The Human Stain

The blurb on the front of the book says "In American literature today, there's Philip Roth, and then there's everybody else." It's true. He is nothing short of serious at all times and thought provoking. In one page he can create a character more vivid than someone you've known for years, he does it with just a rush of short sentences detailing their life history, hitting on the essence of the person before you turn the page. But he is so angry and bitter. And this particular book The Human Stain has a hard time containing that anger. It's written in the time of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and his rants at times just seem like..... rants.

The story is of a classics professor, Coleman Silk, at a small New England college who just happens to be passing as a Jew when he is really a very light skinned black. (Less ludicrous in the book than when played by Anthony (Whitest Man on the Planet) Hopkins in the movie.) He has an affair with a much younger woman who is the illiterate janitor (Nicole Kidman!) at the college from which he is ostracized and forced to retire after being accused of racism by a black student. Roth is mad and he takes it out on his characters...poor Nathan Zuckerman is outed as incontinent and impotent, having to wear little cotton pads in his underwear to soak up the urine. It stinks being human in Roth's world.

But notwithstanding the stain in my mind of the image of Anthony Hopkins superimposed on Coleman Silk, it is a good book. Not his best book, but it is Phillip Roth after all, not everybody else, and we should pay attention.