The Human Stain (Paperback, New Ed)

The theme of this disturbing and gripping novel is the stuff of Greek tragedy - how capricious human fate is, or can seem when that fate is unavoidable. Coleman Silk, a classics professor at a New England university, clears out the dead wood in his department with a hubristic disregard for diplomacy and tact; his nemesis, Professor Delphine Roux, seizes her chance to strike when an ambiguous phrase used by Silk can be interpreted to daub him as a racist; the witch-hunt that follows costs him his job and, he believes, provokes the death of his wife. Silk further defies the gods of political correctness through an affair with an illiterate office cleaner more than half his age. The plot pivots on Silk's darkest secret, which cannot be revealed here; suffice to say that a decision made in youth will plant the seed of an old man's destruction. And whom the gods wish to destroy, they first drive mad. Silk's story, narrated by Roth's fictional hero Nathan Zuckerman, unfolds against the impeachment of President Clinton in 1998 and there is no doubt that Roth sees both the president and the professor as flawed men, as all men are, brought down by malevolent forces. An angry and eloquent indictment of modern America. (Kirkus UK)

It is 1988, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, it is the last year of the life of the forcibly retired, disgraced, widowed professor Coleman Silk, whose own tragic exposure is played out against the background of the Clinton revelations. Coleman's secret has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out - after Coleman's suspicious death in a car crash with his mistress - to understand how his eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, had fabricated his identity and how that cannily controlled life came unravelled.

Set in 1990s America where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciation and rituals of purification, THE HUMAN STAIN concludes Philip Roth's eloquent trilogy of post-war American lives that are as tragically determined by the nation's fate as by the 'human stain' that so ineradicably marks human nature.

General

Imprint:	Vintage
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	April 2001
First published:	December 2001
Authors:	Philip Roth
Dimensions:	198 x 130 x 23mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - B-format
Pages:	361
Edition:	New Ed
ISBN-13:	978-0-09-928219-8
Categories:	Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction
LSN:	0-09-928219-4
Barcode:	9780099282198

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