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Editorial Review:
It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.The Wall Street Journal , "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."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 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 dramatized 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
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
A smart novel which will stay in your mind for days:
So this is a story about Coleman Silk who is black. He was raised in a respectable black family, with an optometrist father and a mother who was one of the first black Head Nurses in New Jersey. The Silks however, as Coleman came to find out, were much more accepted in their NJ neighborhood because they were light skinned. Coleman especially was light with soft curly hair and green eyes. Because of this, Coleman, after dropping out of Howard University and eventually joining the military as a white man... more info
Philip Roth = Genius:
A college professor is forced to resign for alleged racism and begins an affair with an illiterate woman. In my opinion, this is very close to the perfect book. The writing is genius, and the scope of the book is enormous. Doldrums in a horizenless ocean of words:
I'm a great admirer of Philip Roth's books, and I have no doubt that he's one of the country's greatest novelists (in fact, I don't quite understand why he hasn't been awarded the Nobel). But even the great ones occasionally hit clunkers, and The Human Stain is a clunker. I really wanted to like the book, but I just couldn't. It has its grand moments--it is, after all, written by Roth--but it's too long, too messy, too grandiose in places, too underdeveloped in others. By midpoint, I felt I was drowning in... more info Recommending Philip Roth is a little like recommending sex...:
...It's so obvious it hardly needs saying.more info Similar Products:
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