anyone. The re-birth is painful and the new person has just as many problems as the old.
Read this book and discover what you have been thinking for the past few years about our society, but have not been able to put into the right words. Roth has the right words.

The last Roth I read was Portnoy's Complaint, when it was first released and was comsidered ever so scandalous. Maybe I was too young or maybe it was truly a mediocre book, but I was not at all impressed.

My father (a wise Eiropean who knows me too well) bought The Human Stain for me so I thought I would give it a chance - and I'm very glad I did. This book digs deep into my soul and forces me to question the stains that make me human. What are those stains? How have they transformed my life? Are they stains that need to be bleached out or should they be worn with pride? All these questions and so many more are raised by Roth in this most probing novel.

In addition, I have been treated to some truly brilliantly developed characters. Although the motives of some are opaque to me, they in some way are reasonable. After all, we do often accept that which we cannot understand and grow from that acceptance.

Get this book. It will make you think. Scary!!!!!!!!

"The Human Stain" is a fictional work that includes a detective story, a cultural commentary, several personality portraits, and a darn good yarn too. It's about a college professor who is forced from his position as dean because he is accused of using racial epithets during a class lecture. Isn't that a familiar story at Brown and other school?
You can't say a lot about the characters in this story because that would give away the plot. But Roth's novel is an attack on the militancy of college-campus political correctness and the feminists whose Roth character believes are hypocritcal. Further the book is a discussion of the roles that race plays in America and what is means to be raised as a Jew. There's lots of other themes too including man's preoccupation with sex which is, of course, what Roth writes about frequently.
The character Faunia refers to the novel's title, the "Humain Stain", when she says "That's what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain." The "he" she is referring to is a crow in the pet show. Faunia likes to talk to crows. She's supposed to be the village idiot in this novel, but she`s more comples than that. In the same paragraph Roth mentions another bird, a swan. Writing of the Greek gods, Roth says they are like humans in their cruelty--leaving stains of excrement and semen wherever they go--and their desire for erotic love. He writes "...[Zeus] to enter her bizarrely as a flailing white Swan." This is a direct reference to the poem by William Butler Years "Leda and the Swan" which Roth quotes at length in his novel "Portnoy's Complaint"--whose very title is a psychological term for to the desire for erotica and the angst that causes because of cultural mores. The poem reads in part "How can those terrified vague fingers [Leda] push the feathered glory [the Swan] from her loosening things?".
This book is a riveting read, long passages held me for page after page. I could not put it down as Roth takes us inside the mind of Delphine Roux, the French teacher at Athena college who has created so much trouble for Coleman Silk, the main character in the novel. Roth reveals her thoughts as she reflects on her status as a beautiful expatriate intellectual utterly alone in the word. She is miserable because she is despised by the female faculty members who hate her for her good looks and who, consequently, refuse to read her published writings. She hates Coleman because her isn't intimidated by her beauty like so many of the men are. She feels lost as a expatriate: caught between two oceans and not certain to which shore to seek refuge. She's a woman who desperately wants erotic love. But she can't abide the many suitors she has at the school. She goes to the New York Public library--anyone who lives in New York will tell you that the adjacent Bryant Park is a great pick up place--and looks wistfully at her intellectual peers: handsome men reading difficult books in those hallowed halls. If only she could find someone like that at the far flung, mountain-enclosed school where she's surrounded by shallow thinking Philistines masquerading as intellectuals.
One fascinating feature of this novel is that it's all written in one voice. There's no effort to reproduce accents like, say, William Faulkner would do. And there's no effort to change the substance of the language from one character to the next. Whether it's the uneducated Faunia speaking or the highly educated Coleman Silks, they all speak with the erudite voice of Philip Roth. I find this technique a good one: why sully the great language in a novel just to sound like one of the locals? That's my complaint with Irvine Welsh who writes in Scottish patois.
This novel spoke to me directly in two particular ways. First Roth writes of the death of two children. My own children are alive and O.K. but I felt compelled to rush to them as I read Roth's harrowing account of the two children dying a ghastly death. It was such a page turning horror tale, as good as the only Stephen King I read, and had me so upset by the end that I almost flung the book across the room. I haven't been moved by a book like that in a long time. There should be a preface at that chapter: "not for the faint of heart".
Secondly, Roth wrote was speaking to me again, on the subject of living alone in the woods--since that is what I do--with Henry David Thoreau like authority. The narrator of the novel is a writer who has fled the city for the quiet of the woods. (Doesn`t Philip Roth live like this too?) Roth says, "The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements...is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence and wealth exponentially increasing....The trick is to find sustenance in [He quotes Nathaniel Hawthorne] `the communication of a solitary mind with itself``. These words give hope too any person attempting to go it alone away from the noise of the city.

