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The Human Stain
 
 
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The Human Stain [Paperback]

Philip Roth
3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 384 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (4 Aug 2005)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0099282194
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099282198
  • Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 2.5 x 19.9 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 14,971 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Philip Roth
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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

Athena College was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman Silk--formerly "Silky Silk", undefeated welterweight pro-boxer--strode in and shook the place awake. This faculty dean sacked the deadwood, made lots of hot new hires, including Yale-spawned literary-theory wunderkind Delphine Roux, and irritated so many people for so many decades that now, in 1998, they have all turned on him. Silk's character assassination is partly owing to what the novel's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, calls "the Devil of the Little Place--the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the lies".

But shocking, intensely dramatised events precipitate Silk's crisis. He remarks of two students who never showed up for class, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" They turn out to be black, and lodge a bogus charge of racism exploited by his enemies. Then, at 71, Viagra catapults Silk into "the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication", and he ignites an affair with an illiterate janitor, Faunia Farley, 34. She's got a sharp sensibility, "the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble", and a melancholy voluptuousness. "I'm back in the tornado", Silk exults. His campus persecutors burn him for it--and his main betrayer is Delphine Roux.

In a short space, it's tough to convey the gale-force quality of Silk's rants, or the odd effect of Zuckerman's narration, alternately retrospective and torrentially in the moment. The flashbacks to Silk's youth in New Jersey are just as important as his turbulent forced retirement, because it turns out that for his entire adult life, Silk has been covering up the fact that he is a black man. (If this seems implausible, consider that the famous New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard did the same thing.) Young Silk rejects both the racism that bars him from Woolworth's counter and the Negro solidarity of Howard University. "Neither the they of Woolworth's nor the we of Howard" is for Coleman Silk. "Instead the raw I with all its agility. Self-discovery--that was the punch to the labonz.... Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?"

Silk's contradictions power a great Philip Roth novel, but he's not the only character who packs a punch. Faunia, brutally abused by her Vietnam vet husband (a sketchy guy who seems to have wandered in from a lesser Russell Banks novel), scarred by the death of her kids, is one of Roth's best female characters ever. The self-serving Delphine Roux is intriguingly (and convincingly) nutty, and any number of minor characters pop in, mouth off, kick ass, and vanish, leaving a vivid sense of human passion and perversity behind. You might call it a stain. --Tim Appelo

Amazon.co.uk Review

Athena College was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman Silk strode in and shook the place awake. This faculty dean sacked the deadwood, made lots of hot new hires, including Yale-spawned literary-theory wunderkind Delphine Roux, and pissed off so many people for so many decades that now, in 1998, they've all turned on him. Silk's character assassination is partly owing to what the novel's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, calls "the Devil of the Little Place--the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the lies". But shocking, intensely dramatised events precipitate Silk's crisis. He remarks of two students who never showed up for class, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" They turn out to be black, and lodge a bogus charge of racism exploited by his enemies. Then, at 71, Viagra catapults Silk into "the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication", and he ignites an affair with an illiterate janitor, Faunia Farley, 34. She's got a sharp sensibility, "the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble," and a melancholy voluptuousness. "I'm back in the tornado," Silk exults. His campus persecutors burn him for it--and his main betrayer is Delphine Roux.

The flashbacks to Silk's youth in New Jersey become just as important as his turbulent-forced retirement when he reveals a secret that he has been hiding his entire adult life and Silk's contradictions power a great Philip Roth novel, but he's not the only character who packs a punch. Faunia, brutally abused by her Vietnam vet husband, scarred by the death of her kids, is one of Roth's best female characters ever. The self-serving Delphine Roux is intriguingly (and convincingly) nutty, and any number of minor characters pop in, mouth off and vanish, leaving a vivid sense of human passion and perversity behind. You might call it a stain. --Tim Appelo --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Readers like me familiar with Philip Roth's work may well feel slightly disappointed with The Human Stain. Many of the features which imparted a unique character to his earlier books- the vivid recreation of Jewish Newark or the introduction of the semi autobiographical narrator Nathan Zuckerman- are now beginning to seem rather tiring mannerisms.

