Athena College was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman Silk--formerly "Silky Silk," undefeated welterweight pro boxer--strode in and shook the place awake. This faculty dean sacked the deadwood, made lots of hot new hires, including Yale-spawned literary-theory wunderkind Delphine Roux, and pissed off so many people for so many decades that now, in 1998, they've all turned on him. Silk's character assassination is partly owing to what the novel's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, calls "the Devil of the Little Place--the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the lies."

But shocking, intensely dramatized events precipitate Silk's crisis. He remarks of two students who never showed up for class, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" They turn out to be black, and lodge a bogus charge of racism exploited by his enemies. Then, at 71, Viagra catapults Silk into "the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication," and he ignites an affair with an illiterate janitor, Faunia Farley, 34. She's got a sharp sensibility, "the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble," and a melancholy voluptuousness. "I'm back in the tornado," Silk exults. His campus persecutors burn him for it--and his main betrayer is Delphine Roux.

In a short space, it's tough to convey the gale-force quality of Silk's rants, or the odd effect of Zuckerman's narration, alternately retrospective and torrentially in the moment. The flashbacks to Silk's youth in New Jersey are just as important as his turbulent forced retirement, because it turns out that for his entire adult life, Silk has been covering up the fact that he is a black man. (If this seems implausible, consider that the famous New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard did the same thing.) Young Silk rejects both the racism that bars him from Woolworth's counter and the Negro solidarity of Howard University. "Neither the they of Woolworth's nor the we of Howard" is for Coleman Silk. "Instead the raw I with all its agility. Self-discovery--that was the punch to the labonz.... Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?"

Silk's contradictions power a great Philip Roth novel, but he's not the only character who packs a punch. Faunia, brutally abused by her Vietnam vet husband (a sketchy guy who seems to have wandered in from a lesser Russell Banks novel), scarred by the death of her kids, is one of Roth's best female characters ever. The self-serving Delphine Roux is intriguingly (and convincingly) nutty, and any number of minor characters pop in, mouth off, kick ass, and vanish, leaving a vivid sense of human passion and perversity behind. You might call it a stain. --Tim Appelo


From Publishers Weekly
Roth almost never fails to surprise. After a clunky beginning, in which crusty Nathan Zuckerman is carrying on about the orgy of sanctimoniousness surrounding Clinton's Monica misadventures, his new novel settles into what would seem to be patented Roth territory. Coleman Silk, at 71 a distinguished professor at a small New England college, has been harried from his position because of what has been perceived as a racist slur. His life is ruined: his wife succumbs under the strain, his friends are forsaking him, and he is reduced to an affair with 34-year-old Faunia Farley, the somber and illiterate janitor at the college. It is at this point that Zuckerman, Roth's novelist alter ego, gets to know and like Silk and to begin to see something of the personal and sexual liberation wrought in him by the unlikely affair with Faunia. It is also the point at which Faunia's estranged husband Les Farley, a Vietnam vet disabled by stress, drugs and drink, begins to take an interest in the relationship. So far this is highly intelligent, literate entertainment, with a rising tension. Will Les do something violent? Will Delphine Roux, the young French professor Silk had hired, who has come to hate him, escalate the college's campaign against him? Yes, but she now wants to make something of his Faunia relationship too. Then, in a dazzling coup, Roth turns all expectations on their heads, and begins to show Silk in a new and astounding light, as someone who has lived a huge lie all his life, making the fuss over his alleged racism even more surreal. The book continues to unfold layer after layer of meaning. There is a tragedy, as foretold, and an exquisitely imagined ending in which Zuckerman himself comes to feel both threatened and a threat. Roth is working here at the peak of his imaginative skills, creating many scenes at once sharply observed and moving: Faunia's affinity for the self-contained remoteness of crows, Farley's profane longing for a cessation to the tumult in his head, Zuckerman delightedly dancing with Silk to the big band tunes of their youth. He even brings off virtuoso passages that are superfluous but highly impressive, like his dissection of the French professor's lonely anguish in the States. This is a fitting capstone to the trilogy that includes American Pastoral and I Married a Communist--a book more balanced and humane than either, and bound, because of its explosive theme, to be widely discussed. 100,000 first printing. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Beliefnet
It is a superb book, but not for the reasons Roth wants it to be. He sells it as a political parable. The title's human stain, and the exposition of the first five pages, remind us that the book's action takes place in Impeachment Summer, 1998. Not just on Monica's dress, the stain is on us all, original sin, a fact that should make us more empathic, not less. Yet that summer, America's "piety binge ... revived America's oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony." Roth's narrative is unsparing in its defense of the private sphere and is a worthy reminder that private lives are best left that way; his repudiation of self-righteousness as a mode of public carriage should leave us all a little ashamed of much that we have done, or at least suborned. The salient tragedy of "The Human Stain" is not Coleman Silk's imprisonment in the stocks of public opinion, a fate that would not have befallen him had he never rejected his mother, siblings, and race. (Of course, had he remained a black man after mid-century, would he have become a tenured classicist at a baby-ivy college? A fair question.) Rather, the import of "The Human Stain" lies in its humane, beautiful dissection of a man who decides that freedom from race is worth total estrangement from a loving family and a literate, educated, upwardly mobile heritage that most Americans of all races would be happy to crow about. (Beliefnet, May 2000)


