Rating: 
Summary: The Chronicler
Review: Philip Roth is certainly one of the greatest, if not the greatest, living American literary figure.In The Human Stain, Roth relates a story that touches on many themes: accepting your past (and coming to grips with it), relationships (both filial and erotic), race relations, and many others that contribute to a great work of fiction. Roth's characters are fully developed and realistic, and his imagination obviously knows no bounds. He runs the gamut of players in the novel, from an educated, discraced professor, to a disgruntled Vietman veteran, to an illiterate young janitor. Why not the fifth star? First, though the plot is well concieved, some may find it poorly executed. The setting of the novel often shifts from present to past, which makes for difficult reading. Also, Roth writes quite often in a stream-of-consciousness manner, and subsequently digresses quite often. This, especially, can make for lulls in the book, and is the reason many people I know have not enjoyed it.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought provoking
Review: Are we really who we appear to be? Why is it our nature to escalate trivial things and ignore the bigger picture? These are some of the issues explored by Philip Roth in this thought provoking novel. Each of the characters is rich and complex and Roth masterfully weaves their stories together. This is not a light novel, nor is it particularly easy reading. Instead, it's the kind of book that makes you think long after you've finished it. It's hard to talk about the content of this book without giving away the plot, so suffice it to say that this is a worthwhile read for people who aren't looking for a fairy tail with a happy ending.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent read.
Review: Philip Roth is a decidedly delightful author who knows how to engage the reader without distancing his story. This story is about a man who feels, from a very young age, that he will go nowhere and be nothing unless he denies his heritage. Coleman Silk is a Negro, but light skinned enough to pass for white, so he informs his mother and sister and brothers that he is going out into the world as a white man. His mother will never know her grandchildren; his sister and brothers will never know their nieces and nephews. Coleman does at first make a vain attempt to bring home a white girlfriend, and it is a tragic failure. Coleman becomes an esteemed college dean, a brilliant professor of Greek mythology, marries and takes the chances of having children who fortunately for him are born white. When it all begins to go wrong, the irony of Coleman's downfall is a twist you will enjoy and a plot you will not soon forget. Enter Nathan Zuckerman, local author who is befriended by Coleman. From Nathan's viewpoint, we get to know Coleman as no one else does, and Philip Roth has a profound ability to make the reader feel a part of the story. We first meet Coleman Silk when he is seventy-one years old, and is having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman. It's an intriguing start, and the book gets better and better. You will find yourself wrapping yourself around the story like a snug quilt, so plan on some great hours of enjoyment from Philip Roth.
Rating: 
Summary: Desparately Needs Editing
Review: Roth is favorite American author, but every period of success (in this case, Sabbath's Theatre) is followed by two or three books where Roth thinks he can do no wrong, every work is automatically golden. This book is twice as long as it needs to be. Roth just keeps covering the same ground over and over, often with very nearly the same language. The same happened in American Gothic (20 long passages on the wife being a former beauty-queen) and I Married a Communist. Some passages on the same subject are so close you think the printer accidently repeated some previous pages. I love Roth, but he needs an strong editor to tell him when enough is enough.
Rating:
Summary: A truly outstanding literary achievement
Review: Philip Roth's "The Human Stain" is a landmark novel, an outstanding literary achievement and fully deserving of this year's PEN/Faulkner Prize Award. The novel is a clear-eyed and devastating indictment of contemporary American society, one which has lost its moral bearings and belief in decency and truth. As the nation's morals plunge new depths witnessed by the lurid sensationalism surrounding the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, should it surprise anybody that ex-friends and colleagues of Coleman Silk should unquestioningly accept as truth the rumours and accusations - however ridiculous - hurled at him, from charges of racism to sexual debauchery with Faunia, a fallen angel and white trash ? The brutal irony is that Coleman's terrible secret, the bitter denial of his race and ethnicity to free himself from the shackles of prejudice, was finally of no avail in a society which turns a blind eye to justice in deference to cheap sensationalism. His anger, when he recognises the truth, drives him into the arms of Faunia, a damaged woman whose status as outsider and outcast, allows her the freedom to define standards of her own. Likened to a crow, she's a human scavenger and for someone like her, there's no lack of dignity in "cleaning shit", if that's what she does for a living. Faunia sits at the novel's moral centre. She lights up the pages. As a character, she is incandescent and a wondrous creation of fiction. Her scene with the crows is especially memorable. So is Coleman's confrontation scene with his mother. Powerful, devastating and heartbreaking, the pain runs deep. Delphine Roux is a bit of an enigma, a little hysterical perhaps but an interesting character nevertheless. I can't say the same for Lester Farley (Faunia's war deranged husband). He is a cliche. Roth is one of the most accomplished contemporary novelists writing today. "The Human Stain" could be the best he's written to date. One of this year's most enjoyable reads for me. The book comes highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: eternal conflicts presented as poor literature
Review: I keep hoping that Roth would write a better novel. His characters are potentially interesting people and his themes are universal. We don't get a developed picture of the protaginist Coleman, a retired university professor, with an interesting past and many conflicts. He is typically a Roth Characer whose ego has problems dealing with his libido and conscience. He is always angry not able to find any internal integration. This is also true of the other characters who are very two dinensional and always predictible. They incluse his lover, his lawyer, his frustrated female detractor and others. I'm sorry about this as I can remember laughing with Portnoy many years ago. For me Roth is prolific, tells complicated stories but is a middle of the road author.
