The Human Stain: A Novel by Philip Roth Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Human Stain: A Novel
Book Review: Skin Deep
Summary: 5 Stars
Breathtaking prose, a thing of taut beauty dealing with race, guilt and the artifice of modern life. This was like rubbing a bruise, painfully pleasurable.
The central theme, of denial and associated guilt, of prejudice and its capacity for destruction is presented in a beguilling manner. Coleman Silk as a character inspires at times sympathy, loathing or just plain consternation. For me it is another fabulous example of Roth's brilliance in being able to capture the right note of an idea, a feeling a subject.
Read this book and it will have an impact. Having done so I would suggest watching the film version, with Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman. The film was not particularly well praised, but it is worthwhile and seeing it ironically provides some additional colouring in of the story, having first read the book.
Book Review: Strange Little Book
Summary: 3 Stars
I'm surprised that in none of the reviews I've read so far has there been any reference to the fundemental flaw in this book: Namely, that the author (as narrator) casts himself as a character involved in the action who then goes on to tell the reader information about other characters (personal history, private thoughts, etc.) that he (as character) is not privvy to and cannot possibly know. This is particularly jarring in the case of the French woman who lectures at the University - someone he actually never meets!
And it starts off so well too. Like layers being peeled off an onion we discover the inner workings of Coleman, of Faunia, etc. An unfolding tragedy that is totally gripping until he finds it necessary to start acting as omniscient author and not the character he set himself up to be. Why didn't his publisher point this out to him? It would have been a much better book if they had.
Book Review: Boring
Summary: 1 Stars
In trying to review this novel, the only word which really presents itself is boring. I normally find at least some interest in even the most tedious books, but I really couldn't find any here.
This was the first of Philip Roth's books I've read...and it will most definitely be the last!
Book Review: Identity politics and political correctness as manifestations of American insecurity
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: A primer for the soul
Summary: 5 Stars
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.