The New York Times Book Review, Lorrie Moore
The Human Stain is an astonishing, uneven and often very beautiful book.


From AudioFile
This novel completes the trilogy begun in 1997 with AMERICAN PASTORAL and followed in 1998 with I MARRIED A COMMUNIST. Here, Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego, tells the story of Coleman Silk, an eminent classics professor forced to resign from his New England college under charges of racism. The truth turns out to be far more complex than the false accusation. Arliss Howard is the voice of Zuckerman. He expertly conveys Zuckerman's varied emotions (outrage, puzzlement, warmth) as he tries to learn the truth. The two sections of the novel where the story is told by women are read by Debra Winger, and the substitution is very effective. Both readers get high marks for keeping the listener's rapt attention from start to finish. R.E.K. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
With the help of his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, Roth continues the inquiry into the state of the American soul during the second half of the twentieth-century. Fueled by the story of his magnetic hero, Coleman Silk, it roars, with heart-revving velocity, through a literary landscape that embraces the politics of race and sex, the Vietnam War, and the absurdity of extreme political correctness, the dumbing down of the academy, and President Clinton's impeachment. Coleman, a classics professor at a small Berkshire college, embodies all the ambition, paradox, anger, and futility of the American dream, and, over the course of his secretive life, he displays all the mettlesome powers of the Greek and Roman gods he helps immortalize. Naturally, a man this fired up makes enemies, and no one defends him when his brilliant career capsizes over a misunderstanding regarding his use of the word spooks to refer to students who failed to materialize in the classroom. How was he to know they were black? How was anyone to know that he would be the last professor on earth to make a racist remark? Enraged by the inanity of the ensuing brouhaha, Coleman resigns. Then, when his wife dies unexpectedly, he becomes involved with a woman who is half his age and illiterate. These unlikely lovers are surely doomed, and Zuckerman seems destined to discover the truth about Coleman, which reveals so many truths about the land he so passionately portrays. As Roth unfurls his hero's galvanizing tale, he protests the tyranny of prejudice and propriety, recognizes the "terrifyingly provisional nature of everything," and shakes his head in sorrow and wonder over the "inevitably stained creatures that we are." Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Roth's extraordinary recent productivity (the prizewinning Sabbath's Theater, 1995, and American Pastoral, 1997) continues apace with this impressively replete and very moving chronicle of an academic scandal and its impact on both the aging professor at its center and his friendalter ego novelist Nathan Zuckerman. In the turbulent summer of 1998 (while the country reacts with prurient dismay to the Bill ClintonMonica Lewinsky mess), Coleman Silk, classics teacher and Dean of Faculty at New England's Athena College, innocently uses the word ``spook'' (correctly, as it happens) in class, and is immediately accused of racism. His career and reputation are in ruins, his wife dies as a result of the ensuing emotional trauma, and Silk becomes estranged from his several adult children. Then, his ``exploitative'' ongoing affair with Faunia Farley, a passive cleaning woman less than half his age, is discovered. Zuckerman, in whom Coleman has confided, befriends him, hears him outthen, following the last of the storys several climaxes, sedulously ``reconstructs'' his beleaguered friend's history (``I am forced to imagine. It happens to be what I do for a living''). There's another secret in Coleman's pastand Zuckerman/Roth teases it out and explores its consequences in a back-and-forth narrative filled with surprises that strains plausibility severely, while simultaneously involving us deeply with its vividly imagined characters. In addition to Coleman Silk (whose arrogance and secretiveness in no way lessen our respect for him), Roth creates telling and unusually full characterizations of the semiliterate Faunia (both a pathetic victim of circumstance and a formidably strong woman); her angry ex-husband Les, a Vietnam vet crippled by post-traumatic stress disorder; and even Delphine Roux, Coleman's single-minded feminist colleague, and his most dedicated enemy. And in the long elegiac final scene, Zuckerman contrives a resolution that may confer forgiveness on them all. A marvel of imaginative empathy, generosity, and tact. Roth's late maturity looks more and more like his golden age.-- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Our Review
The Human Stain
Phillip Roth's The Human Stain is full of outrageous events and outraged people. Its main action takes place during a season of outrage: the summer of 1998, during which Monica Lewinsky was at last induced to testify as to the nature of her relationship with President Clinton; a time, as Roth writes, "when -- for the billionth time -- the jumble, the mayhem, the mess proved more subtle than this one's ideology and that one's morality. It was the summer when a president's penis was on everyone's mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America." It happens that Roth's hero, Coleman Silk, who is having an affair with a woman half his age, is being persecuted for reasons arguably similar to those that roused the Republican congress against Bill Clinton.