Roth becomes more ambitious with every book and The Human Stain again sees him tackling through a piquant life story The State of the Nation. Here he is taking on the tyranny of political correctness and of the persecuting spirit which is said to be ruling America at the time of the Monica Lewinsky trial.

Some of Roth's hits at the intellectual decline of American universities or the absurdities of French theory are shrewd. But they are also often disconnected from the vital life of the novel and read more like impassioned (and not always well thought through) journalistic tirades.

'Write what you know' is a saying that Roth always seems to have respected in his earlier work, with its accounts of the life of the novelist and the pains and pleasures of an American Jewish upbringing. But it is one he seems to depart from here. His central character Coleman Silk is marvellously alive, but many of the supporting figures- like the neurotic Derrida spouting academic or the mad Vietnam veteran- feel like a clever assemblage of cliches rather than authentic creations.

For me at least if Roth is becoming ever more concerned with 'issues'- wrestling with Black History month or the Monica Lewinsky trial- then the cost is a slackening delight in language. The monologues here lack some of the high octane inventiveness of previous works and Roth's bent for exaggeration looks less like surrealism or fantasy than lack of attention to the facts.

Having said all that there is still much to admire here and a fantastic plot twist which generates an extremely intelligent discussion of what personal identity means in modern America. Buy by all means but preferably with some earlier Roth for comparison.

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33 of 36 people found the following review helpful
Roth's finest work 14 July 2004
Format:Paperback
This book sat on my bookshelf for over a year before I decided to pick it up and read it. I had only read Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and wasn't too impressed with it. But, when I found out that there was a movie adaptation of the book I wanted to make sure that I read the book before seeing the movie (books are typically far superior to the film adaptation). It didn't take long before I was floored. The Human Stain is an exceptional novel and has completely turned around my opinion of Philip Roth. Without question this is one of the best novels I have read this year.

The Human Stain is the story of Coleman Silk, a retired college professor from Athena College. Coleman retired from his position in the midst of a scandal. He was accused of making a racist remark in one of his classes towards two students. The accusation is patently untrue but Coleman was not the most popular man on campus and things began to steamroll out of control until he left the school. The joke inherent in this accusation is that while Coleman may look like a 71 year old white man, he is actually a black man. Coleman has spent his professional (and private) life denying who (and what) he is. In case this concept sounds too fantastic (a black man who looks white trying to hide the fact that he is black), there is a real life corollary in Anatole Broyard, a New York Times book critic.

This is the Coleman that we are first introduced to. He is in a sexual (and not much more) relationship with 34 year old Faunia Farley. She is illiterate and works as a cleaning lady at Athena College. This too, is a scandal waiting to happen. It is this relationship with Faunia that instigates the telling of the story and we are told very early in the novel that Coleman and Faunia do not live for many more months (by early, I mean within 20 pages). The story is told by writer Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman was told most of what he knows by Coleman. For quite some time Coleman tried to get Zuckerman to write a book about the events following the alleged racist remark. The Human Stain (the title of Roth's novel as well as Zuckerman's book) is not quite the book that Coleman wanted written, but it was a story that Zuckerman felt compelled to tell. We must remember that everything is shaded by what Zuckerman knows and what he believes.

There is a long section in the middle of the book dealing with a young Coleman Silk. We see him in High School and get glimpses of how he became a black man hiding behind his white skin and denying his family and why he would have done such a thing. This section deals with Coleman being a young boxer and the relationships with women that he engaged in. For all the power of this book, the section on the young Coleman is the most powerful. I first expected it to break the rhythm of the story, but it fits perfectly and is one of the best passages in the novel.

