HUMAN STAIN, THE - EXPORT ONLY
Language: English
Published by Vintage Books, 2001
Series: Book 3 of 3 - American Trilogy
- Softcover
- Used
Seller: Barksdale Books, Almere, NetherlandsBarksdale Books
AbeBooks seller since August 5, 2025
Condition: Used - Good
£ 8.59
Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
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."; .
Seller Inventory # 928482
- Title
- HUMAN STAIN, THE - EXPORT ONLY
- Author
- Philip Roth
- Publisher
- Vintage Books
- Publication year
- 2001
- Condition
- Good
- Binding
- Softcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0099422131
- ISBN 13
- 9780099422136
- Series
- Book 3 of 3: American Trilogy
- Seller catalogs
- Literary fiction: general
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review
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.
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
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Barksdale Books
Almere, Netherlands
AbeBooks seller since August 5, 2025
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| Item | 8 to 60 business days | 8 to 60 business days |
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| First item | £ 16.69 | £ 50.07 |
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