...happens to be "black"? Why should he be precluded from "accepting the democratic invitation to throw our origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness" (334)? He is the child of chance, not a victim of fate. He leaves the baggage of the past behind him...

...closing the door to a past, to people, to a whole race. . . . Was it the social obstruction that he wised to sidestep? Was he merely being another American...both: what of it? And suppose they weren't — what of that?70 But Roth's question is not simply about America but about what is human or perhaps what has...

...Frame, Coleman Silk and Faunia Farley. All, as he says of Coleman Silk in The Human Stain, were part of "the great frontier tradition, accepting the democratic...to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness." Merry Levov becomes a terrorist murderer, disappearing into the fugitive underground and leaving behind...