Rating: 
Summary: HE'S COME UNDONE...
Review: Overall, I liked this book, despite the author's oftentimes wordy and dense prose. It was an interesting look at one man's history, a proud man who was brought to heel and hoisted by his own petard in a most ironic way. It seems that the main protagonist in his book, Coleman Silk, an esteemed classics college professor, who almost single-handedly put small, liberal arts Athena college on the academic map, finds himself brought up on charges by the college for using a word that has dual meanings, one of which is racially offensive to blacks, in connection with two students. Coleman has never seen the students at the heart of the brouhaha, as they missed all their classes. Consequently, he has no idea what their racial makeup is when he uses the word that is to cause so much offense.
Coleman is rightly outraged by his colleagues reaction towards him in connection with this incident and, in particular, by one colleague's virulent attempt to castigate him and paint him as the devil incarnate. Coleman then cuts off his nose to spite his face and resigns from the college, holding the college responsible for the death of his wife, when she dies shortly after learning of his disgrace. What the college does not know, and what makes the accusation so ironic, is that Coleman Silk is an African-American who has been passing for white. Therein lies the rub, as Coleman and his life slowly unravel.
Coleman, now in his early seventies, is fighting mad about the way his once promising and respected life seems to be ending. He is not helping matters any, however, when he takes up with Faunia Farley, an under-educated, emotionally troubled janitor at the college who is half is age and has a great deal of personal baggage from her own turbulent past, including an abusive, Vietnam vet ex-husband who stalks her. Coleman is like a man possessed and seems to go into an emotional tailspin, seeking to right what went wrong. To that end he reaches out to writer Nathan Zuckerman, whom he befriends, and asks him to write his story, as he himself is unable to write it. Of course, Coleman is unable to write it, because he cannot do so without revealing the secret that he kept for fifty years from his wife, his children, his colleagues, and his friends.
When tragedy strikes, Nathan Zuckerman is left to put the pieces together and discover what it was that made Coleman Silk the man that he was. This is a very compelling story. The most affecting parts of the book have to do with Coleman's early life, before he decided to pass. It is an indictment of race relations in America at the time of his decision, when someone perceived to be a black man was unable to be all that he could be. Coleman, a very bright and talented young man, seeking to be all that he could be without thinking about race, chose to pass. He was simply not interested in being a role model for those of his perceived race.
There are parts of the novel, however, that do not ring true. His affair with the janitor is a little hard to believe. I suppose that that the reason that Coleman and Faunia come together, other than the obvious sexual one, is because of the inherent, personal pathology that each one brings to the relationship. Of course, the relationship makes Coleman feel young again. Still, it is more distracting that enlightening in terms of the issues contained within the pages of this book. I also found her ex-husband to be more of a caricature and distraction more than anything else, though he is necessary to the plot.
Still, there is much to like about this novel, if one can overlook the somewhat self-indulgent prose that probably could have used better editing. The issues of racial identity are interesting and are the ones that provide much food for thought. It is in these issues that the strength of the book lies, even though the questions that they raise remain unanswered. This is a good book that could have been a great one.
Rating: 
Summary: What's the matter about a novel on a questionable character?
Review: Reading previous reviews about this prolix, physical, sensuous novel -Roth struck me as one of the few American writers who can speak about sex by means of allusions only without producing near-porn and neverthless manage to be enourmouly enticing- I'm struck by the inability of some American readers to grasp the novel's main point.
Coleman Silk, the novel's hero, is on one side, an entirely questionable character - an African American who has decided to make good in Academe by faking himself an alternate life as Jewish; on the other side, he's the prototypical all-American hero - the youngster who has decided to make good solely on his own. It's not his decisions, in themselves, that are "bad"; it's the _context_ in which they are set that makes makes them to appear as so. Now, this is the stuff of which tragedy, according to Aristotle, was made of: a person like any other making a normal, "good" - but neverthless flawed- decision that unfolds consequences that turn entirely for the bad. In order to be understood, Silks needs to be set against his historical milieu - therefore to understand the nature of his tragedy is to understand the nature of the general tragedy of the American Dream - something I fear some of the novel's readers are unwilling to cope with. Those who want to cope with it, however, may be sure they shall have a superb novel in their hands with which they shall not easily able to set aside until they have read it from cover to cover.
