Book Review: The Human Stain, by Philip Roth

One of those books where an aging author insertcollege professor rediscovers his penishimself by screwing a younger chick.



Houghton Mifflin, 2000, 352 pages

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.

Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk''s astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."

( Philip Roth really likes his penis. )

Verdict: A literary novel. A very dudely literary novel. Like most such novels I have read, I appreciated the craftsmanship of the author's writing, and found the story mildly interesting and the characters more so, but it was tedious to get all the way to the end, especially with the authorial penis looming large over the pages. I am not as impressed by Philip Roth and his penis as I think I'm supposed to be. I feel no urge whatsoever to go read another Philip Roth novel. Does this book deserve to be on the list of 1001 books you must read before you die? Well, give him his due, Philip Roth is a real writer, so you should probably read at least one book by him, and now I have. And I think that's enough.

This was my ninth assignment for the books1001 challenge.

Book Review: The Human Stain, by Philip Roth

One of those books where an aging author insertcollege professor rediscovers his penishimself by screwing a younger chick.



Houghton Mifflin, 2000, 352 pages

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.

Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk''s astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."

( Philip Roth really likes his penis. )

Verdict: A literary novel. A very dudely literary novel. Like most such novels I have read, I appreciated the craftsmanship of the author's writing, and found the story mildly interesting and the characters more so, but it was tedious to get all the way to the end, especially with the authorial penis looming large over the pages. I am not as impressed by Philip Roth and his penis as I think I'm supposed to be. I feel no urge whatsoever to go read another Philip Roth novel. Does this book deserve to be on the list of 1001 books you must read before you die? Well, give him his due, Philip Roth is a real writer, so you should probably read at least one book by him, and now I have. And I think that's enough.

This was my ninth assignment for the books1001 challenge.