Rating: 
Summary: Human Truth and Fiction
Review: Coleman Silk, ("Silky Silk") a humanities professor at Athena College, resigns from his job in disgrace because of a supposedly racist remark he has made about two black students. The ensuing brouhaha leads to the death of his wife. Silk then begins an affair with Faunia Farley, (surely one of the most engaging, earthy seductresses in modern fiction) the school janitor, who is thirty-four years his junior.
Silk's relationship with Farley, who is being stalked by her ex-husband and his confessions to Rothian alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, fuel the narrative for this novel.
But what is absolutely brilliant in this novel is the unraveling of the metaphoric strands of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in which Silk finds himself enmeshed in the web of contradictions of contemporary America and its past.
The novel also goes beyond the facile reading of race. This novel questions the political construct of race and asks, Are we ONLY products of our past? What is the price we pay for the personal and collective fictions we construct to become ourselves? What do we really know about anything or anyone? Does self-actualization mean killing one's past and by extension one's biological parents? Can a successful identity be built on a lie? What does it mean to live an authentic life given the constraints of race, gender, etc.? If an authentic life is built on the contradictions of a society, does this diminish the validity of all subsequent lives that are built on the original fiction?
Roth probes the question of identity deliberately and provocatively, and the structure of the novel is fascinating because of the multiple perspectives on events-visited and revisited by Silk, Zuckerman and Faunia.
And those sentences! Wow!
The Human Stain is a brilliant work of a modern master.
Rating: 
Summary: Bad patches, but the good parts are essential
Review: The long section that describes Coleman's youth, from boxing to the decision to leave his family behind, is one of the miraculously sustained pieces of writing that Roth has ever done. There is not a single false note, and the imaginative identification is absolutely complete. This is not a novel about the problem of race in America, but about something that Roth has always been writing about: how to be an individual actor, a free agent, when you are tied inextricably, whether you want to be or not, to a group.Now, I'm not sure how a writer of Roth's talent could throw in parts like the Lester Farley monologues, where the author has clearly not really felt his way into the consciousness of the character, but outlined it with some commonplaces about Vietnam veterans, is beyond me. I suppose I admire the effort to even try to see what's going on inside the head of such a character - more so, certainly, that his attempt, well, not to get inside Delphine Roux's head, but to create a straw woman to be seen through by the author and his readers. She isn't taken seriously enough, given enough life, to be effective even as a satire. The book loses a lot of blood when Coleman is gone, but while he is walking through its pages The Human Stain is alive and vital. Worth your time as very few others are nowadays.
Rating:
Summary: Smooth as Silk
Review: The web of lifelines connected under bizarre circumstances in the otherwise sleepy Berkshires in Roth's The Human Stain remind us of why it is exactly we love Roth at all. His Faulkner-like way of making something come together while everything is falling apart is astounding. This book is tough and worth it.
Rating:
Summary: A Powerful Commentary on Our Times
Review: This is a great book - but it is not an easy read. Several people who I've given it to did not like it much or derive the value I got from it. It's not for everyone. It deals with racism, class struggles, intellectual elitism, and all the rolls we play to get through the day (most of which do us more damage than good.) On the other hand, it shows how honesty is punished and how people who don't posture are destroyed by society. This is one powerful book.
