The Human Stain - Hardcover

Roth, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618059458 ISBN 13: 9780618059454

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000

Synopsis

In an insightful new novel by the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author of I Married a Communist, a college professor with a sexual indiscretion in his past is hounded from his job by academic enemies who label him a racist. 100,000 first printing.

About this title

Review

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 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 this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0618059458
• ISBN 13: 9780618059454
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352