A Book Review
By Richard Keshen
The Human Stain by Philip Roth shows one of the world’s finest novelists at his soaring best. Roth’s novel is about an African-American who grows up in Brooklyn. His skin is light enough so as to pass himself off as a white, which he does when he joins the navy during the second World War. In fact, he adopts a Jewish identity, something he finds easy enough to do given that many of neighbours and friends in Brooklyn were Jewish. Coleman Silk (as the protaganist calls himself) continues with his adopted identity after the War, pursuing his education and then a successful academic career as a classics professor at a rural liberal-arts college.
So far Silk’s life has run along smoothly enough. But then two years before retirement, Silk casually refers to two students who have never shown up for class as “spooks”, meaning ghosts. The two students, unbeknown to Silk, are black, and “spook” is an archaic, derogatory term for a black person. A complaint is laid, and an academic court is convened. Now during a stint as dean, Silk had made himself unpopular with many colleagues because he had championed high academic standards. So he is set for a fall, and fall he does, right into forced resignation (the administration buries its collective head in the sand). The turmoil causes Silk’s beloved wife to suffer a fatal heart attack, and he himself withdraws into bitter reclusiveness.
Several years later, at the age of 71, Silk knocks on the door of a well-known novelist living at the edge of town, the famous Saul Zuckerman (the protagonist of several of Roth’s other novels). Silk wants his story told, and makes himself and his papers available to Zuckerman. The novelist begins to unravel Silk’s story and, after Silk dies, he discovers two hidden parts of Silk’s life. The first is the secret of Silk’s ethnicity (which he had kept even from his wife). The second is a passionate relationship that Silk had started, with the help of Viagra, after his wife had died. The relationship was with a 34 year old female janitor at the college. She was uneducated, indeed illiterate, and had suffered a tragic past. In spite of the many and vast differences between them, Silk and this woman engage in a mutually respectful and erotically charged romance.
The Human Stain then is Zuckerman’s telling of Coleman Silk’s story. It is a story about ethnic identity, academic life, sex, social class, and anger. Roth is a wonderful writer, and there are passages in this book of great poetic intensity. One such passage is about the addictive and ultimately self-destructive nature of the anger and hatred so often endemic to academic life (how right he is). There are also powerful passages about the state of America’s soul. I finished reading the book on the day that Gore conceded the election to Bush. I was moved by Gore’s speech, and struck by the way Americans treat “America” like some superpersonal entity that transcends all of their personal interests. There is indeed a tortured love of America that runs through Roth’s novel. For Roth, America is like a beloved but outrageously difficult parent that one continually wrestles with in one’s imagination. Roth is America’s most satirical, dark and bitter writer. The closest we‘ve got to Roth in Canada is Mordechai Richler. But it’s inconceivable that Richler would bear the kind of relationship to Canada that Roth bears to America. For better or for worse (probably both), we are different from Americans.
There has been much talk this season about Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein (also a story about a professor). Bellow and Roth are two of America’s greatest living writers. Ravelstein is worth reading, but in my view The Human Stain is a far superior novel.