I love Philip Roth, but don't necessarily love reading him. That is, I appreciate his intelligence. I appreciate his ability to weave together a number of incredible stories, each with its own complexity, and link them all thematically. The trouble is that I rarely feel like I'm really enjoying myself. While i'm admiring of his craft, shouldn't he be tricking me into not noticing it? There, I said it, and you can all hate me if you want to. "The Human Stain" is a fantastic book, no question. It takes on far more than the other books I've reviewed here and handles its massively complicated subject matter wonderfully. It's a novel about political correctness, judgement, aging, race, and the American quest for individualism. Set in 1998, with president Bill Clinton's impeachment hovering in the background, and sanctimoniousness in the air, "The Human Stain" follows protoganist Coleman Silk through his success as an academic, his disgrace as an accused racist, and his bizarre death at the hands of a troubled, jealous, and very violent Vietnam War vet.
What you probably can't see on the cover up there are the words "Everyone Knows." They're scrawled on a piece of paper and tucked inside an envelope, which is seen from above. Get it? It takes a minute to understand what you're looking at. Whoever designed that cover did a great job because those are easily the most important words in the novel. "Everyone knows you're sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age" is a message that Coleman Silk receives anonymously in the mail one day. He is, in fact, sleeping with an abused, illiterate woman half his age, but that's not really anyone's business. Everyone loves crucifying a success, and especially one who has already lost his job, wife, and good reputation because of false accusations of racism (Coleman, a respected Classics professor and former dean at a New England liberal arts college, referred to two absent students as "spooks"). But what no one knows is Coleman's biggest secret- a secret he's spent decades worrying that everyone will find out: He has spent almost his entire life passing as a tan-skinned Jew, when he is in fact a light-skinned African American from East Orange, New Jersey. For one thing, this makes his being an accused racist all the more surreal, but it also introduces another layer of complexity to the book. What appeared to be a novel about political correctness and sexual morality in Clinton-era America, is actually much bigger. It's a novel about the American impulse to shed one's skin, start over, and succeed based on one's merits, despite the fact that it's nearly impossible to do so.
While Coleman's decision to abandon his ancenstry and live as a white man is enormous and shocking, other characters are reinventing themselves: Faunia Farley, a damaged, abused, and illiterate janitor who Coleman is sleeping with; Les Farley, a deeply traumatized, unpredictably violent war vet; and Delphine Rioux, a French academic who despises Coleman and leads all charges against him for her own personal reasons.
Roth's writing is expert (Faunia, for example, has "the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble") and at times infectiously frantic. The gradual unravelling of Coleman's past, narrated by Nathan Zuckerman (a recurring Roth character), is slow, detailed, and gripping. The final scene, in which Nathan Zuckerman is both threatened and a threat, is exquisitely imagined, tense as hell, and probably more visual than any other scene in the book.
Writing this is making me love the book, and I know it's the smartest book I've read so far for this award. It's without a doubt the most ambitious. I just didn't have a great experience reading it, so I'm not sure what to do with it. I'm putting it on top. Roth is risking more than every other author on this list so far, and he still comes through with a novel that I can't find a single specific complaint about. It would be crazy to put him below Natsuo Kirino, and maybe I just read it at the wrong time.
"The Human Stain" won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2000.
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