The Human Stain

Summary

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 when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would astonish his most virulent accuser.

Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of the eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America.

Philip Roth, The Human Stain  (New York: Vintage International, Vintage Books, 2000) 361 pages.

Personal Opinion

A very good read and extremely well written. Every sentence is carefully constructed with an amazing use of an expansive vocabulary. Philip Roth gave such depth to all of the characters! The story tackles issues of race, identity, expectations and broken dreams. It is the story of Coleman’s life and tragic demise and the empty, tragic and in some cases pathetic lives of the people around him. It grabbed my attention the entire time.

My score (1-5):

About the Author:

Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933) is an American novelist.

He first gained attention with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of American-Jewish life for which he received the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.Roth's fiction, regularly set in Newark, New Jersey, is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "supple, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity. His profile rose significantly in 1969 after the publication of the controversial Portnoy's Complaint, the humorous and sexually explicit psychoanalytical monologue of "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor," filled with "intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language."

Roth is one of the most awarded U.S. writers of his generation: his books have twice received the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral, which featured one of his best-known characters, Nathan Zuckerman, the subject of many other of Roth's novels. The Human Stain (2000), another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize.

Philip Roth grew up in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, as the second child of Bess (née Finkel) and Herman Roth, first-generation American parents, Jews of Galician descent. He graduated from Newark's Weequahic High School in or around 1950. "It has provided the focus for the fiction of Philip Roth, the novelist who evokes his era at Weequahic High School in the highly acclaimed Portnoy's Complaint.... Besides identifying Weequahic High School by name, the novel specifies such sites as the Empire Burlesque, the Weequahic Diner, the Newark Museum and Irvington Park, all local landmarks that helped shape the youth of the real Roth and the fictional Portnoy, both graduates of Weequahic class of '50." The Weequahic Yearbook (1950) describes Roth as "A boy of real intelligence, combined with wit and common sense." Roth was known as a comedian during his time at school. Roth attended Bucknell University, earning a degree in English. He pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he received an M.A. in English literature in 1955 and worked briefly as an instructor in the university's writing program. Roth taught creative writing at the University of Iowa and Princeton University. He continued his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught comparative literature before retiring from teaching in 1991.

While at Chicago, Roth met the novelist Saul Bellow, as well as Margaret Martinson in 1956, who became his first wife in 1959. Their separation in 1963, along with Martinson's death in a car crash in 1968, left a lasting mark on Roth's literary output. Specifically, Martinson was the inspiration for female characters in several of Roth's novels, including Lucy Nelson in When She Was Good, and Maureen Tarnopol in My Life As a Man. Between the end of his studies and the publication of his first book in 1959, Roth served two years in the United States Army and then wrote short fiction and criticism for various magazines, including movie reviews for The New Republic. Events in Roth's personal life have occasionally been the subject of media scrutiny. A post-operative breakdown mentioned in the pseudo-confessional novel Operation Shylock (1993) and others drew on Roth's experience of the temporary side-effects of the sedative halcion (triazolam), prescribed post-operatively in the 1980s.(It was subsequently discovered that unfavorable studies had been suppressed by triazolam's manufacturer, Upjohn, which showed the drug carried a high risk of causing short term psychiatric disturbance.When this became known, the drug was banned in some countries and its withdrawal due to high risk and poor clinical benefit was also discussed in the United States.)

In 1990, Roth married his long-time companion, English actress Claire Bloom. In 1994 they separated, and in 1996 Bloom published a memoir, Leaving a Doll's House, which described the couple's marriage in detail, much of which was unflattering to Roth. Certain aspects of I Married a Communist have been regarded by critics as veiled rebuttals to accusations put forth in Bloom's memoir.

Source: Wikipedia