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But shocking, intensely dramatized events precipitate Silk's crisis. He remarks of two students who never showed up for class, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" They turn out to be black, and lodge a bogus charge of racism exploited by his enemies. Then, at 71, Viagra catapults Silk into "the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication," and he ignites an affair with an illiterate janitor, Faunia Farley, 34. She's got a sharp sensibility, "the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble," and a melancholy voluptuousness. "I'm back in the tornado," Silk exults. His campus persecutors burn him for it--and his main betrayer is Delphine Roux.
In a short space, it's tough to convey the gale-force quality of Silk's rants, or the odd effect of Zuckerman's narration, alternately retrospective and torrentially in the moment. The flashbacks to Silk's youth in New Jersey are just as important as his turbulent forced retirement, because it turns out that for his entire adult life, Silk has been covering up the fact that he is a black man. (If this seems implausible, consider that the famous New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard did the same thing.) Young Silk rejects both the racism that bars him from Woolworth's counter and the Negro solidarity of Howard University. "Neither the they of Woolworth's nor the we of Howard" is for Coleman Silk. "Instead the raw I with all its agility. Self-discovery--that was the punch to the labonz.... Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?"
Silk's contradictions power a great Philip Roth novel, but he's not the only character who packs a punch. Faunia, brutally abused by her Vietnam vet husband (a sketchy guy who seems to have wandered in from a lesser Russell Banks novel), scarred by the death of her kids, is one of Roth's best female characters ever. The self-serving Delphine Roux is intriguingly (and convincingly) nutty, and any number of minor characters pop in, mouth off, kick ass, and vanish, leaving a vivid sense of human passion and perversity behind. You might call it a stain. --Tim Appelo
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Reissued in electric new backlist style, The Human Stain is one of Philip Roth's bestselling novels and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction'An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand'- Sunday TelegraphPhilip Roth's brilliant conclusion to his eloquent trilogy of post-war America - a magnificent successor to American Pastoral and I Married a CommunistIt 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.________________PRAISE FOR THE HUMAN STAIN-'One of the most beautiful books I've ever read' Red' A tender, shocking and incendiary story on the failure of the American dream refracted through the prism of race' Guardian'A masterpiece' Mail on Sunday 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, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780099282198
Book Description paperback. Condition: New. Language: ENG. Seller Inventory # 9780099282198
Book Description Condition: New. pp. 384. Seller Inventory # 5589841
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: Brand New. 384 pages. 7.76x5.08x0.94 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # __0099282194
Book Description Condition: New. 2001. 01st Edition. Paperback. Set in 1998, with the backdrop of the impeachment of a president, this book shows us an America where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions result in public denunciations and houndings, and where innocence is not always a good enough excuse. Num Pages: 384 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (U) Tertiary Education (US: College). Dimension: 198 x 130 x 25. Weight in Grams: 280. . . . . . Seller Inventory # V9780099282198
Book Description Paperback / softback. Condition: New. New copy - Usually dispatched within 4 working days. 'The work of a genius at full throttle' Sunday TelegraphIt 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. Seller Inventory # B9780099282198