This week, instead of having an album flashback, I'm going with a book. With the release of Philip Roth's new novel, Everyman, I thought I'd post a review of The Humain Stain I originally wrote for The Charleston City Paper in 2000. Philip Roth is one of my favorite authors, and The Human Stain is one of my favorite Roth novels.
Philip Roth writes with uncommon clarity, and his cerebral novels place him in a modern-day authorial trinity. Alongside John Updike and Don Delillo, Philip Roth is an American literary icon and Nobel Laureate in waiting. His novel, The Human Stain, further validates this distinction. Nathan Zuckerman, a recurring Roth character, is the story’s voice and pseudo-author. Zuckerman’s narrative is set in 1998 amid Presidential scandal, and it revolves around Coleman Silk, a Classics professor and Dean Emeritus of Athena College.
The Human Stain opens with Coleman Silk abandoning his academic career under false accusations of racism. When speaking of two always-absent students, Coleman uses the word ‘spooks’ in its original ghostly sense. Unfortunate for Coleman, the two missing specters are African American and Delphine Roux, a new dean, is power-hungry, self righteous, and insecure. Delphine’s racist charges bewilder the aged professor and stress his wife to a literal death. In disgust, Coleman walks away from Athena, blaming its faculty for his wife’s demise. He firmly believes that the faculty “killed her as if they’d taken aim and fired a bullet into her heart,” and Coleman wants this tragedy exposed and forever documented in a book.
Enter Nathan Zuckerman, the writer. Even though the planned book is never written, Coleman and Nathan create a late-sixties early-seventies best-buddy kind of friendship. Coleman confides in Nathan and ends Nathan’s self-imposed hermitage. Once their friendship matures, Coleman tells Nathan about his Viagra-enhanced love affair with Faunia Farley, an illiterate college custodian half his age - his self-defined Voluptas. After two years of suffering, Coleman is happy enough to flirt in Latin.
Reenter Delphine Roux, the bitch. A self-important, look down her nose, stir up some trouble, bitch. Delphine discovers Nathan’s newfound romance and aims to ruin his born-again life. Delphine Roux mirrors Kenneth Star, and her Puritanical intrusiveness is clever social parody. In Chapter 3, Philip Roth removes his thinly veiled satire and offers five provocative pages about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, which is frank and roll-around-on-the-floor funny.
The humor fades however, when Delphine’s witch-hunt creates in Coleman contempt of contemporary American culture – a hypersensitive land of the free. The pursuit of happiness and freedom of speech are nice until society deems your words or lifestyle immoral, odd, or unfashionable. Coleman is tired of being ‘appropriate’. “The current code word for reining in most any deviation from the wholesome guidelines and thereby making everybody ‘comfortable’.”
Why would anyone in their seventies deprive themselves of happiness, just to make others comfortable? For societal reasons, Coleman had done so in the past and refuses to do so in the present. He led a long fraudulent life to make others (and himself) more comfortable. Coleman’s secret haunts him, and, until mid-novel, Philip Roth hides it from the reader. Once Coleman’s character development seems complete, Roth drops a bomb, shattering the book’s spine. A new level of complexity is reached, increasing exponentially the absurdness of Coleman’s demise.
The Human Stain is a vertebra in the backbone of great literature. Philip Roth compassionately and critically discusses political correctness, Bill Clinton’s escapades, Viagra love, and racial tensions. The Human Stain is a lucid snapshot of 20th Century America, taken without filters and painstakingly developed with care.
Roth Readables:
New York Times | Pen Award for Philip Roth
The New Yorker | The Great Enemy
Random Wiki | Nils Gabriel Sefstrom
Unrelated InSound Downloads:
Camera Obscura | I Need All The Friends I Can Get [MP3]
Asobi Seksu | Thursday [MP3]
Brightback Morning Light | Everybody Daylight [mP3]
Philip Roth writes with uncommon clarity, and his cerebral novels place him in a modern-day authorial trinity. Alongside John Updike and Don Delillo, Philip Roth is an American literary icon and Nobel Laureate in waiting. His novel, The Human Stain, further validates this distinction. Nathan Zuckerman, a recurring Roth character, is the story’s voice and pseudo-author. Zuckerman’s narrative is set in 1998 amid Presidential scandal, and it revolves around Coleman Silk, a Classics professor and Dean Emeritus of Athena College.
The Human Stain opens with Coleman Silk abandoning his academic career under false accusations of racism. When speaking of two always-absent students, Coleman uses the word ‘spooks’ in its original ghostly sense. Unfortunate for Coleman, the two missing specters are African American and Delphine Roux, a new dean, is power-hungry, self righteous, and insecure. Delphine’s racist charges bewilder the aged professor and stress his wife to a literal death. In disgust, Coleman walks away from Athena, blaming its faculty for his wife’s demise. He firmly believes that the faculty “killed her as if they’d taken aim and fired a bullet into her heart,” and Coleman wants this tragedy exposed and forever documented in a book.
Enter Nathan Zuckerman, the writer. Even though the planned book is never written, Coleman and Nathan create a late-sixties early-seventies best-buddy kind of friendship. Coleman confides in Nathan and ends Nathan’s self-imposed hermitage. Once their friendship matures, Coleman tells Nathan about his Viagra-enhanced love affair with Faunia Farley, an illiterate college custodian half his age - his self-defined Voluptas. After two years of suffering, Coleman is happy enough to flirt in Latin.
Reenter Delphine Roux, the bitch. A self-important, look down her nose, stir up some trouble, bitch. Delphine discovers Nathan’s newfound romance and aims to ruin his born-again life. Delphine Roux mirrors Kenneth Star, and her Puritanical intrusiveness is clever social parody. In Chapter 3, Philip Roth removes his thinly veiled satire and offers five provocative pages about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, which is frank and roll-around-on-the-floor funny.
The humor fades however, when Delphine’s witch-hunt creates in Coleman contempt of contemporary American culture – a hypersensitive land of the free. The pursuit of happiness and freedom of speech are nice until society deems your words or lifestyle immoral, odd, or unfashionable. Coleman is tired of being ‘appropriate’. “The current code word for reining in most any deviation from the wholesome guidelines and thereby making everybody ‘comfortable’.”
Why would anyone in their seventies deprive themselves of happiness, just to make others comfortable? For societal reasons, Coleman had done so in the past and refuses to do so in the present. He led a long fraudulent life to make others (and himself) more comfortable. Coleman’s secret haunts him, and, until mid-novel, Philip Roth hides it from the reader. Once Coleman’s character development seems complete, Roth drops a bomb, shattering the book’s spine. A new level of complexity is reached, increasing exponentially the absurdness of Coleman’s demise.
The Human Stain is a vertebra in the backbone of great literature. Philip Roth compassionately and critically discusses political correctness, Bill Clinton’s escapades, Viagra love, and racial tensions. The Human Stain is a lucid snapshot of 20th Century America, taken without filters and painstakingly developed with care.
Roth Readables:
New York Times | Pen Award for Philip Roth
The New Yorker | The Great Enemy
Random Wiki | Nils Gabriel Sefstrom
Unrelated InSound Downloads:
Camera Obscura | I Need All The Friends I Can Get [MP3]
Asobi Seksu | Thursday [MP3]
Brightback Morning Light | Everybody Daylight [mP3]