After being somewhat put off Roth from reading Portnoy's Complaint, this book impressed me so much I'm looking forward to reading American Pastoral. I have a hard time imagining that Roth wrote a better book than The Human Stain, but a different novel won the Pulitzer. Awards aside, The Human Stain is one of the best books I have read all year and is simply exceptional work. After finishing the book, the best I can say is: wow. The book really is that good. I would highly recommend The Human Stain.

-Joe Sherry

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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful
By A Common Reader TOP 100 REVIEWER VINE™ VOICE
Format:Paperback
Roth once more shows his literary skills in creating this engrossing book, so richly full of themes and subthemes that it causes the reader to pause in reflection on every page. I would rate this epic story (mirroring the ancient Greek conflicts so loved by its main character Coleman Silk) very highly and have no problem placing it in the "classic" category, a must-read for anyone who seeks to understand American culture in the late 20th century.

Despite the rather grandiose ambition of the book (to make a once-and-for-all comment on the whole topic of political correctness in academia), the book is immensely readable and as the story gathers pace, the reader is drawn into a narrative as thrilling and suspenseful as any crime novel (and in any case there are plenty of crimes in here anyway!). The characters are complex and the situations they find themselves in unusual. Huge conflicts emerge behind their differing approaches to life and the book is in some ways like a glorified soap opera with all the human themes one would find in any television drama.

In writing a review of this book, you become aware of quite how rich this novel is. It would be an excellent book for a reading group, or a more academic programme and the topics for discussion which arise from it would be endless. The book tells complex stories about the Vietnam experience, Bill Clinton's meanderings through the Lewinsky story, racism and ethnicity, human ageing, and the irresisitlble pull of romance and sex. Primarily, the book is about the human condition (the "human stain" of the title) and to use a cliché, man's search for meaning. But it can also be read as a powerful human drama, for Roth's fictional narrative is as valid on its own terms as the lessons he seeks to draw from it.

This is a rich and compelling read, highly recommended to anyone who expects their chosen books to make them think about their own lives and the lives of those around them.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews
The Human Stain
When a writer's career spans 7 decades (Roth's Goodbye Columbus was published in 1959), how do you rate any one of their novels? Well, the short answer is "With great difficulty". Read more
Published 1 day ago by David Llewellyn
Dull.
This book reads like less of a novel and more of an essay on racial prejudice in America. Far too mutch back-story and navel gazing and too little narrative to push the main crux... Read more
Published 2 days ago by Lexicon
Polemic As Always
The book is written to make a single point, as is often the case for Roth. Here he rails against what he would probably call political correctness and how seemingly liberal views... Read more
Published 14 days ago by Conal Henry
masterly technique, interesting ideas - but just not that gripping
The opening chapter of this novel shows us just what mastery Roth has of his form - it ranges from dreams about the White House of Clinton at the time of Monica Lewinsky ('a human... Read more
Published 3 months ago by William Jordan
The Human Stain
Outstanding - what more can I say? Philip Roth's writing is on another level entirely that I defy any writer to beat. Read more
Published 4 months ago by JKB
a riveting story
I had heard about this Philip Roth novel after one of my friends told me about the movie she had seen and how much the story impressed her. Read more
Published 5 months ago by steelo
Everything was ok
This is a good seller. The item arrived as expected and when expected. Everything worked out fine. I am happy on the overall.
Published 7 months ago by Giulia Mangione
yeah yeah yeah
I read this three times a year, maybe more. Sometimes it's just a dip in, sometimes it's an full emersion. Read more
Published 11 months ago by P.J.C. Mallone
The judgement of others
The Human Stain. The very title has something slightly repugnant about it, a stain is usually undesirable, something to be removed, cleaned up, better still avoided in the first... Read more
Published 12 months ago by Mick Read
Snore
It's a while since I read this, but it's still under my skin, unfortunately as one of the most boring and ridiculous novels I've ever bothered to finish. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Amanda Huggenkiss
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