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The Human Stain
by Philip Roth

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     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."

     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. edition.

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 friend alter ego novelist Nathan Zuckerman. In the turbulent summer of 1998 (while the country reacts with prurient dismay to the Bill Clinton Monica 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 out then, following the last of the story's 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 past and 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.
The New York Times
     Mr. Roth does a beautifully nuanced job...by turns, unnerving, hilarious and sad.

The Chicago Tribune
     With THE HUMAN STAIN, Philip Roth, the great autobiographer, has transformed himself into Philip Roth, the great social novelist.
Christian Science Monitor
     "The Human Stain" provides one of the most provocative explorations of race and rage in American literature.

Christian Science Monitor
     "The Human Stain" provides one of the most provocative explorations of race and rage in American literature.

The Miami Herald
     "... this novel...eloquently makes its case for the transcendent complexity of the human soul."

Newsday
     "To be human, Roth tells us in this roiling, sometimes persuasive novel, is to make our dirty mark."

Time Magazine
     "At 67, Roth has not lost one ampere of his power to rile and surprise.

Time Magazine
     "At 67, Roth has not lost one ampere of his power to rile and surprise."

Review
     "A marvel of imaginative empathy, generosity, and tact. Roth's late maturity looks more and more like his golden age."

Book Description
     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."


From the Back Cover
     "In American literature today, there's Philip Roth, and then there's everybody else." —Chicago Tribune

     “By turns unnerving, hilarious, and sad…. It is a book that shows how the public zeitgeist can shape, even destroy, an individual’s life…. Not only a philosophic bookend to American Pastoral but a large and stirring book as well.”–Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

     "Philip Roth's The Human Stain is the best novel he has written—not to devalue the past. Here, everything the writer has learnt and experienced within that indefinable form we call the novel, the impact of society on himself and the people around him, world contemporary mores, beliefs, prejudices, have come to full realization." —Nadine Gordimer, The Times Literary Supplement (International Book of the Year Selection)

     "A master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment." —Sam Tanenhaus, The Wall Street Journal

About the Author
     Philip Roth received the 1960 National Book Award in fiction for Goodbye, Columbus. He has twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award—in 1987 for the novel The Counterlife and in 1992 for Patrimony. Operation Shylock won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was chosen by Time magazine as the best American novel of 1993. In 1995, Roth's Sabbaths Theater received the National Book Award in fiction. In 1998, he received the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral and was a White House recipient of the National Medal of Arts. His other books include the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound; the novels Letting Go, My life as a Man, and The Professor of Desire; and the political satire Our Gang.
 

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