The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

Book Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD - The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral delivers "a master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment" (The Wall Street Journal).

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375726349
• ISBN13: 9780375726347
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Powerful. Roth's characters and words will forever be with you.

Humans are complex. Judging others may be natural but the notion of knowing who is someone can never fully be achieved. One never can know the full story. This novel is a masterpiece not only because of Roth's exquisite use of language to describe his characters and to guide the reader through the complexities of just being human and making desicions, but also because it will change the way one thinks about each person in one's own life. It is hard being human. It is hard living in a world of self righteous, judgemental people. It is hard navigating through what others throw at you and what you impose upon yourself. We must remember everyone has a story of accumulated decisions and experiences and influences all leading to the very person they are at that moment in time. This story of Coleman compounds that truth.

Read it for class.

Definitely a though read as I mostly read YA and manga. It touches mature topics and is worth it if you want a mature novel.

By leaps and bounds ...

Even after American Pastoral and I Married A Communist, this book still astounded me. I wasn't particularly impressed by Roth when I read him in the 1970s. Nor in the 1980s or early 1990s. He wasn't a bad writer, but he certainly wasn't great. Now he is. Human Stain and the two other titles I mentioned represent amazing growth, a writer capable of capturing the pain of loss and all the hurt humans are capable of doing to one another. The way he blurs lines between fact and fiction is thought-provoking, as is the way he constructs a carefully arranged narrative - and then toys with it. This simply isn't the same writer who made his name with Portnoy's Complaint.

one of the best novels i have ever read

This book sat on my bookshelf for over a year before I decided to pick it up and read it. I had only read Roth?s Portnoy?s Complaint and wasn?t too impressed with it. But, when I found out that there was a movie adaptation of the book I wanted to make sure that I read the book before seeing the movie (books are typically far superior to the film adaptation). It didn?t take long before I was floored. The Human Stain is an exceptional novel and has completely turned around my opinion of Philip Roth. Without question this is one of the best novels I have read this year. The Human Stain is the story of Coleman Silk, a retired college professor from Athena College. Coleman retired from his position in the midst of a scandal. He was accused of making a racist remark in one of his classes towards two students. The accusation is patently untrue but Coleman was not the most popular man on campus and things began to steamroll out of control until he left the school. The joke inherent in this accusation is that while Coleman may look like a 71 year old white man, he is actually a black man. Coleman has spent his professional (and private) life denying who (and what) he is. In case this concept sounds too fantastic (a black man who looks white trying to hide the fact that he is black), there is a real life corollary in Anatole Broyard, a New York Times book critic. This is the Coleman that we are first introduced to. He is in a sexual (and not much more) relationship with 34 year old Faunia Farley. She is illiterate and works as a cleaning lady at Athena College. This too, is a scandal waiting to happen. It is this relationship with Faunia that instigates the telling of the story and we are told very early in the novel that Coleman and Faunia do not live for many more months (by early, I mean within 20 pages). The story is told by writer Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman was told most of what he knows by Coleman. For quite some time Coleman tried to get Zuckerman to write a book about the events following the alleged racist remark. The Human Stain (the title of Roth?s novel as well as Zuckerman?s book) is not quite the book that Coleman wanted written, but it was a story that Zuckerman felt compelled to tell. We must remember that everything is shaded by what Zuckerman knows and what he believes. There is a long section in the middle of the book dealing with a young Coleman Silk. We see him in High School and get glimpses of how he became a black man hiding behind his white skin and denying his family and why he would have done such a thing. This section deals with Coleman being a young boxer and the relationships with women that he engaged in. For all the power of this book, the section on the young Coleman is the most powerful. I first expected it to break the rhythm of the story, but it fits perfectly and is one of the best passages in the novel. After being somewhat put off Roth from reading Portnoy?s Complaint, this book impressed me

The Unknowable and Elusive Truth

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 narra

academia exposed -- right on the money

This is a terrific book. The rants on the Clinton-Lewinsky affair are enough to have you gasping for breath in the aisle, and that's before his brilliant comic creation, the pretentious, Ecole-educated Delphine Roux. Having spent many years in higher ed., I can attest to the fact that Roth is so on the mark that it's a bit frightening. He nails the entire feminist-marxist-elite on the head. For me, Roux's panic as she desperately looks for a mate in the New York Review of Books personals and by accident sends the email to her department is the highlight of the book. I have MET her before, I'm sure of it. My favorite pages of the book were the Roux monologues as she rationalizes her whole existence and her snobby education. I'm a longtime fan of Roth and have read almost all of his books, even the old ones, but this is one of his very best. He is just so "on." His portraits of academia, politics, race-relations, plus his electrifying writing make this thrilling from start to finish. Previous to reading this book, I had read two "light" novels. After one page of Roth, I felt the power of words again.Not only is this one of Roth's best books, it's one of the best contemporary books period as it lampoons many areas of our lives. The whole "spook" incident was so lifelike (the black students the professor was supposedly insulting had never actually shown up in class and he had no idea that they were black since he'd never seen them) that I bet colleges everywhere are shaking in their own hypocrotical shoes. Roth emerges as one of the best 20th century chroniclers.

Book Review

"The Human Stain" is a glimpse into the life of a man who has lost everything: his job, his wife, his colleagues. Faced with having to redefine himself in totally unfamiliar ways, he abandons the prior structure and inhibitions of his life and allows himself to explore territory which many consider "off limits." Though he picks rather dangerous routes to explore, we watch him, through the course of the novel, rebuild his friendships, sense of self, and expectations for his life. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the novel is the accuracy with which it keys into human insecurities as well as human habits. We see the story not through the eyes of the protagonist, but through the perspective of his friends and associates who are quick to judge the way he rebuilds his life. "The Human Stain" forces the reader to examine her own responses to a number of astonishing moments where we uncover, piece by piece, the entire life of a man who we are meeting in his "twilight years" following his greatest tragedy.