Philip Roth is a decidedly delightful author who knows how to engage the reader without distancing his story. This story is about a man who feels, from a very young age, that he will go nowhere and be nothing unless he denies his heritage. Coleman Silk is a Negro, but light skinned enough to pass for white, so he informs his mother and sister and brothers that he is going out into the world as a white man. His mother will never know her grandchildren; his sister and brothers will never know their nieces and nephews. Coleman does at first make a vain attempt to bring home a white girlfriend, and it is a tragic failure. Coleman becomes an esteemed college dean, a brilliant professor of Greek mythology, marries and takes the chances of having children who fortunately for him are born white. When it all begins to go wrong, the irony of Coleman's downfall is a twist you will enjoy and a plot you will not soon forget. Enter Nathan Zuckerman, local author who is befriended by Coleman. From Nathan's viewpoint, we get to know Coleman as no one else does, and Philip Roth has a profound ability to make the reader feel a part of the story. We first meet Coleman Silk when he is seventy-one years old, and is having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman. It's an intriguing start, and the book gets better and better. You will find yourself wrapping yourself around the story like a snug quilt, so plan on some great hours of enjoyment from Philip Roth.

Closure. Coleman Silk tells his class, there is never closure. But Coleman is not a novelist and Philip Roth is. Philip Roth is a very clever novelist. Some would say diabolically clever. If you have a doubt on this score, read the last line at the bottom of this page and then re-read the book.

Before you do that, you need to know that this book contains little of Roth's usual preoccupation with his own Jewishness---How does Sol Bellow do this without being so self-indulgent? --- What is different here is that Roth resorts to a cute literary gimmick. It's a lot like the one used in the movie The Sixth Sense. You almost have to see, or in this case, read, the book twice to understand what the author has pulled off. Unless you discover the gimmick, you are unlikely to get it; get the point; get closure.

There are lots of hints if you know where to look. There are all those lies. Different types of lies. Good lies and bad lies. Coleman lies to recreate himself into a new Gatsby type upwardly mobile "immigrant" in a post WWII society. Bill Clinton lies about his relationship with Monica. Faunia lies so that she can remain in her protective shell. The spooks lie when they call Coleman a racist. Delphine lies to herself about her feelings for Coleman. The government lies to us about casualties in Viet Nam. Les lies about his rehabilitation. And, Zuckerman lies to the reader when he places Les at the scene of the fatal crash.

This masterpiece book, which thankfully is less about Philip Roth himself than about the most emotional issues in American society, brings up a number of questions: What is "white"? What is "black"? How can being black in the U.S. in the late 20th century be so bad that one would be willing to give up so much: heritage, siblings, mother? What is "a Jew"? Is it merely a "Mediterranean" complexion and curly hair and a familiarity with corned beef on rye? Here is someone "passing" as a Jew who does not have a Jewish home, belong to any Jewish institutions, celebrate Jewish holidays, read Jewish texts. Yet his estranged son recites the Kaddish at his funeral. Where did he learn this?
The writing never fails to astound. Every scene is so beautifully crafted and rich in detail it brought tears to my eyes -- especially the scenes recounting the experiences of Vietnam veterans: at the Memorial, in the Chinese restaurant. Brilliant! I just finished the book and will re-read it to enjoy every sentence, paragraph, page. I hope the film does it justice.

