The Human Stain: A Novel American Trilogy (3)
by Philip Roth
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Book Summary Information
Author: Philip RothEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-05-08
ISBN: 0375726349
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Human Stain: A Novel American Trilogy (3)
Book Review: "The truth about us is endless. As are the lies."
Summary: 5 Stars
THE HUMAN STAIN explores the relationship between public and private life in America during the second half of the 20th century. Like his few other novels, Philip Roth narrates the novel through his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who after a prostate surgery became impotent and worked as a retired writer. Zuckerman crossed path with our protagonist, Coleman Silk, in a seemingly preposterous situation. Everyone knew about Coleman's affair with a woman half his age. Nor did people not know about the secret of his racism, which severed his well-established tie with Athena College of which he had been professor for nearly forty years.
Readers will eventually learn that Silk is a light skinned African-American who gradually drifted across the American racial divide and for 50 years has successfully passed as a white Jew. He thrives to take Zuckerman into his confidence about this deep lifelong secret that lies at the very core of his identity at the backdrop of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, whose subversive affair with a White House intern emerged in every last mortifying detail in 1998. It was set at a time when "the jumble, the mayhem, the mess proved itself more subtle than one's ideology and one's morality."
A supposed racism slur - "spooks" - forced Coleman Silk to resign and the accusation, Coleman understands, leads directly to his wife's death to heart attack, though the charge is both spurious and preposterous. But this is not his only nightmare. What is most unendurable is that he is drained to the last bucket of days, the time if there ever is a time to quit the quarrel, to give up the rebuttal, to end the protest to an untrue accusation, to undo himself from the conscientiousness with which he raised his family bound by a combative marriage, and on top to come to term with his secret.
Coleman Silk's tragedy is intrinsic that it has so firmly imprinted in his in his early years, at his painful realization the objective is for his fate to determine not by the ignorant, hate-filled intentions of a hostile world but by his own resolve. So racism is just one example of evil, which, in Roth's rigorous and robust language, originates from his quest of purity, one that is racism-free. The lie, a shameful secret that has his lifetime magnetism, exists at the foundation of his relationship to his children who never have the opportunity to know their true ethnic identity. The lie impedes his relationship with his family, which has inevitably become an impediment, embarrassment, and taboo. No wonder Coleman is left to his crushing sense of abandonment that festered into the wound that has led to his self-destructive isolation and too circuitously a tragedy. Coleman's original goal is to live in freedom and not a representative of his race. In the quest for this freedom he falls prey to a society in which racism issue compromises the public and private life of morality.
The prose of HUMAN STAIN is robust, matter-of-fact, mellifluous, and highly literate. The book is quite difficult to take in the sense that he takes the fanaticism of the social root of evil very seriously.
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