Human Stain, The by Philip Roth

Identity, point of view, and the American Dream are not often seen
as interlocking, or even interrelated, themes these days. In a
fragmented, deconstructed, and multicultural universe, even the notion
of social fluidity and individual change is suspect, potentially a
reactionary trick, we are told. The American Dream itself, if addressed
at all, is typically dismissed as hollow materialism, hardly worth more
than a passing snide remark or two. The truth, of course, is something
else. It usually is.

In The Human Stain, Philip Roth takes on these themes in an
entertaining, convincing, and erudite manner. This is a courageous and
ambitious undertaking. In the hands of a less-skilled writer, or one
with a large axe to grind, the whole construct would collapse under the
weight of its own incomprehensibility or come off as laughably trite
and artificial. Not to worry. Roth is at the top of his game here and
succeeds magnificently in creating a richly detailed and complex story
flowing effortlessly to its conclusion. In short, this is at once a fun
read and a serious cultural commentary about America at the end of the
20th Century.

The story begins as a third person narrative told by Dr. Zuckerman, a
novelist living in rural New England, not far from fictional Athena
University. Zuckerman is telling the story of his neighbour Coleman
Silk, a retired Classics professor from Athena, who, we learn later,
has recently died. He wants to set the record straight and tell the
truth about Silk, a truth which only he knows in full. Silk is not a
criminal, but he does have a secret. We learn that Professor Silk, who
has lived his entire adult life, including a stint in the Navy during
WWII and several decades as a professor and administrator at Athena, as
a non-religious Jew, is, in fact, a Negro.

In 1998, the year in which this novel takes place, with the
Clinton-Lewinsky scandal as background, such a deception probably
sounds preposterous, even self-defeating. Coleman Silk was the
valedictorian of his high school graduating class in Newark, New
Jersey. Today, as Roth correctly notes, such a person would receive
special privileges by virtue of being black, but that was not the case
in the 1930's and 1940's. When Coleman enlisted in the Navy during
WWII, he simply declared himself to be Caucasian and maintained the
deception to his death. Having grown up in a largely Jewish
neighbourhood, passing for a non-religious Jew was the easy part. He
walked away from his parents and siblings, obtained a degree in
Classical literature and a teaching position at Athena. He married a
non-religious Jewish woman and fathered four children with her. None of
them knew. Deceptions if this kind were not uncommon prior to the
1960's, at least not among those who could carry it off. The question
"Can you pass?" did not refer to a maths exam. It meant, "Can you (a
Negro) pass yourself off as white?"

Ironically, Silk resigns and takes early retirement from Athena in 1998
because he is accused of racism for a misinterpreted and innocent
remark he made in class. His primary inquisitor is Delphine Roux, a
young French woman, literature professor and now department head, whom
Silk had hired several years previously. Silk's wife dies during the
scandal. He then spends months writing a long defence of himself and
asks Zuckerman to finish the book for him. Zuckerman declines at the
time, advising Silk to forget it and get on with his life, which he
does.

Silk then takes up with Faunia, an attractive thirty-something
Caucasian janitor at the college. She also has a secret: everyone
believes she is illiterate, when in fact she is not. She uses this
deception to keep her life simple, at least as she sees it. She comes
from a deprived and violent family background which includes a
psychotic ex-husband who is also a Viet Nam veteran. Silk's
relationship with Faunia ultimately leads to their deaths.

In this story, everyone has a secret. Everyone is trying to be
something they are not, or at least something they were not. Coleman
Silk is the prime, and by today's standards, extreme example. Yet the
word "pretend" may well not be relevant in this context. Roth is not
that simplistic. He asks the reader to consider whether Silk is simply
a headstrong individual out to con the system or just another American
following the American Dream. Forget about the house in the suburbs,
the white picket fence, the 1.74 children and two cars in the garage.
That is a caricature from the 1950's. The essence of the American Dream
is the ability and opportunity to change, to become something new,
something and someone of your own choosing, though not without a price.
There is always a price.

Roth addresses the issue this way:

"Did he get, from his decision, the adventure he was after, or was the
decision in itself, the adventure? Was it the misleading that provided
his pleasure, the carrying off of the stunt that he liked best, the
travelling through life incognito, or had he simply been closing the
door to a past, to people, to a whole race that he wanted nothing
intimate or official to do with? 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 less?"

Coleman Silk can jump on his horse and ride off into the sunset to make
a new life for himself somewhere else, but that does not mean he can
escape unscathed. As Roth describes it: " The we that is inescapable:
the present moment, the common lot, the current mood, the mind of one's
country, the stranglehold of history that is one's own time. Blindsided
by the terrifyingly provisional nature of everything."

In the end, Faunia's ex-husband, Les Farley, kills her and Coleman by
running them off the road in what the police conclude is a simple
automobile accident. Since there was no collision with Les' truck, and
thus no physical evidence, they do not pursue Zuckerman's assertion
that this was no accident. In the final scene, Zuckerman finds Les ice
fishing alone on a lake and engages him in conversation. It becomes
clear that Les is aware of Zuckerman's agenda and, in effect, warns him
off, brandishing his ice-auger with the gleaming 5-inch blades.
Zuckerman leaves, determined to write the whole story, which of course
we have been reading all along, knowing that he will have to move far
away to avoid Les' revenge. As he walks away from Les and back to his
car, Zuckerman gives us Roth's summary of the story:

"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. I could feel the
terror of the auger-even with him already seated back on his bucket:
the icy white of the lake encircling a tiny spot that was a man, the
only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate's
signature on a sheet of paper. There it was, if not the whole story,
the whole picture. Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life
offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a lake that's
constantly turning over its water atop an Arcadian mountain in
America."

Roth invites us to take this imagery for what we will. The Human Stain
is a story first about identity. In it the key characters take on, or
aspire to, new identities and invest enormous enterprise in carrying
out their plans. It is also story about point of view, characterizing
identity as being both the cause and result of point of view. To
emphasize the point in a nearly physical way, the author changes the
narrative point of view from third person to first person and back,
often within the same paragraph, thus echoing the distinction between
internal and external identity. Roth's execution of this device is so
skilful it is virtually unnoticeable at the time of reading. The Human
Stain is finally a story about the American Dream in a contemporary
context, a societal phenomenon of great promise and great cost, a
phenomenon so powerful and inclusive that, if you are like me, you can
opt for the logical endgame and choose to fulfil it by abandoning the
nation which gave it birth. The frontier is where you find it.

Note: The Human Stain is Philip Roth's most recent novel. He is
probably best know for his humorous novels Portnoy's Complaint and
Goodbye Columbus, the latter of which was made into a movie in the
1970s. Vintage Press publishes The Human Stain in the U.K.