[.ca] The Human Stain: A Novel (ISBN 0618059458)

From Amazon.com:
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

An American tragedy:
This is a beautiful,intricate story, beautifully and intricately told, about who we are in America at the dawn of the 21st century. It is written with passion, urgency, a touch of fire and brimstone; and Coleman Silk's fate at the hands of the righteous and the ruthless seems to me a genuine tragic vision of American life. Satirical? Roth here is more Jeremiah than Swift. Tom Wolfe likes to venture into something like this territory, but for me, the entire oeuvre of Wolfe doesn't stand up to one page of this magnificent novel. This is the first Roth I've read since GOODBYE, COLUMBUS, many years ago. I enjoyed that book but didn't think of Roth as a writer I needed to know better. I ran out of reading on vacation, picked up THE HUMAN STAIN in an airport, and was stunned for two days as I read it. A month later I can't stop thinking about it. The word "masterpiece" is applied so promiscuously that it tends to be supremely unhelpful when thinking about any work it purports to describe. But it is hard to think of this book without invoking it.

disregard bengagirl:
This is a beautiful, wrenching novel; just what you'd expect of Roth. I think it also might be his most accessible work. I've reccommended it to several people who previously had shied away from Roth after works like "My Life as a Man" and "American Pastoral." The characters are so real, it seems like you could bump into them in a restaurant. And bengalgirl, the reviewer below who panned it with such spite, just look a little deeper. Sjhe gave five stars to a Star Trek book. That's right, a novel about TV characters. So, um. I guess if you're so deeply into cheesy TV sci-fi shows that you read novels with the same characters (and, no doubt, the same depth) this might not be the book for you. Maybe you'd like some Buck Rodgers books. Or Battlestar Gallactica.

TRAGEDY of SELF: Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths as a Dean:
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?

Deeply relevant:
In short, but expansive descriptions, Roth takes us inside the psyche of his characters and reveals in the process much about our American selves. Read it if you dare.

Get past the agenda:
Roth is, perhaps, this country's greatest master of the written word. His style is unparalleled and a privilege to read and study. The plot of The Human Stain, though at times tedious and overdrawn, is nevertheless worth the read. The characters are engrossing and well developed and you genuinely come to care for them. The struggle with this book is in getting past Roth's liberal agenda. His apparent point that what takes place behind closed doors is nobody else's business is valid enough, but when those doors are in the White House, and the producer of "The Human Stain" lies to the country about what has taken place, this is a problem that a 300+ word novel about a college professor passing for white cannot atone for. I'd rather be subjected to the blatant liberalism of a Time magazine cover that declares "How the scandal was good for America." A different title and about fifty less pages would have made this a far more enjoyable read. (I invite you to read my book, Living Dead Man, available on Amazon or through my website, www.mbernier.com.)