The Human Stain: A Novel American Trilogy (3)
by Philip Roth

List Price: $16.00
Our Price: $4.98
You Save: $11.02 (69%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of The Human Stain: A Novel American Trilogy (3)

Book Review: A Flawed Feast
Summary: 4 Stars

THE HUMAN STAIN completes Philip Roth's trilogy of novels dealing with the social and cultural aspects of post-World War II America. The first two were I MARRIED A COMMUNIST and AMERICAN PASTORAL. In this third novel, Roth has elected to make Bill Clinton's scandalous experience with Monica Lewinsky the fulcrum on which to balance his tale of a respected public figure who gets done in by an early misdeed and his subsequent attempts to cover it up. The exploitation of his weakness by the media and his academic opposition completes the parallel. I suspect Roth's decision to slant his story in this direction was as opportunistic as the press that covered Clinton's impeachment hearings and trial-hounding him and slavering for every bone of information and misinformation that came their way.
Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego narrator, is more tightly integrated into this story than he was in Roth's earlier novel, AMERICAN PASTORAL, where he suddenly seemed to disappear early in the narrative. But AMERICAN PASTORAL seemed to be a truer reflection of its era-the Vietnam War and seething student protests-than THE HUMAN STAIN is of its setting-the nineties, culminating with the impeachment hearings in 1998. AMERICAN PASTORAL was a passionate and evocative portrait of an American family trying to reconcile its immigrant work-ethic values with those of its disaffected, alienated flower children. THE HUMAN STAIN is a personal character-driven story that could've happened any time, any place. The allusions to the human stain that betrayed Clinton seem like a fortuitous ploy to promote Roth's new book.
Both novels, however, probe deeply into the contemporary American psyche. Roth's exposure of anguished parent-child relationships was especially touching, as when the son of Roth's protagonist, Coleman Silk, attends his father's funeral and exclaims about a father for whom he has previously expressed nothing but hostility- "We've lost him!" No lectures, no sermons, just a short line of dialogue, but it has the power to awake echoes of the guilt I felt when I lost my father. Why didn't I tell him I loved him while he was still alive!
As in AMERICAN PASTORAL, Roth presents the reader with a tapestry of fact and conjecture-stories woven in and around characters both major and minor, complex and cameo, and leads us to a climax as tragic as a Shakespearean drama. But though Roth successfully creates the brooding tone of impending disaster, he ignores an obvious damned-if-you-do and damned-if you-don't irony that would've drawn a perfect analogy to Bill Clinton's situation.
Professor Coleman Silk is accused of being a racist because his innocent comment about two black students was completely misconstrued by the administrators of a small Liberal Arts College in New England where he'd formerly been Dean of Faculty. He is further brought down by the jealousy and ambition of a female professor who covets both Silk and his professional reputation. Although Coleman Silk fought the accusation of racism with all the weapons of his orderly, rational and even brilliant mind, he could not overcome the self-serving motives of his accusers. He is outraged and claims that his persecutors not only forced his resignation but caused the untimely death of his loyal and supportive wife, Iris. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to his students and colleagues, as well as his wife and four children, Coleman Silk was a Negro who was passing for white. The only thing that might have saved him was the confession that he, too, was black and therefore would not have had racist motives. That, however, would've revealed that he'd been deceiving his friends, family and the University for years and he'd end up exchanging one catastrophe for another. In the words of Roth's fellow-writer, Joseph Heller, he was in a Catch 22.
Silk finds consolation and redemption of sorts in a relationship with Faunia Farley, a woman half his age who works as a part-time farmhand and janitor. It is in this relationship that he also becomes the victim of a deadly retribution by Faunia's estranged husband. Is this coincidence, or the hand of Fate, punishing him for deceiving his wife and children and abandoning his birth family in his quest to be accepted as white?
Coleman Silk was caught between a rock and a hard place. To be unfairly branded as a racist and deprived of his respected position in the community, or to reveal the fearful secret he'd concealed for years? A Chekhovian dilemma. But though this dilemma was obvious from the beginning, Roth never focuses on it, never alludes to it and never even speculates on the results of such a revelation. Too bad. Maybe he did in an earlier version but decided on a more opportunistic approach. After all, in 1998 the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was a hot topic, THE HUMAN STAIN was an intriguing title, and who'd be interested in a novel about a man who sold his soul so he could pass for white? That's been done before, although, in this case, it's a little different. Although Coleman Silk conceals his racial origins, he takes on the identity of another disadvantaged minority. He passes as a Jew!
Well, what happens to a protagonist who sells his soul? Right! He usually gets short-changed. But this transaction is a fascinating one, especially the way Roth describes it. THE HUMAN STAIN is a brilliant portrait of a flawed human being, but Roth never passes judgment. He wisely leaves that to the reader.

Summary of The Human Stain: A Novel American Trilogy (3)

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

Literary Books

• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > Literary