This is a story about the human condition, about each of us being trapped -- trapped ironically by intensely following our own earthly dreams and ambitions -- in a tangled, unavoidably stained web uniquely of our own making: a "human stain" that permanently tarnishes our passage -- everyone's passage -- through life. It also is a saga of a tragic and futile attempt by two individuals to break free of these tangled webs, webs that have defined their lives within differing strata of society, and in the process entangling the embedded author Nathan Zuckerman himself in their human dilemmas and strivings, dilemmas that according to Roth only a maniac creator could have conceived.
I enjoyed this book for lots of reasons, not the least of which being Roth's scorn for the illusions and pretensions infecting the modern ultra-liberal university environment. He also, at least in my view, has the primary and most important battle of modern life squarely in focus, the disconnect between our deepest sense of "self" and the demands made by Western society to negate and thus to enslave that "self," a disconnect that promotes a modern Faustian bargain promising material paradise in return for succumbing to the "system," that costs everything of permanent value, and that ultimately delivers the empty shells of our scooped-out souls at the very gates of hell.
This is not a happy or funny book. At times it rambles, but Roth's reputation has earned that indulgence for him, and of course some "ramblings" provide superb insights into human nature. Some creations in the book are, at least for me, too "cute," such as the middle name "Brutus" for the main character, Dr Coleman Silk, and like the list of pedantic terms used to show Silk's mastery of the English language.
My strongest concern, however, is that because of the relatively limited intellectual target audience for this book, the most important messages of individual alienation and the absorption of "self" into modern society's seductive systems do not and will not reach a much larger population that sorely needs to hear them. If someone of the integrity and intellectual caliber of Coleman Silk falls for the lures of modern life and, in ultimate desperation, finds solace only with and through sex with another battered soul, what hope is there for the rest of us? Who of Roth's stature will warn us lesser but more numerous souls of our own absorption and eventual disintegration so that we may take heed before it is too late?

THE HUMAN STAIN explores the relationship between public and private life in America during the second half of the 20th century. Like his few other novels, Philip Roth narrates the novel through his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who after a prostate surgery became impotent and worked as a retired writer. Zuckerman crossed path with our protagonist, Coleman Silk, in a seemingly preposterous situation. Everyone knew about Coleman's affair with a woman half his age. Nor did people not know about the secret of his racism, which severed his well-established tie with Athena College of which he had been professor for nearly forty years.

Readers will eventually learn that Silk is a light skinned African-American who gradually drifted across the American racial divide and for 50 years has successfully passed as a white Jew. He thrives to take Zuckerman into his confidence about this deep lifelong secret that lies at the very core of his identity at the backdrop of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, whose subversive affair with a White House intern emerged in every last mortifying detail in 1998. It was set at a time when "the jumble, the mayhem, the mess proved itself more subtle than one's ideology and one's morality."

A supposed racism slur - "spooks" - forced Coleman Silk to resign and the accusation, Coleman understands, leads directly to his wife's death to heart attack, though the charge is both spurious and preposterous. But this is not his only nightmare. What is most unendurable is that he is drained to the last bucket of days, the time if there ever is a time to quit the quarrel, to give up the rebuttal, to end the protest to an untrue accusation, to undo himself from the conscientiousness with which he raised his family bound by a combative marriage, and on top to come to term with his secret.

Coleman Silk's tragedy is intrinsic that it has so firmly imprinted in his in his early years, at his painful realization the objective is for his fate to determine not by the ignorant, hate-filled intentions of a hostile world but by his own resolve. So racism is just one example of evil, which, in Roth's rigorous and robust language, originates from his quest of purity, one that is racism-free. The lie, a shameful secret that has his lifetime magnetism, exists at the foundation of his relationship to his children who never have the opportunity to know their true ethnic identity. The lie impedes his relationship with his family, which has inevitably become an impediment, embarrassment, and taboo. No wonder Coleman is left to his crushing sense of abandonment that festered into the wound that has led to his self-destructive isolation and too circuitously a tragedy. Coleman's original goal is to live in freedom and not a representative of his race. In the quest for this freedom he falls prey to a society in which racism issue compromises the public and private life of morality.

The prose of HUMAN STAIN is robust, matter-of-fact, mellifluous, and highly literate. The book is quite difficult to take in the sense that he takes the fanaticism of the social root of evil very seriously.