Out, out damned spot

The Human Stain
By Philip Roth
Vintage Books,
361 pages
Available at Powerbooks

An American college professor is deconstructed bit by bit until there’s nothing left in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, a companion novel to his 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winner, American Pastoral.

The backdrop is America 1999, a time when Americans were wringing their hands over Monicagate, Linda Tripp, Kenneth Starr and a certain impeached president. Coleman Silk is the head of the classics department at fictional Athena College in Massachusetts. During roll-call one morning, he asks if certain non-attending students actually exist, "or are they spooks?"

This seemingly innocent comment sparks a fierce debate on campus, with Silk being charged with racism and facing expulsion. His incredulous defense ("I was referring to their possibly ectoplasmic character. Isn’t that obvious? These two students had not attended a single class. That’s all I knew about them. I had no idea what color these two students might be. I had wholly forgotten that ‘spooks’ is an invidious term sometimes applied to blacks") fails to save him, and he resigns under pressure: bitter, stained, and out for justice.

Justice – or at least explanation – comes at the hands of narrator Nathan Zuckerman, an all-but-retired novelist who in Roth’s books stands along the sidelines observing events much like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. In fact, Gatsby is a sort of template for American Pastoral and The Human Stain, as each traces the rise and fall of an American Dreamer – Swede Levov, the all-white, all-American success story in Roth’s former novel, and Coleman Silk, the darker counterpart in The Human Stain –each trying to reinvent himself through sheer will and effort.

Along the way, Roth takes steady aim at the "dumbing down" of America, specifically at a prevailing academic climate where the classics are thrown out at universities because students can’t handle them (so they are simply labeled "sexist" or "racist"), where political correctness squeezes free speech like a deadly vise, and where the moral atmosphere is no less puritanical than in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s day:

"Almost without exception, my dear, our students are abysmally ignorant. They’ve been incredibly badly educated. Their lives are intellectually barren. They arrive knowing nothing and most of them leave knowing nothing. Least of all do they know, when they show up in my class, how to read classical drama. Teaching at Athena, particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan and talking to yourself, except instead of the eighteen people who hear you in the street, they’re all in the same room. They know, like, nothing."

That’s Coleman Silk sounding off on American students, but even while defending himself, he comes off as arrogant, pompous and sexist. Roth himself is in fine writing form these days, so The Human Stain is full of barbed wit, furious energy and inventiveness from page one. After Silk is banished from the college department he largely created and his wife passes away, he begins a lustful affair with a young woman whose lowly job is sweeping up at the local post office. That she is half his age and supposedly illiterate fans the flames of campus rancor once again. Through anonymous letters and rumors, he is accused of manipulating and exploiting an intellectual inferior, even getting her pregnant and forcing her to have an abortion. The accusations fly thick and fast in a New England town, and as Coleman Silk’s life veers toward destruction, Zuckerman is nearby, scrambling to set the record straight.

It’s Zuckerman’s sideline perspective that makes The Human Stain work so well. You’d have to look far and wide for a better snapshot of America’s Zeitgeist, circa 1999. It’s a snapshot frozen in the past, a pre-9/11 time when blowjobs in the Oval Office were the biggest thing America had to worry about. Zuckerman/Roth unravels a network of characters spanning America’s post-WW2 history, from blue-collar Vietnam vets to light-colored blacks reaching for an American Dream. It’s brilliantly interwoven, even when it goes over the top. Because despite the events of the story, satire and farce are much bigger forces than tragedy in The Human Stain. And the biggest farce of all is political correctness, a knee-jerk second-guessing that proves what fools liberals be, including Delphine Roux, the empowered literature dean who replaces Coleman Silk, but has to take out personal ads to find a suitable mate:

If she wrote, "A photo accompanying the letter would be welcome," or simply, "Photo, please," it could be misunderstood to imply that she esteemed good looks above intelligence, erudition, and cultural refinement; moreover, any photos she received might be touched up, years old, or altogether spurious. Asking for a photo might even discourage a response from the very men whose interest she was hoping to elicit. Yet if she didn’t request a photo, she could wind up traveling all the way to Boston, to New York, or farther, to find herself the dinner companion of someone wholly inappropriate and even distasteful. And distasteful not necessarily because of looks alone. What if he was a liar? What if he was a charlatan? What if he was a psychopath? What if he had AIDS? What if he was violent, vicious, married or on Medicare?

There are no good guys or bad guys in The Human Stain: just an odd assortment of people caught up in the human condition, a condition that’s as hard to get rid of as a certain stain on a certain dress. And possibly as hard to forget.