Philip Roth, The Human Stain

Philip Roth is on any serious shortlist for the greatest living American novelist. I have read a few of his books, and each has been profoundly powerful. American Pastoral, The Plot Against America, even to a lesser degree the short Indignation. And now The Human Stain. In each case, I have begun thinking that I am reading a more or less ordinary novel, plainly written. This feeling of slight disappointment in this "great novelist" persists for about half or even two-thirds of the novel.

And then, everything changes. It is as if the wool is pulled from before my eyes. I gasp aloud at sudden revelations that, in retrospect, change the valence of everything that has come before. This experience in The Human Stain caught me, yet again, completely off guard. I thought that I had already grasped the twists and shifts, but again, Roth had me in the palm of his hand.

The story here focuses on a college professor (so I am, of course, sympathetic from the outset). He is put under intense investigation, culminating in his storming out shortly before his retirement, for a supposedly racist remark. The accusation is, we realize, absurd, trumped up, the result of simmering resentments throughout campus. Coleman Silk has been (like many Roth characters), an outspoken and successful Jew who is resented by society. Here, though, race becomes more broadly considered, triangulating between Silk, his white Christian colleagues, and the African-American students who are the supposed target of his remark.

If you think you have a handle on such issues, pick this book up and reconsider. If you don't, pick this book up and consider. This is an excellent choice for college students, in particular, as the setting and concerns should hit home perhaps more than some of Roth's other books. More students are likely to identify with college professors and students than, say, with the glove factory owner in American Pastoral. Roth is the only novelist whose work has caused me to rethink my understandings of my country, my ethnicity, and my personal identity. And he has done so more than once. If this is the book that serves for a reader as an entry point into Roth's work, all the better.