The Human Stain - Hardcover

Roth, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224060902 ISBN 13: 9780224060905

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 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.

About this title

Review

Athena College was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman Silk 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 dramatised 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.

The flashbacks to Silk's youth in New Jersey become just as important as his turbulent-forced retirement when he reveals a secret that he has been hiding his entire adult life and 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, 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 and vanish, leaving a vivid sense of human passion and perversity behind. You might call it a stain. --Tim Appelo

Review

?Perhaps the best writing of ÝRoth?s¨ long career?. ÝThe Human Stain¨ is a modern tragedy.??"Chicago Sun-Times"

?Perhaps the best writing of [Roth?s] long career?. [The Human Stain] is a modern tragedy. Chicago Sun-Times

Edition details

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0224060902
• ISBN 13: 9780224060905
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384