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Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed

The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

2000

Novel

The final volume of Roth's trilogy about postwar United States tells the story of how fatal sanctimony destroys a professor who had attempted to reinvent himself

The final volume in Philip Roth's trilogy, The Human Stain, links the tale of one man's fall from grace to the orgy of sanctimony in which the nation indulged itself during the year that a president of the United States was being denounced and impeached for his human stains. It was, writes Roth, “the summer of an enormous piety binge” that claimed Coleman Silk, along with Bill Clinton, as victims.

Narrator Nathan Zuckerman, the fictional novelist who appears in Roth's novels as early as 1974, undertakes to understand another man he has admired—this time, Coleman Silk in The Human Stain. “For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out,” Zuckerman insists, “there really is no bottom to what is not known.” Like the previous two volumes in the trilogy, The Human Stain is a character study that proceeds from the Gnostic premise that the full complexity of character can never be fathomed.

Silk is a dynamic, urbane dean and professor of classics at Athena College, a small, insular institution in the bucolic Berkshires. Silk's illustrious career comes undone six weeks into the semester, when he inquires about two students who have never attended class. “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?” asks Silk, and the flippant question proves fatal. Though he is merely referring to the missing persons as phantoms, the word “spooks” is construed by political zealots as an abusive epithet, and the professor is accused of racism. In an atmosphere of ideological intimidation, no one dares rise to Silk's defense, and, appalled by the preposterous charge, he resigns in disgust.

Silk blames the vicious crusade against him for the sudden death of his wife, Iris. When he then takes up with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman, local gossip proliferates. One of the first important discoveries that Zuckerman makes about Silk is that the light-skinned professor is himself really African American, that he has for more than fifty years been passing as white—in fact, as Jewish. It is Silk who is the spook, a ghost of his true, black self. Silk's ethnic imposture has been so successful that not even his four grown children suspect their father's origins in a hard-working African American family in East Orange, New Jersey.

Silk fashions himself an expert on Greek literature, though he proves powerless to avert his own tragic fall. Silk's flaw is the unwarranted confidence that anyone can understand and control his or her own life. The curious directions that Silk's life took lead Zuckerman to ponder the Sophoclean enigmas of destiny and chance: “how accidentally a fate is made… or how accidental it all may seem when it is inescapable.” Silk's life converges and collides with others who also believe in self-begetting. Faunia Farley, for example, flees an abused childhood into an abusive marriage and abandons that to become a menial laborer in Athena. Like her older lover, Silk, she, too, conceals secrets, redesigning herself as an eccentric, illiterate drudge.

The entire story is told by Zuckerman, who gathers his (incomplete) information from several sources. From time to time, Zuckerman becomes so absorbed in spinning Silk that the author's voice fades and what he imagines as the thoughts of others take over. Ultimately, readers are left with the tarnished image from which Roth's elegiac novel derives its name. The Human Stain is a sad, imperfect record of the insane urge to purify, by both Silk and his antagonists.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Roth, Philip. "The Human Stain." Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed, edited by Editors of Salem Press, Salem Press, 2015. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=6CR_0246.
APA 7th
Roth, P. (2015). The Human Stain. In E. Salem Press (Ed.), Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Roth, Philip. "The Human Stain." Edited by Editors of Salem Press. Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2015. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.