Product 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."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21255 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-08
• Released on: 2001-05-08
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

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

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)

Customer Reviews

Doldrums in a horizenless ocean of words
I'm a great admirer of Philip Roth's books, and I have no doubt that he's one of the country's greatest novelists (in fact, I don't quite understand why he hasn't been awarded the Nobel). But even the great ones occasionally hit clunkers, and The Human Stain is a clunker. I really wanted to like the book, but I just couldn't. It has its grand moments--it is, after all, written by Roth--but it's too long, too messy, too grandiose in places, too underdeveloped in others. By midpoint, I felt I was drowning in a sea of words and alternately bored and irritated, longing for the crispness and elegance of Roth's Everyman or Portnoy.

I'm not sure why Roth opted for such a baroque style in Human Stain-- endless soliloquies, teutonically long sentences, tireless and tiresome flashbacks--but it all becomes simply too much after awhile, especially since his characters are too underdeveloped to carry the narrative. The protagonist, Coleman Silk, despite everything we come to know about him, remains rather one-dimensional. Huge secrets don't necessarily make for depth. Coleman's love interest, Faunia Farley, is even less alive. She seems little more than a shadow, which is especially odd given that the tragic events of her life are surely rich fodder. Lester, Faunia's ex-husband and screwed-up vet, is a caricature who seems to do nothing but rant, rave, and sweat. The Chinese cafe scene which serves as part of Lester's "therapy" is worthy of a bad movie. The only character that really has color is Delphine Roux. Would that she was more present.

In all fairness, there are some good moments in the novel. I've never been as totally surprised by a novel as I was when, in the book's second part, Coleman's ethnicity is revealed. I just didn't see it coming, and it took me ten or so pages before I fully grasped what was going on. This was masterful on Roth's part. Additionally, his depiction of small college politics and political correctness was deliciously barbed, and enjoyable for anyone who's ever taught at such a place as the fictional but all too real Athena College. But such Lucky Jim-like dissections of academia aren't, after all, uncommon in fiction. They may be fun to read, but there's no shortage of them.

At the end of the day, the tragedy of Coleman Silk that serves as The Human Stain's message is one worthy of an American Euripides. For all his genius, Mr. Roth was unable to do it justice.

Recommending Philip Roth is a little like recommending sex...
...It's so obvious it hardly needs saying.

Coleman Silk is a professor ousted from his position on false charges of racism, and, at 71, carrying on a torrid and secret affair with an illiterate 34-year-old cleaning woman. But when it comes to secrets, that's the least of Silk's.

Reading Roth is often breathlessly easy, a pure joy; at other times, he's a challenge, demanding full attention and a little forbearance. But both are always rewarded. And I can't think of another writer who so accurately captures the inner workings of the male mind. An uncompromising, intelligent, complex exploration of race, identity, sex, and American morality.

Mixed feelings
Let me just start with the silliest comment: the only way to find out whether you like this book or not, is by reading it. Most reviews here and on Amazon.uk reflect ambivalent feelings. After turning the last page, mine was not altogether negative, but not entirely positive either. This was also my first book by Philip Roth.

Ageing but vigorous professor Coleman Silk is accused of racism in the classroom and forcefully rejecting it (in vain), he chooses to retire after a long, fulfilling and esteemed teaching career. His tale is told by his friend, writer Nathan Zuckerman. Hardly acknowledging each other for years, a friendship begins and Zuckerman tries to understand the multiple facets defining Silk's personality. Unbeknownst to him, he will later discover a secret that Silk has kept for decades, a secret which his life had been, and still is, based on.

Looping around the main theme, there are other characters who are connected with Silk and bear relevance. In the background, Coleman's parents and siblings. Their beginnings, the struggles to send all their children to proper schools for the best education possible. We then have his wife, a strong, independent personality who died during the `racism ordeal', and their four adult children (it's 1998 by then). Silk's bursting rage and pain towards these two -to him- related events (the accusations and his wife's death), find a degree of comfort through the acquaintance -later developing into something much more- of Faunia, a janitor in the Athena college where he used to teach. Faunia, a tormented soul herself, does not seem to be left alone by her ex-husband, Les, who keeps stalking her after a terrible tragedy struck at their home some years previously. Some other characters from the past who are irretrievably connected with Coleman, pop into the picture. His former girlfriend, Steena, met and loved in his twenties. The young French dean at Athena, Dolphine Roux, who supported the racism accusations. Zuckerman himself finds a niche for some of his personal details.

So many people, so many different personalities, so many tragedies. This book explores a variety of themes -race, rape, depression, death, loneliness- which make it certainly for a substantial, full-of-texture read. It also speaks of love, love for a profession, for a person, for life in general, but the intricacy with which the author interpolates this concept is open to debate. This is why I cannot define in full its identifying quality, or, for that matter, what exactly I did not like about this book. Perhaps a certain dislike for the structure of some of the chapters: sentences which do not see a full stop, a pause, for an entire page for example. This rendered the read a bit tedious. Also, I found the numerous references to the Clinton/Lewinski's `interlude' somewhat irrelevant to the core of the story and if the purpose was to pinpoint that Silk's own story began to unfold back then, in 1998, well, it was clear enough already. Not to mention the final paragraphs -and this is not a spoiler- when an incredible and unrealistic conversation ensues in a cemetery. I mean, was that to supply the reader with some final `answers' -which could not have been `real' anyway since it was all a mental image?- .

And yet. Coleman Silk is a personage. And his secret, the secret from which we are often distracted due to a number of superimposed, unnecessary (to me) details, is the central theme of this book. Like it or not, mixed feelings or not, I've never written such a long review before. There must be a reason, although I myself am not sure what that is. What I am sure about is that this tale is so imbued with wrenching issues that it cannot fail to dazzle, provoke and stimulate conversations.