Book Reviews
On page 4, the protagonist of Roth's novel, a classics professor, asks his students: "You know how European literature begins?... With a quarrel. All of European literature springs from a fight." And there you have The Iliad, whose characters and raw passions Roth overlays onto a story that takes place some 3,000 years after Troy in the town of Athena, Mass. And those two stories are jammed up right up against the story of Bill and Monica in the White House in the summer of 1998. Oh boy—buckle your seatbelts!
A LitLovers LitPick (Aug. '08)
The Human Stain is a book that shows how the public Zeitgeist can shape, even destroy, an individual's life, a book that takes all of Roth's favorite themes of identity and rebellion and generational strife and refracts them not through the narrow prism of the self but through a wide-angle lens that exposes the fissures and discontinuities of 20th-century life...Roth does a beautifully nuanced job -- by turns, unnerving, hilarious and sad.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
The darkness that seeps into every corner of this novel is not oppressive or dreary, thanks to Mr. Roth's narrative energy. The story he tells, packed with twists and revelations, moves sinuously back and forth in time, from one perfectly realized scene to the next. The darkness that seeps into every corner of this novel is not oppressive or dreary, thanks to Mr. Roth's narrative energy. The story he tells, packed with twists and revelations, moves sinuously back and forth in time, from one perfectly realized scene to the next.
Sam Tanenhaus - Wall Street Journal
Philip Roth's new book offers a bleak look beneath the surface of a self-satisfied nation.
Time
Roth holds nothing back in The Human Stain. His prose style is aggressive, his humor often savage, his narrative punctuated with virtuoso digressions. But Roth's reckless desire to tell the whole human story lends his latest novel the texture of necessary fiction.
Men's Journal - Mark Levine
The passages get more and more brilliant–so brilliant you can’t stand it anymore–and then he goes himself one better. Whether he’s giving you America’s bygone glove-making industry down to its most minute particular (which works like gangbusters on both concrete and metaphorical levels), or parsing to a fare-thee-well the vagaries of the human heart, he is, word for word, paragraph for paragraph, Mozartean, simply unsurpassable.
New York Observer
Roth almost never fails to surprise. After a clunky beginning, in which crusty Nathan Zuckerman is carrying on about the orgy of sanctimoniousness surrounding Clinton's Monica misadventures, his new novel settles into what would seem to be patented Roth territory. Coleman Silk, at 71 a distinguished professor at a small New England college, has been harried from his position because of what has been perceived as a racist slur. His life is ruined: his wife succumbs under the strain, his friends are forsaking him, and he is reduced to an affair with 34-year-old Faunia Farley, the somber and illiterate janitor at the college. It is at this point that Zuckerman, Roth's novelist alter ego, gets to know and like Silk and to begin to see something of the personal and sexual liberation wrought in him by the unlikely affair with Faunia. It is also the point at which Faunia's estranged husband Les Farley, a Vietnam vet disabled by stress, drugs and drink, begins to take an interest in the relationship. So far this is highly intelligent, literate entertainment, with a rising tension. Will Les do something violent? Will Delphine Roux, the young French professor Silk had hired, who has come to hate him, escalate the college's campaign against him? Yes, but she now wants to make something of his Faunia relationship too. Then, in a dazzling coup, Roth turns all expectations on their heads, and begins to show Silk in a new and astounding light, as someone who has lived a huge lie all his life, making the fuss over his alleged racism even more surreal. The book continues to unfold layer after layer of meaning. There is a tragedy, as foretold, and an exquisitely imagined ending in which Zuckerman himself comes to feel both threatened and a threat. Roth is working here at the peak of his imaginative skills, creating many scenes at once sharply observed and moving: Faunia's affinity for the self-contained remoteness of crows, Farley's profane longing for a cessation to the tumult in his head, Zuckerman delightedly dancing with Silk to the big band tunes of their youth. He even brings off virtuoso passages that are superfluous but highly impressive, like his dissection of the French professor's lonely anguish in the States. This is a fitting capstone to the trilogy that includes American Pastoral and I Married a Communist—a book more balanced and humane than either, and bound, because of its explosive theme, to be widely discussed.
Publishers Weekly
With the help of his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, Roth continues the inquiry into the state of the American soul during the second half of the twentieth-century. Fueled by the story of his magnetic hero, Coleman Silk, it roars, with heart-revving velocity, through a literary landscape that embraces the politics of race and sex, the Vietnam War, and the absurdity of extreme political correctness, the dumbing down of the academy, and President Clinton's impeachment. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Roth's extraordinary recent productivity (the prizewinning Sabbath's Theater, 1995, and American Pastoral, 1997) continues apace with this impressively replete and very moving chronicle of an academic scandal and its impact on both the aging professor at its center and his friendalter ego novelist Nathan Zuckerman. In the turbulent summer of 1998 (while the country reacts with prurient dismay to the Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky mess), Coleman Silk, classics teacher and Dean of Faculty at New England's Athena College, innocently uses the word "spook'' (correctly, as it happens) in class, and is immediately accused of racism. His career and reputation are in ruins, his wife dies as a result of the ensuing emotional trauma, and Silk becomes estranged from his several adult children. Then, his "exploitative'' ongoing affair with Faunia Farley, a passive cleaning woman less than half his age, is discovered. Zuckerman, in whom Coleman has confided, befriends him, hears him outthen, following the last of the storys several climaxes, sedulously "reconstructs'' his beleaguered friend's history ("I am forced to imagine. It happens to be what I do for a living''). There's another secret in Coleman's pastand Zuckerman/Roth teases it out and explores its consequences in a back-and-forth narrative filled with surprises that strains plausibility severely, while simultaneously involving us deeply with its vividly imagined characters. In addition to Coleman Silk (whose arrogance and secretiveness in no way lessen our respect for him), Roth creates telling and unusually full characterizations of the semiliterate Faunia (both a pathetic victim of circumstance and a formidably strong woman); her angry ex-husband Les, a Vietnam vet crippled by post-traumatic stress disorder; and even Delphine Roux, Coleman's single-minded feminist colleague, and his most dedicated enemy. And in the long elegiac final scene, Zuckerman contrives a resolution that may confer forgiveness on them all. A marvel of imaginative empathy, generosity, and tact. Roth's late maturity looks more and more like his golden age.
Kirkus Reviews