THE HUMAN STAIN

Philip Roth

Narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist visiting the Berkshires who befriends the main protagonist, Coleman "Silky" Silk, The Human Stain is the story of the unraveling of the life of a iconoclastic college professor at the hands of small minded PC liberals. As the faculty dean of Athena College, Coleman hired young, fresh blood, like Delphine Roux, and alienated most of those he brought in with his obstinate personal philosophies, until in 1998, they turn on him and exploit an idiom to expel him from his true life's work. When two students fail to show up to class Silk asks, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" Later it is discovered that the students, whom Silk has never seen, are black, and they use the word 'spook' to file a fraudulent racism case against the professor and the university. Silk rails against the insufferable injustice of his expulsion and even blames the passing of his wife on the shame the university has laid upon his name.

When Silk turns 71 he discovers Viagra, and an illiterate college janitor named Faunia Farley who is half his age, igniting a passionate affair that is eventually exposed by the jealous and scorned Delphine Roux. " I'm back in the tornado," Silk decries.

Interspersed through the diaper wearing Zuckerman's narration are the details of Silk's abandoned and covered up New Jersey upbringing as a feather-weight boxer and pride and joy of a father who died early due to health complications. It seems that, much like the love interest in Francis Ford Coppola's Cotton Club, Silk has been disguising the fact that he is black, hence his sense of outrage and indignation for being removed from his post for racial comments.

Silk's affair with Fauna eventually is his undoing as her ex-husband is a mentally deranged Vietnam Vet, who refuses to allow her to go on with her life after the accidental death of their children. Roth is at his all time best here, delicately sketching these characters from minute details that convey impressive depths of emotion.

If you like to read you should buy this book. If you have a hard time with text and idea's and you thought that English Lit was a huge chore in college, you should skip this book and go straight for David Lee Roth's autobiography.