The Human Stain: A NovelIt 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 his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with Faunia Farley, a woman half his age with a savagely wrecked past--a part-time farmhand and a janitor at the college where, until recently, he was the powerful dean of faculty. And it's not the secret of Coleman's alleged racism, which provoked the college witch-hunt that cost him his job and, to his mind, killed his wife. Nor is it the secret of misogyny, despite the best efforts of his ambitious young colleague, Professor Delphine Roux, to expose him as a fiend. Coleman's secret has been kept for fifty years: from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understand how this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, had fabricated his identity and how that cannily controlled life came unraveled. Set in 1990s America, where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciation and rituals of purification, The Human Stain concludes Philip Roth's eloquent trilogy of postwar American lives that are as tragically determined by the nation's fate as by the "human stain" that so ineradicably marks human nature. This harrowing, deeply compassionate, and completely absorbing novel is a magnificent successor to his Vietnam-era novel, American Pastoral, and his McCarthy-era novel, I Married a Communist. |
From inside the book
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Page 10
... five miles away from me in the tiny Essex County town of East Orange , New Jersey , and that , as a 1944 graduate of East Orange High , he had been some six years ahead of me in my neighboring Newark school . Coleman had made no effort ...
... five miles away from me in the tiny Essex County town of East Orange , New Jersey , and that , as a 1944 graduate of East Orange High , he had been some six years ahead of me in my neighboring Newark school . Coleman had made no effort ...
Page 11
... at the college and could not even begin to follow the chronology of the hor- ror that , for five months now , had engulfed him and the late Iris Silk : the punishing immersion in meetings , hearings , • 11 • EVERYONE KNOWS.
... at the college and could not even begin to follow the chronology of the hor- ror that , for five months now , had engulfed him and the late Iris Silk : the punishing immersion in meetings , hearings , • 11 • EVERYONE KNOWS.
Page 15
... five eight , if that , he was not heavily muscled , and yet there was a lot of strength in him , and a lot of the bounce of the high school athlete was still visible , the quick- ness , the urge to action that we used to call pep . His ...
... five eight , if that , he was not heavily muscled , and yet there was a lot of strength in him , and a lot of the bounce of the high school athlete was still visible , the quick- ness , the urge to action that we used to call pep . His ...
Page 21
... five years of the songs , the girls , and that fulfilled my every ideal . I found a letter to- day . Cleaning out that Spooks stuff , found a letter from one of the girls . The girl . After I got my first appointment , out on Long ...
... five years of the songs , the girls , and that fulfilled my every ideal . I found a letter to- day . Cleaning out that Spooks stuff , found a letter from one of the girls . The girl . After I got my first appointment , out on Long ...
Page 23
... five by then . We stopped and spoke , and I told her my wife was pregnant , and she told me what she was do- ing , and then we kissed goodbye , and that was it . About a week later this letter came to me care of the college . It's dated ...
... five by then . We stopped and spoke , and I told her my wife was pregnant , and she told me what she was do- ing , and then we kissed goodbye , and that was it . About a week later this letter came to me care of the college . It's dated ...
Contents
1 | |
2 Slipping the Punch | 75 |
3 What Do You Do with the Kid Who Cant Read? | 146 |
4 What Maniac Conceived It? | 202 |
5 The Purifying Ritual | 285 |
About Philip Roth | 363 |
Back Flap | 365 |
Back Cover | 366 |
Spine | 367 |
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Common terms and phrases
American Asbury Park asked Athena College believe Berkshires called Coleman Silk colored crazy crow dance dead dean death Delphine Roux door driving East Orange Ernestine everything eyes faculty father Faunia Farley feel Fensterman fight fucking girl going Gouldtown hair hand happened head hear Human Stain Iris Iris's Jeff kids kill knew laugh Lawnside letter Linda Tripp Lisa living look Louie Louie says Matthew Henson milk Monica Lewinsky morning mother Negro Nelson Primus never Newark night Okay once Primus professor secret shit Silk's someone spooks Steena stop story Street stuff sure talk Tanglewood tell There's thing thought told took turned valedictorian Viagra Vietnam walking Wall Walt Walter watching What's who'd wife woman women word
Popular passages
Page 109 - Cowards die many times before their deaths ; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear ; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come, when it will come.
Page 244 - Faunia was telling the girl feeding the snake: we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen — there's no other way to be here.
Page 4 - America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism — which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country's security — was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America's oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony.
Page 244 - The stain that's there before its mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It's why all the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It's insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity.
Page 117 - Some day he'll come along, The man I love; And he'll be big and strong, The man I love; And when he comes my way, I'll do my best to make him stay.
Page 336 - Was it the social obstruction that he wished to sidestep? Was he merely being another American and, in the great frontier tradition, accepting the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness? Or was it more than that? Or was it less? How petty were his motives? How pathological? And suppose they were both — what of it? And suppose they weren't — what of that?
Page 110 - Not the tyranny of the we and its we-talk and everything that the we wants to pile on your head. Never for him the tyranny of the we that is dying to suck you in, the coercive, inclusive, historical, inescapable moral we with its insidious Epluribus unum.
Page 344 - To become a new being. To bifurcate. The drama that underlies America's story, the high drama that is upping and leaving — and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands.