The Human Stain
The Human Stain is the third in Philip Roth's American Trilogy, but it can be read on its own. When Classics professor Coleman Silk is accused of racism by students at the small liberal arts college where he teaches, he is forced to retire--though the charge is false. Silk has kept a secret for 50 years, and fighting would mean revealing it and reckoning with that history. Roth weaves a masterful story that manages to address questions of language, race, identity, feminism, and power dynamics.
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Philip Roth’s brilliant conclusion to his eloquent trilogy of post-war America – a magnificent successor to American Pastoral and I Married a Communist It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town a distinguished classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser.
Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who comes upon Silk’s secret, and sets out to unearth his former buried life, piecing the biographical fragments back together. This is against backdrop of seismic shifts in American history, which take on real, human urgency as Zuckerman discovers more and more about Silk’s past and his futile search for renewal and regeneration. `An extraordinary book – bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand’- Sunday Telegraph