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Athena College was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman Silk--formerly "Silky Silk," undefeated welterweight pro boxer--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 dramatized 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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Roth almost never fails to surprise. After a clunky beginning, in which crusty Nathan Zuckerman is carrying on about the orgy of sanctimoniousness surrounding Clinton's Monica misadventures, his new novel settles into what would seem to be patented Roth territory. Coleman Silk, at 71 a distinguished professor at a small New England college, has been harried from his position because of what has been perceived as a racist slur. His life is ruined: his wife succumbs under the strain, his friends are forsaking him, and he is reduced to an affair with 34-year-old Faunia Farley, the somber and illiterate janitor at the college. It is at this point that Zuckerman, Roth's novelist alter ego, gets to know and like Silk and to begin to see something of the personal and sexual liberation wrought in him by the unlikely affair with Faunia. It is also the point at which Faunia's estranged husband Les Farley, a Vietnam vet disabled by stress, drugs and drink, begins to take an interest in the relationship. So far this is highly intelligent, literate entertainment, with a rising tension. Will Les do something violent? Will Delphine Roux, the young French professor Silk had hired, who has come to hate him, escalate the college's campaign against him? Yes, but she now wants to make something of his Faunia relationship too. Then, in a dazzling coup, Roth turns all expectations on their heads, and begins to show Silk in a new and astounding light, as someone who has lived a huge lie all his life, making the fuss over his alleged racism even more surreal. The book continues to unfold layer after layer of meaning. There is a tragedy, as foretold, and an exquisitely imagined ending in which Zuckerman himself comes to feel both threatened and a threat. Roth is working here at the peak of his imaginative skills, creating many scenes at once sharply observed and moving: Faunia's affinity for the self-contained remoteness of crows, Farley's profane longing for a cessation to the tumult in his head, Zuckerman delightedly dancing with Silk to the big band tunes of their youth. He even brings off virtuoso passages that are superfluous but highly impressive, like his dissection of the French professor's lonely anguish in the States. This is a fitting capstone to the trilogy that includes American Pastoral and I Married a Communist--a book more balanced and humane than either, and bound, because of its explosive theme, to be widely discussed. 100,000 first printing.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
IT WAS in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk-who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of faculty-confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
IT WAS in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk-who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of faculty-confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college. Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mixed feelings,
By
This review is from: The Human Stain: A Novel American Trilogy (3) (Paperback)
Let me just start with the silliest comment: the only way to find out whether you like this book or not, is by reading it. Most reviews here and on Amazon.com reflect ambivalent feelings. After turning the last page, mine was not altogether negative, but not entirely positive either. This was also my first book by Philip Roth.Ageing but vigorous professor Coleman Silk is accused of racism in the classroom and forcefully rejecting it (in vain), he chooses to retire after a long, fulfilling and esteemed teaching career. His tale is told by his friend, writer Nathan Zuckerman. Hardly acknowledging each other for years, a friendship begins and Zuckerman tries to understand the multiple facets defining Silk's personality. Unbeknownst to him, he will later discover a secret that Silk has kept for decades, a secret which his life had been, and still is, based on. Looping around the main theme, there are other characters who are connected with Silk and bear relevance. In the background, Coleman's parents and siblings. Their beginnings, the struggles to send all their children to proper schools for the best education possible. We then have his wife, a strong, independent personality who died during the `racism ordeal', and their four adult children (it's 1998 by then). Silk's bursting rage and pain towards these two -to him- related events (the accusations and his wife's death), find a degree of comfort through the acquaintance -later developing into something much more- of Faunia, a janitor in the Athena college where he used to teach. Faunia, a tormented soul herself, does not seem to be left alone by her ex-husband, Les, who keeps stalking her after a terrible tragedy struck at their home some years previously. Some other characters from the past who are irretrievably connected with Coleman, pop into the picture. His former girlfriend, Steena, met and loved in his twenties. The young French dean at Athena, Dolphine Roux, who supported the racism accusations. Zuckerman himself finds a niche for some of his personal details. So many people, so many different personalities, so many tragedies. This book explores a variety of themes -race, rape, depression, death, loneliness- which make it certainly for a substantial, full-of-texture read. It also speaks of love, love for a profession, for a person, for life in general, but the intricacy with which the author interpolates this concept is open to debate. This is why I cannot define in full its identifying quality, or, for that matter, what exactly I did not like about this book. Perhaps a certain dislike for the structure of some of the chapters: sentences which do not see a full stop, a pause, for an entire page for example. This rendered the read a bit tedious. Also, I found the numerous references to the Clinton/Lewinski's `interlude' somewhat irrelevant to the core of the story and if the purpose was to pinpoint that Silk's own story began to unfold back then, in 1998, well, it was clear enough already. Not to mention the final paragraphs -and this is not a spoiler- when an incredible and unrealistic conversation ensues in a cemetery. I mean, was that to supply the reader with some final `answers' -which could not have been `real' anyway since it was all a mental image?- . And yet. Coleman Silk is a personage. And his secret, the secret from which we are often distracted due to a number of superimposed, unnecessary (to me) details, is the central theme of this book. Like it or not, mixed feelings or not, I've never written such a long review before. There must be a reason, although I myself am not sure what that is. What I am sure about is that this tale is so imbued with wrenching issues that it cannot fail to dazzle, provoke and stimulate conversations.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Dull dull dull dull dull...you get the point,
By
This review is from: The Human Stain: A Novel American Trilogy (3) (Paperback)
This was my first - and probably last - Philip Roth novel. I bought this novel for two reasons. 1) I was in a foreign country and there was not a lot of English language novels to chose from; 2) The book was the winner of the Pen/Faulkner award. So combine those two factors together and I figured I couldn't go wrong.Well, I did. That's not to say this is a bad novel. I just felt that the novel rambled on in certain areas and that about 50...or maybe 100...pages could have been left out of the book to still tell a compelling story. In short the story is about university professor Coleman Silk. For reasons that become apparent at the start of the novel, Coleman is forced to resign from his position with the university. This forced resignation starts a chain of events in Coleman's life, coming to a conclusion with the end of the book (surprise surprise). But what should have been a good gripping yarn is nothing more than a long winded story. There were many places in the book when/where I found myself losing interest in the story and just plain wishing that the book would end. Yet like any good soldier, I carried on. Hoping that the content of the book would improve. It didn't. I understand that Roth is quite a prolific author and there are many other books penned by him. Based on my experience with The Human Stain, I can't see myself rushing out to read any of his other books at the moment.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Deeply relevant,
By Deborah Daughtry (ridgewood, nj USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Human Stain: A Novel American Trilogy (3) (Paperback)
In short, but expansive descriptions, Roth takes us inside the psyche of his characters and reveals in the process much about our American selves.Read it if you dare.
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