But Coleman has already once been a political scapegoat. He has been driven from his position as Dean of Faculty at a small New England liberal-arts school called Athena College because of a remark willfully misconstrued as racist. Coleman, a professor of classics, wonders why he has never seen two of his students in class. "Do they exist or are they spooks?" he asks his class. The absentees are, of course, black, and a decorous mob of the politically correct immediately launches itself at Coleman's throat, despite his honest protests that he had used the word only in its primary signification, as a synonym for "ghosts." The leader of the mob is one Delphine Roux, a frailly sophisticated Parisian gamine and professor of French literature who has it in for Coleman -- as Roth later suggests -- because of her unadmitted desire for the powerful older man. One feels, in reading of Coleman's downfall at Athena, that Roth is not playing fair: even the false sensitivity of political correctness is usually not quite so false or so sensitive as this, and as for Delphine Roux, she is mostly a straw-woman, a necessary counter in the easy oppositions Roth wants to set up between the classical canon and the pop-gun of fashionable theory; between sexual honesty and sexual repression; between heroic individualism and hysterical censoriousness.

The Human Stain succeeds much better in depicting Coleman's other transgressions. After he has resigned bitterly from Athena and his wife has died (at least in part a victim of her husband's ostracism), Coleman, at 71, takes up with a damaged, illiterate woman of 34, one of the college's cleaning staff. If Coleman is the novel's hero, Faunia Farley is its saint. She has survived abuse at the hands of her step-father and her ex-husband and the death, in a fire, of her two children. She has emerged from these ordeals purged of all sanctimony and sentimentalism. It is in their mere copulating animal selves that she and Coleman take solace. When he says to her, "This is more than sex," she replies, "No, it's not. You just forgot what sex is.... Don't fuck it up by pretending it's something else." Steeped in Greek epic and tragedy, Coleman has already gone a long way towards abandoning Judeao-Christian moral perfectionism: he reflects that a course on " 'Appropriate Behavior in Classical Greek Drama'...would be over before it began." Illiterate Faunia completes his education. Lustful moral realists on the far side of shame, Faunia and Coleman -- the latter taking Viagra -- go at it like unsupervised teenagers. The affair only reinforces Coleman's ostracism from the burghers and burgheresses of Athena, who find it unsavory, but nothing can force Coleman to give up this late-life happiness. One imagines that Roth would concur with the philosopher E. M. Cioran's remark: "I shall never utterly admire anyone except a man dishonored -- and happy."

Loosened into candor by his delighted dishonor, Coleman confesses to Faunia his one truly transgressive secret. Coleman Silk is in fact a light-skinned black who has been passing as a Jew since his bohemian days in Greenwich Village. Ruthlessly estranged himself from his black family, he never even revealed his race to his Jewish wife or his children. That a black man who concealed his origins should be brought down by a remark falsely construed as racist might strike some as an appropriate comeuppance. To Roth it seems like an instance of the gods' sense of humor, which his tragedy -- complete with epigraph from Sophocles -- means to protest. (According to LukÀcs, the central function of tragedy is to protest fate, rather than indicate its appropriateness.) At the funeral following Coleman's untimely death (the result of a car accident incurred while receiving fellatio from Faunia) the black eulogist does not know how truly he speaks when he praises Coleman as "an American individualist par excellence." Such an individualist was Coleman Silk that he not only rejected "the tyranny of propriety" but the confinements of race as well.

