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| The Human Stain | 
 enlarge | Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £1.40
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Avg. Customer Rating:  33 reviews
Sales Rank: 12695
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 1
ISBN: 0099282194
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780099282198
ASIN: 0099282194
Publication Date: August 4, 2005
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: USED PAPERBACK; VERY GOOD CONDITION; CLEAN TIGHT TEXT WITH NORMAL READING WEAR TO COVER
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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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 28 more reviews...
 Mixed feelings May 5, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
 Very putdownable March 28, 2008
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 expression) for characters that really turn out to be not very important. Dare I accuse the great Roth of this (and he IS sometimes great) but much of this seems to be padding. Indeed, you get the feeing that Roth is writing too much and that half of his output of the last 10 years would be more than sufficient. Everyman is wonderful and so to supposedly, is American Pastoral. Both are enough to secure his reputation in the pantheon of great American novelists - as if he needed anyone to reassure him - and that's not mentioning Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint and the 20 plus other novels he has written. Although this book has plenty of interesting things to say about political correctness gone mad and issues of race and racism, I found that I was left wanting to get properly inside the head of Coleman Silk but with the narrative stucture and device employed, this proved impossible.
Remarkably captivating February 15, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
 A primer for the soul November 22, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
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 know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.'
Through the story of Coleman Silk, a man whose anger at being wronged is amplified to the point of near madness by the knowledge of his own secret wrongs, Roth shines a bitterly bright spotlight on the assumptions we make about others, and on the assumptions we try to make others have of us. The Human Stain is a tragedy of epic proportions - with all the pain, irony, misunderstanding and revelation that suggests. The twists of the plot are like the twists of the knife as he skewers human frailty, prejudice and self-deception.
I read this book very slowly - not because it is hard work (it is in fact an electrifying page-turner) - but because the brilliance of the prose and the richness of the insight makes it sometimes feel like a primer for the soul - and to miss a sentence might be to miss an insight one should never forget. So, for example, buried deep mid-paragraph, in the middle of the book, Roth almost casually encapsulates the thesis of the novel: '...we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen - there's no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It's in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.'
Lately I have felt weary of the over conceptualised and plodding earnestness of so much contemporary literary fiction, and this book singlehandedly made me fall in love again with the act and purpose of reading. It is a book that makes you want to gasp at the beauty of language in the hands of a master-craftsman, and that leaves you feeling wiser about yourself, and everyone else - even if that wisdom is deep, dark and desperate.
Identity politics and political correctness as manifestations of American insecurity October 11, 2007
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 finally takes up with a badly damaged, poorly educated backwater girl half his age who is being stalked by her psychotic ex-Nam war vet ex-husband. Silk's life becomes increasingly precarious and complicated, resulting in the inevitable denouement. We learn later that throughout his adult life he had harboured a personal secret (out of self-interest) which made his humiliation almost laughably ironic.
Roth tackles major issues (political correctness, identity politics, racial prejudice, overseas adventurism, dumb education and dumb culture) against a backdrop of an extremely trivial one (the Clinton-Lewinsky affair) and it is a risky undertaking in modern America because of the very issues he is attacking. In particular he lays himself open to claims of cryptic racism but that would be a false claim. The action taken by Coleman Silk is not new; it is one that has been used by American Jews and English working-class men in the past as a means of personal progress and is merely a damning statement about the social climate and pressures of certain societies at certain periods in their history. It has nothing to do with personal shame or self-loathing.
There is some terrific characterisation, notably of Silk himself, his nemesis Faunia Farley, her deranged husband Lester, and Delphine Roux, the alienated French academic hired by Silk, an action that he came to regret. You genuinely come to understand their individual motivations, foibles, weaknesses and neuroses as a result. The writing is dense yet fast-paced and angry. This is the best novel I have read so far published in the current century.
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