false http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166485679m/11734.jpg 11734 26 Athena College was snoozing complacently in the Berkshires until Coleman Silk--formerly "Silky Silk," undefeated welterweight pro boxer--strode in and shook the place awake. This faculty dean sacked the deadwood, made lots of hot new hires, including Yale-spawned literary-theory wunderkind Delphine Roux, and pissed off so many people for so many decades that now, in 1998, they've all turned on him. Silk's character assassination is partly owing to what the novel's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, calls "the Devil of the Little Place--the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the lies." 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 <I>New York Times</I> 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. <I>Self</I>-discovery--<I>that</I> was the punch to the labonz.... Self-knowledge but <I>concealed</I>. 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. <I>--Tim Appelo</I> 1118624 book 2000 The Human Stain total:4984|5:1128|4:1922|3:1395|2:409|1:130| 4984 18461 6805 481 3 4 false false Wed Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Fri Jul 20 08:29:41 -0700 2007 Fri Aug 10 08:48:49 -0700 2007 CARD. you IMP. no one makes me laugh like you.

around this time last year i was on vacation on the cape reading american pastoral, another roth novella of fun and good humor! (read brinda's perfect description for an idea of that one.) i ended up forgetting the book...more...]]> 3 2 false false Wed Apr 16 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Mar 31 19:58:20 -0700 2008 Wed Apr 16 10:36:43 -0700 2008 more...]]> 3 2 false false Sat Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Thu Nov 15 08:57:39 -0800 2007 Thu Nov 15 08:57:54 -0800 2007 more...]]> 4 2 false false Fri Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sun Jun 17 16:19:52 -0700 2007 Tue Jun 19 14:52:35 -0700 2007 1. The amazing language. Philip Roth has such an amazing vocabulary, first off. Every word he uses seems painstakingly chosen and every sentence carefully constructed. Honestly, the writing itself is what kept me interested.
2. The idea of the education...more...]]> 1 4 false false Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Mon Sep 03 15:54:34 -0700 2007 Mon Sep 03 16:11:49 -0700 2007
Let me explain: I just read a very positive review of this book stating that Roth has such an expansive vocabulary, and every word seems painstakingly chosen, etc. That is exactly what I hate about this book! A n...more...]]> 2 2 false false Sun Apr 01 00:00:00 -0800 1956 Thu Oct 25 19:20:16 -0700 2007 Mon Jul 07 17:43:51 -0700 2008
Your banal prose and elementary gimmicks do nothing to endear yourself to me, sir. If, in the future, a thought flies into your head and you would like to put it down on paper, I would first suggest that you hide or burn every John Updike novel you've been petting to sleep each...more...]]> 3 1 false false Fri Dec 12 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sun Nov 09 22:15:14 -0800 2008 Fri Dec 12 22:04:38 -0800 2008 more...]]> 0 5 false false Mon Oct 06 15:53:24 -0700 2008 Fri Nov 13 13:59:58 -0800 2009 more...]]> 3 1 false false Tue Jul 15 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue Jul 15 09:37:29 -0700 2008 Tue Jul 15 10:21:07 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 1 false false Thu Nov 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Mon Oct 29 18:27:16 -0700 2007 Mon Nov 12 19:06:54 -0800 2007 more...]]> 4 1 false false Tue Jul 24 11:35:27 -0700 2007 Tue Sep 25 22:05:00 -0700 2007
The thing that attracts me about this novel is quite simply how it is told. The narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, is also a character (albeit a relatively minor one although he grows in importance as the story continues). He is not, therefore, omniscient, although this becom...more...]]> 5 1 false false Thu Mar 20 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Jun 03 08:43:21 -0700 2007 Thu Mar 20 14:29:08 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 1 false false Sat Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2006 Thu Dec 27 09:27:09 -0800 2007 Thu Dec 27 09:34:49 -0800 2007 more...]]> 1 1 false false Sun Nov 04 14:16:24 -0800 2007 Sun Dec 30 08:57:11 -0800 2007 more...]]> 4 1 false false Thu Aug 02 16:41:07 -0700 2007 Thu Aug 02 16:53:55 -0700 2007 more...]]> 5 1 false false Thu Apr 09 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Mon Mar 09 07:32:55 -0700 2009 Thu Apr 09 21:01:34 -0700 2009 more...]]> 2 0 false false Mon Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Wed Dec 31 18:10:54 -0800 2008 Wed Dec 31 18:22:06 -0800 2008
We start out thinking this is a book about the relationships and secrets of...more...]]> 5 0 false false Sat Dec 06 11:11:47 -0800 2008 Sat Dec 06 11:11:55 -0800 2008 more...]]> 3 0 false false Wed Nov 18 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Wed Nov 18 18:37:04 -0800 2009 Wed Nov 18 18:51:29 -0800 2009 Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It's in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark. Without the sign it is there. The stain so intrinsic it doesn't require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that ...more...]]> 2 0 false false Wed Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2004 Fri Aug 21 09:02:42 -0700 2009 Fri Aug 21 09:02:42 -0700 2009
"As the audience filed back in, I began,...more...]]> http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=11734