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The Human Stain
by: Philip Roth

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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780099282198
ISBN: 0099282194
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Pages: 384
Publication Date: August 04, 2005
Publisher: Vintage
Studio: Vintage
Sales Rank: 3548

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Editorial Review:

Amazon.co.uk Review:
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 irritated so many people for so many decades that now, in 1998, they have 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 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

Amazon.co.uk Review:
Athena College was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman Silk 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 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.

The flashbacks to Silk's youth in New Jersey become just as important as his turbulent-forced retirement when he reveals a secret that he has been hiding his entire adult life and 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, 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 and vanish, leaving a vivid sense of human passion and perversity behind. You might call it a stain. --Tim Appelo

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Mixed feelings
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 ... Read More:

Rating:

- Very putdownable
The premise and the promise is great, but the book fails to impress. This book has two of Roth's favourite preoccupations - sex and the experience of the Jewish man in America - in abundance. This was also very important material for Everyman, whereas the latter is an absolute tour de force this is a tour to nowehere, via a fairly dull and lengthy scenic route that I did not even wish to complete. One of the main problems with this book is the detachment I experience from its central character Coleman Silk. I would rather that he had delivered this narrative first hand. Instead it is delivered by Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Another problem is the huge amount of words and energy invested in to building character and "backstory" (that awful new ... Read More:

Rating:

- Remarkably captivating
Here are sentences like paragraphs and paragraphs like chapters which have a tendency to exasperate. That said, this is actually a great read. Zuckerman, the writer again, has an assignment of profound consequence. An association with Coleman allows us to see a retrospective unfolding scene to the inevitable. There is no especial mystery, yet the novel is remarkably captivating. Some characters are witnessed second hand, but this does not matter, for that is part of the well developed construction. Ideas are aplenty with lots of rich pages of impressive brilliance.

Rating:

- A primer for the soul
I've long since learned to be sceptical of the hyberbolic quotes that decorate the covers of books. So when I read the Sunday Telegraph's summary of The Human Stain as 'The work of a genius at full throttle' I anticipated disappointment. But within only a few pages their assessment became a statement of fact rather than opinion.

It would have been absurd for Roth to call his novel 'The Human Condition', and yet he reasonably could have. In these three hundred and fifty or so pages he describes with cruel precision the human need to tell stories and lies about ourselves and each other - stories and lies which together ensure that all human interaction is at cross purposes. 'Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning?' he writes. 'All that we don't ... Read More:

Rating:

- Identity politics and political correctness as manifestations of American insecurity
The central premise in Philip Roth's fulminating diatribe against the maladies of modern America is very flimsy and yet it works, probably because of its flimsiness. The pity is that I can't state it clearly here without spoiling the plot, though other reviewers have done so.
Narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego, the story revolves around the life of Coleman Silk, the autocratic Dean of Faculty in a small town New England university. Pressured and humiliated into quitting his academic position as a result of an unintentional racial double entendre he blames the subsequent death of his wife on the affair. Seething with resentment and seeking revenge on those within the university who remained silent or actively collaborated in his demise, he ... Read More:

Books : The Human Stain