By Philip Roth
2001
384 pgs.
Published by Vintage International
#20 on the NY Times "Best American Works of the Last 25 Years"
Winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award
Although this is one of the better Roth that has made it through the Factual Opinion's screening process, it's still a Roth, and therefore suspect. On some level, it's impossible to deny or ignore the writer's intelligence: yes, he's a bright dude. Still, the intense self-worship, the awful egotism and crushing arrogance of his work is something that, when fully immersed in his novels, is suffocating and horrid. Much like the writer, the Human Stain's protagonist is yet another intensely intelligent man whose acumen is matched, toe to toe, by a total dearth of social ability. Worshiping at the alter of intelligence and coated in a cloak of absolute self-righteousness, both Roth and his literary counterpart (the poorly named Coleman Silk) stride around tiny liberal towns (as is the case for Roth, always standing in for America) and proclaim themselves master of morality and behavior, begging the reader to recoil in disgust or shock from the choices it's characters make, so that Roth/Silk can point a crone-like finger across the pages and name the prudish conservative in the midst. As is, irritatingly, standard with all of Roth's work that's come across this desk, entire sections of America are ignored--like the Republican ones, the ones that are gay, the ones that are Muslim, the ones that are Asian, and, up until this tour de force of ego, the ones that are black.
Knowing the uninteresting and trite fact that the Human Stain's main character will, at some point, be revealed to be a light skinned African-American posing as white does nothing to lessen the suspense at the reveal--if anything, it increases the irritation at the cloying and pointless attempts at subterfuge in the early pages. Like the work of M. Night Shamayln, Roth uses a trick--and an obvious one at that. While Human Stain contains some brilliant passages, as do all of Roth's work, the book remains firmly in the pantheon of literature that no one who has limited time should spend upon. One hopes that someday, Harold Bloom and the New York Times be damned, scholarship shall reach the same conclusion.
-Tucker Stone, 2007
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