Rating:
Summary: The Unknowable and Elusive Truth
Review: The Human Stain completes Philip Roth's thematic American trilogy, a meditation on the historical forces in the latter half of the twentieth century that have destroyed many innocent lives. In this trilogy, Roth takes devastating aim at the "American dream" and its empty promises of prosperity, freedom and everlasting happiness.The trilogy began with American Pastoral, which some believe to be the high point in Roth's career. American Pastoral explored the effects of late-sixties radicalism on the idyllic life of Swede Levov and his family. I Married a Communist, the second book of the trilogy, was somewhat of a disappointment after the near-perfect American Pastoral, but it was still an engrossing story about the McCarthy era, a portrait of a country in which paranoia had displaced reason, allowing rumor and innuendo to run rampant and ruin lives. The Human Stain closes the trilogy and brings us to the year 1998. The United States is awash in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and citizens feel the "ecstasy of sanctimony;" they are ready to accuse, blame and punish a very good president for what amounts to nothing more than the sexual peccadilloes almost every person becomes involved in at some time during his life. On its surface, The Human Stain condemns the political correctness of McCarthyism that effectively turns college campuses away from creative thought and toward middle-aged, white, male oppression at any cost. Does this make The Human Stain a campus satire? Yes, but it is so much more and those who think it is not are simply missing the book's deepest level. It is, at its heart, a sad and poignant statement on the very essence of human nature, a statement that, in Roth's talented hands, becomes utterly convincing. It reminds us of our very unpraiseworthy proclivity to condemn, sully and even find some secret and voluptuous joy in ruining the name of others and delivering their lives into the hands of misery. The real truth, Roth tells us, is both "endless" and unknowable, no matter how much we may wish to label it with our petty accusations. Most of us, however, find this unknowability unacceptable, and so, we leave our own unmistakable "human stain" in our wake. Coleman Silk, Roth's protagonist in The Human Stain, understands truth's unknowablility all too well. This seventy-one year old professor, who was once a beloved classicist of Athena College, now faces a scandal much like the one faced by President Clinton. And, like Clinton, Silk has done a very good job; his efforts as dean have left their mark of excellence. Athena College is all the better for his having been there, just as the United States is all the better for the Clinton years. Nevertheless, Silk finds himself accused of being both a racist and a misogynist. Shamed publicly, Silk does exact revenge, but revenge for what? What exactly is the truth in this matter? While those in Silk's community want to see "truth" as a matter of black and white, the novel's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman tells us that "truth," at least in this case, if not in every case, is something that is more nuanced, more grey. And, in a delightfully ironic twist, we learn that Silk has a secret to share, one that makes his accusers turn beet-red with embarrassment rather than with exhilaration. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's own alter-ego, has appeared in eight of his novels, including the first two of this trilogy. He is the man in whom the reader must place his trust, or his mistrust. Zuckerman willingly admits that he knows only certain facts about his protagonists, that he must rely on his own innate gift for storytelling to convince us of the things that he, himself, sees so clearly, and that we are certainly free to accept or deny his version as we will. Roth could have chosen to tell his story from the vantage point of an objective, omniscient narrator and thus allowed us access to the thoughts and feelings of all the characters involved. At first glance, this might seem to have been the wiser choice. A second glance, however, will show us it would have been a travesty, an audacious claim to actually know what the elusive and unknowable truth really is. Telling the story from the point-of-view of the highly subjective Zuckerman is tantamount to an admission of the elusiveness of truth; it is allowing us to form our own opinions without manipulation from either the author or from any of his characters. It is, genius. If there is any blemish, however slight, in this wonderful literary achievement, it is the character of Les Farley. Les is the now-cliched Vietnam veteran; a man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, the weary, misunderstood and maligned soldier who has been abandoned by a country for whom he was willing to give up his very life. Roth uses Farley as a plot device only, and he is one that fails to convince in an otherwise overwhelmingly convincing book. Roth's prose is, as always, without rival. His Jamesian sentences twist and turn with a vitality and energy that, at times, can seem almost frantic. But Roth never jeopardizes his lucidity; he is a linguistic master who can take us on the most tumultuous ride with an ease and smoothness that other authors can only dream about. The Human Stain is Philip Roth at the top of his form. It is also American fiction at its very finest and a book that is definitely not to be missed.
Rating:
Summary: "The truth about us is endless. As are the lies."
Review: THE HUMAN STAIN explores the relationship between public and private life in America during the second half of the 20th century. Like his few other novels, Philip Roth narrates the novel through his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who after a prostate surgery became impotent and worked as a retired writer. Zuckerman crossed path with our protagonist, Coleman Silk, in a seemingly preposterous situation. Everyone knew about Coleman's affair with a woman half his age. Nor did people not know about the secret of his racism, which severed his well-established tie with Athena College of which he had been professor for nearly forty years.
Readers will eventually learn that Silk is a light skinned African-American who gradually drifted across the American racial divide and for 50 years has successfully passed as a white Jew. He thrives to take Zuckerman into his confidence about this deep lifelong secret that lies at the very core of his identity at the backdrop of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, whose subversive affair with a White House intern emerged in every last mortifying detail in 1998. It was set at a time when "the jumble, the mayhem, the mess proved itself more subtle than one's ideology and one's morality."
