The Human Stain: American Trilogy (3)

This amazingly insightful novel, set in 1998, is an unrelenting look at the conflicted American psyche over prurience, purity, and political correctness and the havoc that is wreaked in the mix of those obsessions. 1998 is the year when the American public can't wait to read every anatomical detail of a President's affair with an intern while pretending to be horrified. That is the context of this story about Coleman Silk, a classics professor at Athena College located in the Berkshires, who inadvertently falls victim to these American obsessions. Coleman is an enigmatic fellow who took major social risks in his early years, only to find no escape from the political correctness agenda as he approaches seventy. The story is told by Nathan Zuckerman, aka Philip Roth, who lives near Coleman and becomes friends with him after his being drummed out of the college for a remark he made in a class that was misconstrued as being racially insensitive. It is a charge filled with irony given Coleman's background that is slowly pieced together by Zuckerman in the entirety of the book. In putting his life back together, Coleman begins an affair with a thirty-something female janitor at the college Faunia, who has been battered by life but who has a subtle appeal. Of course, this only adds fuel to the purity fire that has already burned Coleman. A French-born, young female professor and Faunia's ex-husband make every effort to ensure that Coleman pays a high price for his apparent indiscriminate pleasure seeking. The book is really more of a sociological treatise than it is a novel. The characters go on for pages in their reflections and conversations concerning the fault lines in American society and the difficulties in surmounting them. The plot is only a device to substantiate those difficulties. There is a sameness to most of the characters: their personalities are secondary to their thoughts and words. But the words are riveting. It is hard to imagine a book that better captures the destructiveness that can enter lives when it is judged that social mores have been violated regardless of a high degree of hypocrisy lurking behind the standards.

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.

I read The Human Stain for an academic look at mobbing, a form of legitimized bullying hoisted on one perceived "bully" by a mob of seriously sick and destructive bullies passing themselves off as "do-gooders." Think GaGaGalenda (Glenda) of Wicked and her minions. Much of the book is pure fiction, except the mobbing of Coleman Silk--that much was true and was taken from the life of Melvin Tumlin at Princeton. As I read the first couple of chapters, I was regretting my goal to see mobbing as rumored to be demonstrated by Philip Roth. I hated the dancing scene and I hated the tragic representation of the worries of a prostate cancer survivor after surgery--the book just dragged along at first. Getting beyond those uncomfortable scenes, however, netted a delightful genius at work. I LOVE good writing, and Roth is excellent at summing up humanity in various forms at a certain time in history. In the end, I walked away feeling Roth had increased the mobbing of Tumlin with his fictional part of the story. Before knowing what was fiction and what was truth, I felt Silk got back a bit of what he dished out to his family and began thinking maybe that applied to all who are mobbed. Maybe they don't deserve a pile-on from "these" people, but maybe they deserve a push back from "someone" in their past and it has finally just come around full circle. After knowing the truth, I felt the author further destroyed a man's reputation that was already destroyed unfairly by a vicious mob. I felt mobbing was illustrated by the actual fictitious accounts of liars and by the imagination of the author who added a few more lies to the pile. Still... genius writing and epic insights! Highly recommend and am off looking for more of Roth's work now.

Philip Roth is a creative genius... Every page opens up into a mini novel of characters, events, histories, backstories and so on. Unlike anything I've read in a long time. No wonder it was a prizewinner

Roth once more shows his literary skills in creating this engrossing book, so richly full of themes and subthemes that it causes the reader to pause in reflection on every page. I would rate this epic story (mirroring the ancient Greek conflicts so loved by its main character Coleman Silk) very highly and have no problem placing it in the "classic" category, a must-read for anyone who seeks to understand American culture in the late 20th century. Despite the rather grandiose ambition of the book (to make a once-and-for-all comment on the whole topic of political correctness in academia), the book is immensely readable and as the story gathers pace, the reader is drawn into a narrative as thrilling and suspenseful as any crime novel (and in any case there are plenty of crimes in here anyway!). The characters are complex and the situations they find themselves in unusual. Huge conflicts emerge behind their differing approaches to life and the book is in some ways like a glorified soap opera with all the human themes one would find in any television drama. In writing a review of this book, you become aware of quite how rich this novel is. It would be an excellent book for a reading group, or a more academic programme and the topics for discussion which arise from it would be endless. The book tells complex stories about the Vietnam experience, Bill Clinton's meanderings through the Lewinsky story, racism and ethnicity, human ageing, and the irresisitlble pull of romance and sex. Primarily, the book is about the human condition (the "human stain" of the title) and to use a cliché, man's search for meaning. But it can also be read as a powerful human drama, for Roth's fictional narrative is as valid on its own terms as the lessons he seeks to draw from it. This is a rich and compelling read, highly recommended to anyone who expects their chosen books to make them think about their own lives and the lives of those around them.