Yet in this hymn to freedom, Roth has constructed a trap for himself. The phrase "the human stain" is Faunia's, and she pronounces it "without revulsion or contempt or condemnation." She understands the words, as we are meant to, as a kind of tautology: to be human is to be stained: "Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen -- there's no other way to be here." Faunia considers that "the fantasy of purity is appalling," yet Roth's novel, and Faunia especially, is a fantasy of purity. Faunia and Coleman have so thoroughly cleansed themselves of misgiving and remorse, of moral meliorism, that they seem impossibly pure. They are no less saintly for being inverted saints. In escaping his race, Coleman becomes a creature of fantastic solitude and therefore equally fantastic purity. He is not sullied by belonging to a group. Faunia's capacity to live without apology is also troubling: Are there not deeds for which we must apologize? If all is cruelty and abuse, aren't some abuses nevertheless much worse than others? And what if they are committed by Delphine Roux?

The great irony of The Human Stain is that Delphine Roux, schooled in deconstructionism, might be its best reader. It was the cardinal tenet of deconstruction that all systems of rhetorical opposition -- such as that between the stained and the immaculate, between purity and impurity, or freedom and subjection -- were self-contradictory and therefore self-dissolving. They were no sooner constructed than they desconstructed themselves. So it is with Roth's novel, purist in its insistence on impurity, dogmatic in its resistance to dogma, angry in its plea for tolerance. But to say so is only to confirm that The Human Stain is indeed stained and impure, the main exhibit in its own passionate case.

No one needs to be reminded at this stage that Phillip Roth is one of our finest and most intelligent novelists, and if one argues with him more persistently than with his contemporaries, it is largely because -- as Theodor Adorno said of Proust -- he spares the reader the embarrassment of believing himself more intelligent than the author. The Human Stain may not be a perfect novel, but so much of what is centrally anguishing about American life forces its way, shouting, onto its pages, that it is impossible not to consider it the work of a great writer. Whether its arguments need to be assented to, or its prejudices indulged, I doubt; but more than any other novel of the season, it demands to be read.

--Benjamin Kunkel

Benjamin Kunkel is a writer living in New York City.

About the Author

After many years of teaching comparative literature -- mostly at the University of Pennsylvania -- Philip Roth retired from teaching as Distinguished Professor of Literature at Hunter College in 1992. Until 1989, he was general editor of the Penguin book series Writers from the Other Europe, which he inaugurated in 1974 and which introduced the work of Bruno Schultz and Milan Kundera to an American audience. His lengthy interviews with foreign authors -- among them Primo Levi, Ivan Klima, and Aharon Appelfeld -- have appeared in The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review. Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933 and has lived in Rome, London, Chicago, and New York. He now resides in Connecticut.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.

Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."

SYNOPSIS

Set during the sanctimonious culture wars of the 1990s, The Human Stain concludes Philip Roth's eloquent trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist) of postwar America with the story of an eminent, respected college professor whose life, career, and very identity unravel in the wake of a politically correct academic bushwhacking.

FROM THE CRITICS

Time

Philip Roth's new book offers a bleak look beneath the surface of a self-satisfied nation.

Sam Tanenhaus - Wall Street Journal

The darkness that seeps into every corner of this novel is not oppressive or dreary, thanks to Mr. Roth's narrative energy. The story he tells, packed with twists and revelations, moves sinuously back and forth in time, from one perfectly realized scene to the next.

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

The master chronicler of American life in the 20th century concludes his trilogy of postwar lives, each as tragically determined by the nation's fate as by the "human stain" that so indelibly marks human nature. "Accessible, tightly woven, and downright fun. I'll be sure to pick up his backlist titles." Roth's long-winded passages were the only drawback - one reviewer counted 142 words in a single sentence!

"THE HUMAN STAIN exposes the stress that… race and ethnicity, economics, puritanism and paranoia…have placed on the American Dream."

AudioFile