A supposed racism slur - "spooks" - forced Coleman Silk to resign and the accusation, Coleman understands, leads directly to his wife's death to heart attack, though the charge is both spurious and preposterous. But this is not his only nightmare. What is most unendurable is that he is drained to the last bucket of days, the time if there ever is a time to quit the quarrel, to give up the rebuttal, to end the protest to an untrue accusation, to undo himself from the conscientiousness with which he raised his family bound by a combative marriage, and on top to come to term with his secret.
Coleman Silk's tragedy is intrinsic that it has so firmly imprinted in his in his early years, at his painful realization the objective is for his fate to determine not by the ignorant, hate-filled intentions of a hostile world but by his own resolve. So racism is just one example of evil, which, in Roth's rigorous and robust language, originates from his quest of purity, one that is racism-free. The lie, a shameful secret that has his lifetime magnetism, exists at the foundation of his relationship to his children who never have the opportunity to know their true ethnic identity. The lie impedes his relationship with his family, which has inevitably become an impediment, embarrassment, and taboo. No wonder Coleman is left to his crushing sense of abandonment that festered into the wound that has led to his self-destructive isolation and too circuitously a tragedy. Coleman's original goal is to live in freedom and not a representative of his race. In the quest for this freedom he falls prey to a society in which racism issue compromises the public and private life of morality.
The prose of HUMAN STAIN is robust, matter-of-fact, mellifluous, and highly literate. The book is quite difficult to take in the sense that he takes the fanaticism of the social root of evil very seriously.
Rating: 
Summary: Sporadically Involving
Review: There is much to recommend in Philip Roth's latest literary effort - the engaging/moving story of Coleman Silk's childhood and his eventual rejection of his family and his African-American heritage, the character of Les Farley, forever damaged by his experiences in Viet Nam and doomed to live a haunted and isolated life, and the on again/off again narration of Nathan Zuckermann, a frequent fixture of Roth's literature. When this book is good, it's great. When it's not, it's rather ponderous. With the exception of American Pastoral, which ranks as one of the greatest books I have ever read, Roth's novels of the past decade read more like social diatribes than narrative fiction. The anger he sees in the world seems propelled by his own disillusionments with love, women, sex, Viet Nam, the breakdown of the American family, etc. etc. He is also (and perhaps some will argue) a raging misogynist. His female characters are some of the most grotesque figures I have ever encountered in fiction and in the Human Stain, they prove to be the book's weakest feature. Delphine Roux and Faunia Farley are just not well written. Delphine comes across as a monster, which is fine, but Roth never gives the reader any insight into why she behaves as she does. The passages which focus on her are the least interesting. Faunia Farley isn't a monster, but one does not feel particularly compelled to sympathize with her. She comes across merely as a sexual figure, not very bright and much maligned by everyone in the book with the exception of Coleman, whose connection to her is dubious. Is she a victim or the cold-hearted, manipulative catalyst in Coleman's ultimate downfall? Is Delphine intended to be read as a victim? She seems more an indictment against the radical feminism inherent on some college campuses. Roth, as the author, clearly despises her. But why? (And thru it all runs the thread of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal.) So I give this a rather half-hearted recommendation. Roth remains one of my favorite authors and I still look forward to the release of his books. I liked this more than I Married a Communist but for a great read and for those who have never read a Philip Roth novel - my highest recommendation goes to American Pastoral. That is literature of the highest order.
Rating:
Summary: disregard bengagirl
Review: This is a beautiful, wrenching novel; just what you'd expect of Roth. I think it also might be his most accessible work. I've reccommended it to several people who previously had shied away from Roth after works like "My Life as a Man" and "American Pastoral." The characters are so real, it seems like you could bump into them in a restaurant. And bengalgirl, the reviewer below who panned it with such spite, just look a little deeper. Sjhe gave five stars to a Star Trek book. That's right, a novel about TV characters. So, um. I guess if you're so deeply into cheesy TV sci-fi shows that you read novels with the same characters (and, no doubt, the same depth) this might not be the book for you. Maybe you'd like some Buck Rodgers books. Or Battlestar Gallactica.
Rating:
Summary: An American tragedy
Review: This is a beautiful,intricate story, beautifully and intricately told, about who we are in America at the dawn of the 21st century. It is written with passion, urgency, a touch of fire and brimstone; and Coleman Silk's fate at the hands of the righteous and the ruthless seems to me a genuine tragic vision of American life. Satirical? Roth here is more Jeremiah than Swift. Tom Wolfe likes to venture into something like this territory, but for me, the entire oeuvre of Wolfe doesn't stand up to one page of this magnificent novel. This is the first Roth I've read since GOODBYE, COLUMBUS, many years ago. I enjoyed that book but didn't think of Roth as a writer I needed to know better. I ran out of reading on vacation, picked up THE HUMAN STAIN in an airport, and was stunned for two days as I read it. A month later I can't stop thinking about it. The word "masterpiece" is applied so promiscuously that it tends to be supremely unhelpful when thinking about any work it purports to describe. But it is hard to think of this book without invoking it.
|