Rating:
Summary: A Flawed Feast
Review: A FLAWED FEAST, A Critique Of Philip Roth's THE HUMAN STAIN,
by Alice Lee THE HUMAN STAIN completes Philip Roth's trilogy of novels dealing with the social and cultural aspects of post-World War II America. The first two were I MARRIED A COMMUNIST and AMERICAN PASTORAL. In this third novel, Roth has elected to make Bill Clinton's scandalous experience with Monica Lewinsky the fulcrum on which to balance his tale of a respected public figure who gets done in by an early misdeed and his subsequent attempts to cover it up. The exploitation of his weakness by the media and his academic opposition completes the parallel. I suspect Roth's decision to slant his story in this direction was as opportunistic as the press that covered Clinton's impeachment hearings and trial-hounding him and slavering for every bone of information and misinformation that came their way.
Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego narrator, is more tightly integrated into this story than he was in Roth's earlier novel, AMERICAN PASTORAL, where he suddenly seemed to disappear early in the narrative. But AMERICAN PASTORAL seemed to be a truer reflection of its era-the Vietnam War and seething student protests-than THE HUMAN STAIN is of its setting-the nineties, culminating with the impeachment hearings in 1998. AMERICAN PASTORAL was a passionate and evocative portrait of an American family trying to reconcile its immigrant work-ethic values with those of its disaffected, alienated flower children. THE HUMAN STAIN is a personal character-driven story that could've happened any time, any place. The allusions to the human stain that betrayed Clinton seem like a fortuitous ploy to promote Roth's new book.
Both novels, however, probe deeply into the contemporary American psyche. Roth's exposure of anguished parent-child relationships was especially touching, as when the son of Roth's protagonist, Coleman Silk, attends his father's funeral and exclaims about a father for whom he has previously expressed nothing but hostility- "We've lost him!" No lectures, no sermons, just a short line of dialogue, but it has the power to awake echoes of the guilt I felt when I lost my father. Why didn't I tell him I loved him while he was still alive!
As in AMERICAN PASTORAL, Roth presents the reader with a tapestry of fact and conjecture-stories woven in and around characters both major and minor, complex and cameo, and leads us to a climax as tragic as a Shakespearean drama. But though Roth successfully creates the brooding tone of impending disaster, he ignores an obvious damned-if-you-do and damned-if you-don't irony that would've drawn a perfect analogy to Bill Clinton's situation.
Professor Coleman Silk is accused of being a racist because his innocent comment about two black students was completely misconstrued by the administrators of a small Liberal Arts College in New England where he'd formerly been Dean of Faculty. He is further brought down by the jealousy and ambition of a female professor who covets both Silk and his professional reputation. Although Coleman Silk fought the accusation of racism with all the weapons of his orderly, rational and even brilliant mind, he could not overcome the self-serving motives of his accusers. He is outraged and claims that his persecutors not only forced his resignation but caused the untimely death of his loyal and supportive wife, Iris. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to his students and colleagues, as well as his wife and four children, Coleman Silk was a Negro who was passing for white. The only thing that might have saved him was the confession that he, too, was black and therefore would not have had racist motives. That, however, would've revealed that he'd been deceiving his friends, family and the University for years and he'd end up exchanging one catastrophe for another. In the words of Roth's fellow-writer, Joseph Heller, he was in a Catch 22.
Silk finds consolation and redemption of sorts in a relationship with Faunia Farley, a woman half his age who works as a part-time farmhand and janitor. It is in this relationship that he also becomes the victim of a deadly retribution by Faunia's estranged husband. Is this coincidence, or the hand of Fate, punishing him for deceiving his wife and children and abandoning his birth family in his quest to be accepted as white?
Coleman Silk was caught between a rock and a hard place. To be unfairly branded as a racist and deprived of his respected position in the community, or to reveal the fearful secret he'd concealed for years? A Chekhovian dilemma. But though this dilemma was obvious from the beginning, Roth never focuses on it, never alludes to it and never even speculates on the results of such a revelation. Too bad. Maybe he did in an earlier version but decided on a more opportunistic approach. After all, in 1998 the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was a hot topic, THE HUMAN STAIN was an intriguing title, and who'd be interested in a novel about a man who sold his soul so he could pass for white? That's been done before, although, in this case, it's a little different. Although Coleman Silk conceals his racial origins, he takes on the identity of another disadvantaged minority. He passes as a Jew!
Well, what happens to a protagonist who sells his soul? Right! He usually gets short-changed. But this transaction is a fascinating one, especially the way Roth describes it. THE HUMAN STAIN is a brilliant portrait of a flawed human being, but Roth never passes judgment. He wisely leaves that to the reader.
