The Human Stain (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic Series) - Hardcover

Roth, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786229640 ISBN 13: 9780786229642

Publisher: Thorndike Pr, 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:

"An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand'" (Sunday Telegraph)

"The Human Stain pulses with the strengths that make Roth a prime contender for the status of the most impressive novelist now writing in and about America" (Sunday Times)

"A novel so furious in its telling, with a plot so intricate in its construction that it is infused with a kind of diabolic joy. A masterpiece" (Mail on Sunday)

"One of his very best... There are passages of such sustained brilliance here that I found myself going over them again and again in gaping disbelief. An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand" (Sunday Telegraph)

"One of the most beautiful books I've ever read" (Red)

About this edition

• Publisher: Thorndike Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0786229640
• ISBN 13: 9780786229642
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 614