In the "Human Stain" Coleman Silk's successful but complicated life unravels as we learn more about his secrets. Roth's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, shows us the costs of those secrets. His righteous anger on being called racist becomes his burden as we learn that he has "passed" as white for years. We watch him grow up and can understand how his fierce desire for success separates him from his family origin. We see him entangle himself with disapproval from all directions -- his family, his career, and his colleagues. Yet, on another level, we suffer with him as he struggles with his growing anger and sorrow.

Last book of the trilogy, and probably my favourite. Amazing read!

The Human Stain war erst das zweite Buch, das ich von Philip Roth gelesen habe, die Kunde von seinem Ruhm und seiner Sprachgewalt hat mich erst spät ereilt, und mit jedem Mal, das er als Nobelpreiskandidat gehandelt wurde und die Auszeichnung dann doch nicht erhiellt, verstärkte sich mein Bedürfnis, doch einmal etwas von ihm zu lesen. Dieses Buch ist seinem Spätwerk zuzuordnen (er hat das Schreiben letzten Herbst offiziell eingestellt), was in diesem speziellen Fall viele Vorteile mit sich bringt: Roth spielt seine Erfahrung und sprachliche Überlegenheit souverän aus. Die Geschichte des gemobbten College-Professors der sich auf einen Rachefeldzug begibt, der von Anbeginn an zum Scheitern verurteilt ist, in der Wiedergabe des Roth-LeserInnen geläufigen Nathan Zuckerman gehört zum Besten was um die Jahrtausendwende geschrieben wurde. Es ist einerseits die Geschichte selbst, die mit einigen unvorhersehbaren Wendungen mehrere Male überraschende Verläufe nimmt und noch einmal die grossen Themen von Roth als Person und dem 20. Jahrhundert als Zeitalter aufgreift: Familie, Rassismus, Ethnizität, sozialer Aufstieg, Trauma, das Judentum. Es ist die Art in der Roth schreibt: Geschickt verwebt er die Perspektiven der verschiedenen ProtagonistInnen miteinander und am Ende fühlt man mit den übelsten Figuren des Romans mit, fiebert mit ihnen darum, ob sie es schaffen, Reputation und Karriere wiederherzustellen, oder nur ihren Frieden wiederzufinden. Roth bereitet es offensichtlich ein diabolisches Vergnügen, seine Leserschaft solcherart in den Abyss zu schicken, mehr als einmal verleitet er subtil zur Empathie mit den GegenspielerInnen von Zuckerman und Coleman Silk. In dieser Weigerung zu verurteilen tritt aber auch eine, man möchte respektloserweise schreiben, Altersmilde zu Tage ("Dem jungen Zuckerman wäre das nicht eingefallen!") und der humanistische Boden auf dem sich dieser Titan bewegt. Nicht zuletzt schafft es Roth, wie kaum ein anderer Autor, seine LeserInnen in die Handlung hineinzuziehen: Gerade die Bücher der Zuckerman-Reihe werden zu Zeit- und Ostküstenreisen, dieser Chronist des 20. Jahrhunderts schleppt einen überall dahin mit, wo die tiefgreifenden Brüche passiert sind. Sei es Vietnam, die Bürgerrechtsbewegung oder der Fall Lewinsky. Dieser stille und meisterliche Beobachter lässt nichts aus, und während man den Eindruck gewinnt, hier würde jemand mit seiner eigenen durchschnittlichen Existenz kämpfen, zeichnet sich das grosse Bild, das dahinterstehende epochale Gemälde erst mittendrin ab, wenn es schon Konturen annimmt. Roth erzählt Geschichten die weit über ihre eigentlichen, alltäglichen und ans Banale grenzenden Handlungsstränge hinausgehen. Seine Bücher sind immer fest vor dem intellektuellen Horizont ihres Autors verankert, ihre Aussagen gehen stets über das Persönliche, das sie Eingangs zu repräsentieren scheinen, hinaus. Ein grossartiges Buch.