Rating:
Summary: somber, searing "Stain" illuminates impact of moral anguish
Review: Philip Roth's serious indictment of late twentieth-century America, "The Human Stain," is much more than a novel. On one level, Roth examines the devastating impact of a false accusation on an exemplary man's character; in this regard, "Stain" is little less than brilliant. Serious and compassionate, angry and vituperative, despondent and triumphant, the novel traces the shattered remnants of the life of an intellectual whose existence disintegrated as the result of a malicious and spurious charge. Professor Coleman Silk emerges as a fully developed protagonist, and his sufferings are genuine and wrenching. Yet, Roth spends considerable time weighing in on other compelling issues of this era: race, Vietnam, feminism, sexual expression and identity. When the author treats these issues, "The Human Stain" reads less like a novel and more like a series of extended essays on the condition of American culture at the turn of the twenty-first century. Therein lies the sole weakness of an otherwise essential, absorbing and necessary novel. I can attest from the depthless sadness of my own heart that Roth's descriptions of what happens when a good man's reputation is trashed as a result of a patently bogus accusation is not only accurate, but unflinchingly profound. When Roth asserts that "there is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person," he wisely acknowledges its "insidious" nature. So profound is the sense of outrage, guilt, anger, frustration and spiritual isolation on the victim, "its raw realism is like nothing else." As I know from personal experience, once an accusation sticks, the truthfulness of the charge becomes irrelevant. Its stench and stigma invade and consume your life. We'd like to believe that our friends and colleagues have learned the horrific lessons of McCarthyism; the reality is that victimizers and perpetrators have only refined the techniques of guilt by accusation. Friends abandon you and link hands with foes in an alliance of expedience, indifference and feigned innocence and ignorance. Silk is "humiliated and humbled and destroyed...over an issue everyone knew was [expletive deleted]." Yearning for a voice of solidarity, hoping for a link with an ally, wishing for someone to take a stand with him -- Silk instead is left "to nurse the crushing sense of abandonment that festered into the wound" that would come to absorb his life. Philip Roth chooses, however, a more ambitious goal than a mere character study, and his novel suffers for that decision. Roth sacrifices narrative drive for extended soliloquies; in some instances single paragraphs consume four pages of print. Despite the enormous intellectual integrity and emotional impact of his novel, Roth's prose can leave the reader's eyes glazed with his seeminly interminable disquisitions on race, feminism, Vietnam or identity. "The Human Stain" is brutally painful, profoundly disquieting and intellectually challenging. It is also frustratingly unfocused and excessive in verbiage and length. Ignore the weaknesses of this novel. It is one of the few novels I consider to be absolutely essential to undertand what we have become as a people. Roth's chastening lessons will provide little comfort, but they must be heard and understood.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Roth So Far
Review: The Human Stain is an absolutely magnificent read. Roth weaves a myriad of issues into the story line--without being preachy. His writing is extraordinary; descriptive characterizations, sizzling dialogue, twists and turns in the story line. Anyone who writes like this is right on the razor edge of insanity, a delightful place to take the reader. I just bought American Pastoral and hope it comes even close to the Human Stain.
Rating:
Summary: King of the Hill
Review: Philip Roth is the best we have; he might be the best we've ever had. His themes in "The Human Stain" range from the grand-death, race, betrayal-to the ordinary-academic infighting, boxing, dairy farming. His characters are flesh and blood, capable of evoking the entire range of human emotions. They aren't scantily clad post-modern stick figures that exist solely for an author to clothe them in pet theories. They live and will endure.
Rating:
Summary: The Grace of Roth
Review: This is another raunchy, powerful, entertaining, iconoclastic, ironic and highly literate novel by a grand old man of American literature. Unlike Bellow, whose recent work retains only a sterile stylistic literary credibility, Roth still has plenty of life left in his raunchy narratives. The story of Coleman Silk is full of ironic twists. The lives of those he interacts with are told with a great deal of credibility despite the wide variety of characters and life styles. Roth illuminates the pretensions of academic politics and gives us an hilarious extended dialog in which Silk and narrator Nathan Zuckerman talk about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal (which is contemporaneous with a sex scandal that Silk is involved in.) This is not a difficult book to read as some customer reviewers have stated. I found it quite engrossing and the lives of the various characters are meaningfully interwoven. This is a tragedy of self-deception and family, academic, and social deception as well. Read this and also Shirlee Taylor Hazlip's The Sweeter the Juice.
Rating: 
Summary: A bit dry
Review: I had never read Roth before and was intrigued by the book's description. I was disappointed in this book from the beginning, but I didn't give up. The book did have an interesting if tragic story to tell, but I did not appreciate the stream of consciousness narrative style. I found it bit dry and rambling.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring...
Review: This was the first Roth novel I read, or more accurately: tried to read, as I gave up after some 100 pages. I was bored stiff. I really don't understand all the praise in view of the cumbersome rambling style and the unreal characters. It goes on and on and on... Perhaps Roth has written better novels, but just now I don't feel like trying to read another one. Not recommended.
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