The Human Stain by Philip Roth

Philip Roth has always been a remarkably steady producer of literature, publishing fifteen books in the thirty years following his 1959 debut, Goodbye, Columbus. But he really knocked his prolificacy up a notch in the early 1990s, publishing a novel nearly every other year for the past two decades. And since 2006, it has risen to a book per year, with projected publication dates already set for volumes coming in the autumn of 2009 and 2010.

For many Roth fans like myself, and with no disrespect to his earlier and most recent works, the 1990s was his Golden Age (or at least his first Golden Age; who knows how many books he's got left in him). In the span of just eight years, Roth won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and two Pen/Faulkner Awards, each for a different novel. At the heart of this success was the so-called "American Trilogy" featuring Roth's fictional alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman and exploring the public and private spheres of post-war American society: the 1960s in American Pastoral, the 1950s in I Married a Communist, and the 1990s in the novel I've just finished, The Human Stain:

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...Her name was Faunia Farley, and whatever miseries she endured she kept concealed behind one of those inexpressive bone faces that hide nothing and bespeak an immense loneliness. Faunia lived in a room at a local dairy farm where she helped with the milking in order to pay her rent. She'd had two years of high school education.

The summer that Coleman took me into his confidence about Faunia Farley and their secret was the summer, fittingly enough, that Bill Clinton's secret emerged in every last mortifying detail--every last lifelike detail, the livingness, like the mortification, exuded by the pungency of the specific data.

As the opening paragraphs indicate, much of the book is devoted to the issues of political correctness and the tensions between public and private morality. The hypocrisy of American prudeness is a particular target of Roth, who has made quite a living off of delving into the morass of American sexual psychology. But for Coleman Silk (and indeed for the now 65-year old narrator Zuckerman, impotent and incontinent after prostate surgery), sexuality is just one of several areas of his life in which the public and private spheres have clashed:

It was about midway into his second semester back as a full-time professor that Coleman spoke the self-incriminating word that would cause him voluntarily to sever all ties to the college--the single self-incriminating word of the many millions spoken aloud in his years of teaching and administering at Athena, and the word that, as Coleman understood things, directly led to his wife's death.

The class consisted of fourteen students. Coleman had taken attendance at the beginning of the first several lectures so as to learn their names. As there were still two names that failed to elicit a response by the fifth week into the semester, Coleman, in the sixth week, opened the session by asking, "Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?"

Later that day he was astonished to be called in by his successor, the new dean of faculty, to address the charge of racism brought against him by the two missing students, who turned out to be black, and who, though absent, had quickly learned of the locution in which he'd publicly raised the question.

Silk had made his share of enemies on the faculty during his tenure as dean, and in the ensuing months of controversy even his presumed friends fail to come to his defense. Then, in the think of this battle, his wife Iris suffers a fatal stroke, sending Silk into an apoplexy of rage in the belief that it was the ongoing dispute that killed her. It is this rage which drives Silk to the home of reclusive writer Nathan Zuckerman:

There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It's more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because ther is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you're in its grip, it's as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.

This suffering last upwards of two years, until Silk meets Faunia and begins life anew. And things might just have worked out but for the baggage that both are carrying with them in the form of the book's supporting cast: Faunia's violent Vietnam veteran ex-husband, Lester, and Professor Delphine Roux, the young chair of Athena College's languages and literature program and Silk's last boss. Between Lester's gradually more-intrusive stalking and Delphine's accusatory letter ("anonymously" drafted in her readily-identifiable handwriting), the new couple comes under steady attack. That's before everyone else starts rendering their own moral judgments, including Coleman's own children.

And these people are already damaged goods: in addition to the abuse she suffered at the hands of Lester, and her stepfather before that, Faunia has also lost both her children to asphyxiation from a space-heater fire. And Coleman not only lost his wife and his career, he did so in circumstances of the most tragic irony. It turns out that while this is yet another novel in which Roth plumbs the meaning of American-Jewish identity, he does so in the most unusual of ways. Coleman Silk is not the man he claims to be:

He could play his skin however he wanted, color himself just as he chose. No, that did not dawn on him until he was seated in the federal building in Newark and had all the navy enlistment forms spread out in front of him and, before filling them out, and carefully, with the same meticulous scrutiny that he'd studied for his high school exams--as though whatever he was going, large or small, was, for however long he concentrated on it, the most important thing in the world--began to read them through. And even then it didn't occur to him. It occurred first to his heart, which began banging away like the heart of someone on the brink of committing his first great crime.

And thus begins the journey of a light-skinned black man, a dropout of Howard University, into a life in which he will cut off all contact with his mother and siblings, claim to be an orphan and an only child, and a Jew. All this unbeknownst to his wife, their children, any of his co-workers, indeed anyone at all until Nathan Zuckerman meets Coleman's sister at his funeral and starts putting together the pieces of this back story, which become flashbacks in his narration.

There are obviously quite a number of threads woven though this book, and particularly in the portrayals of Coleman and Faunia. Roth's great success in exploring their unlikely union, and the forces that brought them together, is only partially dampened by the shortcuts he takes with the supporting cast. Lester, with his Vietnam PTSD, and Delphine, with her subconscious envy of Faunia and her stilted, insular academic life, are realized in the book through a series of interludes which rest too heavily on archetype, and don't measure up to the creativity of the rest of Roth's invention. And really, why is it that older male writers find it so compelling to portray younger women in sexual relationships with senior citizens?

That said, The Human Stain does feature what Roth does at his best: capture the country's mood at a particular moment, and craft a narrative that conveys all America's glory and disgrace, its idealism and hypocrisy, its comedic ironies and its fundamental, continuing tragedies.