The Human Stain: A Novel | 
|  | | | Title: | The Human Stain: A Novel | | Author: | Philip Roth | | Publisher: | Vintage | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 08 May, 2001 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0099422131 / 9780375726347 | | List Price: | $14.95 | | You Save: | $4.78 | | Amazon Price: | $10.17 | |
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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."
Amazon.com 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
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Customer Reviews:
• Recommending Philip Roth Is A Little Like Recommending Sex... 13 June, 2008
...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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A10W0GPVSGN8PL
• A Smart Novel Which Will Stay In Your Mind For Days 30 September, 2008
So this is a story about Coleman Silk who is black. He was raised in a respectable black family, with an optometrist father and a mother who was one of the first black Head Nurses in New Jersey. The Silks however, as Coleman came to find out, were much more accepted in their NJ neighborhood because they were light skinned. Coleman especially was light with soft curly hair and green eyes. Because of this, Coleman, after dropping out of Howard University and eventually joining the military as a white man (because he learned he can "pass" and because of other reasons...) began to live his life as a Jewish man and eventually living a life of lies until the day he died. Coleman Silk would like to think that he would have kept this secret from ever coming out if only he wasn't accused of being called a racist at the university he was teaching at. He was so surprised with this racist accusation because he was the least likely person to be accused of that. Philip Roth is an acclaimed writer and I can definitely see why. This story is so well written that I find myself thinking about Coleman Silk and his life while I'm about to sleep and how if he did it this way and that maybe his life could be different. Then I realize I'm thinking about a fictional character in a book. But see, that's how good books are supposed to be. It makes you think about it even when you're not reading about it.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1ZJ2R9LH4BNO8
• Mixed Feelings 05 May, 2008
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3HZKNZY9KKQZA
• Philip Roth = Genius 19 August, 2008
A college professor is forced to resign for alleged racism and begins an affair with an illiterate woman. In my opinion, this is very close to the perfect book. The writing is genius, and the scope of the book is enormous.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2KIVODZRTGY4U
• Doldrums In A Horizenless Ocean Of Words 22 July, 2008
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AYCJSA9HR7TKO
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