Rating:
Summary: Great novel about human foibles and a good yarn too
Review: "The Human Stain" is a fictional work that includes a detective story, a cultural commentary, several personality portraits, and a darn good yarn too. It's about a college professor who is forced from his position as dean because he is accused of using racial epithets during a class lecture. Isn't that a familiar story at Brown and other school? You can't say a lot about the characters in this story because that would give away the plot. But Roth's novel is an attack on the militancy of college-campus political correctness and the feminists whose Roth character believes are hypocritcal. Further the book is a discussion of the roles that race plays in America and what is means to be raised as a Jew. There's lots of other themes too including man's preoccupation with sex which is, of course, what Roth writes about frequently. The character Faunia refers to the novel's title, the "Humain Stain", when she says "That's what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain." The "he" she is referring to is a crow in the pet show. Faunia likes to talk to crows. She's supposed to be the village idiot in this novel, but she's more comples than that. In the same paragraph Roth mentions another bird, a swan. Writing of the Greek gods, Roth says they are like humans in their cruelty--leaving stains of excrement and semen wherever they go--and their desire for erotic love. He writes "...[Zeus] to enter her bizarrely as a flailing white Swan." This is a direct reference to the poem by William Butler Years "Leda and the Swan" which Roth quotes at length in his novel "Portnoy's Complaint"--whose very title is a psychological term for to the desire for erotica and the angst that causes because of cultural mores. The poem reads in part "How can those terrified vague fingers [Leda] push the feathered glory [the Swan] from her loosening things?". This book is a riveting read, long passages held me for page after page. I could not put it down as Roth takes us inside the mind of Delphine Roux, the French teacher at Athena college who has created so much trouble for Coleman Silk, the main character in the novel. Roth reveals her thoughts as she reflects on her status as a beautiful expatriate intellectual utterly alone in the word. She is miserable because she is despised by the female faculty members who hate her for her good looks and who, consequently, refuse to read her published writings. She hates Coleman because her isn't intimidated by her beauty like so many of the men are. She feels lost as a expatriate: caught between two oceans and not certain to which shore to seek refuge. She's a woman who desperately wants erotic love. But she can't abide the many suitors she has at the school. She goes to the New York Public library--anyone who lives in New York will tell you that the adjacent Bryant Park is a great pick up place--and looks wistfully at her intellectual peers: handsome men reading difficult books in those hallowed halls. If only she could find someone like that at the far flung, mountain-enclosed school where she's surrounded by shallow thinking Philistines masquerading as intellectuals. One fascinating feature of this novel is that it's all written in one voice. There's no effort to reproduce accents like, say, William Faulkner would do. And there's no effort to change the substance of the language from one character to the next. Whether it's the uneducated Faunia speaking or the highly educated Coleman Silks, they all speak with the erudite voice of Philip Roth. I find this technique a good one: why sully the great language in a novel just to sound like one of the locals? That's my complaint with Irvine Welsh who writes in Scottish patois. This novel spoke to me directly in two particular ways. First Roth writes of the death of two children. My own children are alive and O.K. but I felt compelled to rush to them as I read Roth's harrowing account of the two children dying a ghastly death. It was such a page turning horror tale, as good as the only Stephen King I read, and had me so upset by the end that I almost flung the book across the room. I haven't been moved by a book like that in a long time. There should be a preface at that chapter: "not for the faint of heart". Secondly, Roth wrote was speaking to me again, on the subject of living alone in the woods--since that is what I do--with Henry David Thoreau like authority. The narrator of the novel is a writer who has fled the city for the quiet of the woods. (Doesn't Philip Roth live like this too?) Roth says, "The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements...is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence and wealth exponentially increasing....The trick is to find sustenance in [He quotes Nathaniel Hawthorne] 'the communication of a solitary mind with itself''. These words give hope too any person attempting to go it alone away from the noise of the city.
Rating: 
Summary: Good intentions...
Review: Roth had the foundations for a great novel, but somehow, things did not go as planned. He begins The Human Stain in the late nineties with accusations of racism aimed at an aging Professor Silk. But Roth doesn't allow the Professor to be the only scandal ridden character. He also weaves in the background the Clinton impeachment. Yet Roth does little with both of these issues. They are referred to later in the book maybe two or three times. It is as if both plot these ideas were forgotten. Silk's own affair with a woman half his age is somewhat reminiscent of Clinton's affair with Lewinsky, but nothing compelling comes from their relationship. They both essentially use each other for sex. Roth may have sensed that his novel was lagging when major events occur later that don't seem to satisfy any of the character's earlier conflicts. In the midst of missed opportunities, Roth keeps the novel going with very unrealistic dialogue, and occasionally rambling details. While he introduces to us some interesting characters and events based on very interesting people, there is simply little at stake here, and little that will make the reader care about what happens next.
Rating: 
Summary: A Big Disapointment
Review: I was really looking forward to this book, based on the polt description and word of mouth about the author. I couldn't even finish it! After the first 30 pages, I grew tired of plodding through dialog that no real person would ever utter, spoken by characters with whom I wouldn't want to spend five minutes! At times it seemed like the book was just a vehicle for the author to spew his extreme political views, and I did not appreciate the lecturing!
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