[In the following review, Bachman views The Human Stain as a compelling reflection of culture, politics, and society in America in the late 1990s.]

In his quest for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Philip Roth may now be able to claim that he is not only a great writer—he's a prophet to boot. In the opening chapter of his recent novel, The Human Stain, Roth casts vice-presidential candidate Senator Joseph Lieberman as the righteous protector of American values and sexual ethics in the midst of the President Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal of 1998.

Not much was made of Lieberman's cameo in the novel when it appeared earlier this past summer, most certainly because Vice President Gore had yet to pick him as his running mate—a move most observers have applauded as a brilliant strategy for helping Gore distance himself from President Clinton in the fall campaign for the White House. Lieberman's voice was used by Roth as an example of an almost Puritan, sanctimonious condemnation for a private sexual indiscretion that was really only the business of the President and his family (and of course, Ms. Lewinsky). Early in the book Roth sets an unmistakable tone: my prostate may be gone, but I'm still going to give it to people, real good. Like the phantom shake of Elvis Presley's censored hips and his mischievous smile on television broadcasts in the 1950s, Roth makes the most of his newly limited state.

The Human Stain chronicles the life of Coleman Silk, as told to recovering cancer patient Nathan Zuckerman. Holed up in his country home, freed from the shackles of male potency and left alone to write in blessed solitude, Zuckerman comes to learn of the incredible and nearly implausible turn of events that is the life of Professor Coleman Silk. Silk is a Jewish Classics instructor at the fictional Athena College. Neatly tucked away in the pristine surroundings of the Berkshires, Athena is, like many liberal arts colleges in the Nineties, yet another stage upon which the fight over political correctness is being played out as a tragic drama. Upon this stage, Silk ambles into a lecture hail and asks about two absent students, “Do they exist or are they spooks?” Though clearly referring to their ghostly absence and not to their skin color, Silk is tried and forced to resign his position in a PC witch hunt that brands him an insensitive racist. While he is on trial, his wife dies of a stroke and Silk begins a torrid love affair with a campus janitor, a woman younger than Silk by nearly thirty years. The fallen professor is now further tainted by his association with Berkshire “white trash.” In his effort to set the record straight and tell his side of the story, Coleman Silk enlists Zuckerman as his ghostwriter. And we, Roth's lucky readers, are off to the races.

What a race it is. Zuckerman, the Newark native, learns that Silk in fact is not Jewish but black. In a surprising but profound twist of literary fate for this chronicler of American Jewish identity, Roth turns the tables on identity politics and recreates Silk's life in lower middle-class black Newark. Rather than using his pen to sketch out the bargains made and the consequences wrought for a generation of American Jews' attempts to assimilate and succeed in their quest for acceptance, Roth places Jewishness in the background and brings race and skin color to the fore.

By virtue of The Human Stain's setting in the charged, politically correct world of the Nineties college campus, and its humorous and biting references to the Clinton impeachment trial, reviewers have been quick to categorize the book as the closing statement of an imagined Roth trilogy about the past American half-century. In less than a decade, Roth has crafted American Pastoral, set to the chaotic rhythms and protests of the Sixties; I Married a Communist, the story of another teacher run from his position in the Cold War heat of the McCarthy era; and The Human Stain.

Roth has much to say about these eras. In American Pastoral, Roth dissects the pained assimilationist impulse of one Swede Levov, the jock-hero of Zuckerman's Newark high school, who does everything right only to find that the turbulence of the times and the dissonance of suburban values are not quite ready and willing to accept this heroic, well-behaved Jew. (Historians from the late venerated George L. Mosse to the younger generation of cultural historians like Steve Zipperstein and Michael Berkowitz have all referenced Roth in their work as the literary example for these tensions among assimilating American Jewry.) The clouded atmosphere of this protest-laden time is mere backdrop for Roth's deeper exploration of Jewish identity at the critical juncture when Jews are moving into the suburbs and assimilating into the life and times of America at a speedy rate. In American Pastoral, the title belies the tumult depicted in its pages while also playing with the idea that as Jews find greater success in the American socio-economic scale, it often comes at a risk to their very identity.

While I Married a Communist riffs on the Fifties, McCarthyism, and, as some would have it, Roth's relationship with Claire Bloom, The Human Stain shifts to the Nineties and chronicles not Jewish fate so much as identity in general and the competing orthodoxies of political correctness and meritocracy on the American college campus.

If American Pastoral and I Married a Communist were not particularly funny novels, The Human Stain has the distinct advantage of being both serious and hilarious. Not only has Roth come up with an outlandish way of exposing a certain hypocrisy in the movement for political correctness, he has found a way to turn all expectations topsy-turvy that is reminiscent not only of the descriptive power of Henry James but the dadaist and satirical bite of the Marx Brothers. If this doesn't seal the deal for Roth's bid for the Nobel Prize, what will?

But there are spooks in the house that Roth built. Just beneath the surface of The Human Stain is our own awareness of Roth's battle with prostate cancer—and this reality is given voice in the book by Zuckerman suffering a similar fate. Rather than representing a merely political take on the past American half-century, Roth makes a different case altogether and is perhaps making sense of his own sexual fate as the American Jewish novelist much maligned for putting male Jewish eros, sexuality, and masturbation on the radar screen of American Jewish literature. Looking back on the last fifty years of his own writing, this book, the first written without a prostate, gives us a Roth with the same incisive wit but more comfortable in his solitary, de-sexualized aloneness.

When religious figures dare to go into the solitude of the wilderness, they encounter visions of prophecy and clairvoyance to share with the world. So much of Roth's work has evoked not the quiet and the contemplative, but the cacophony of community: the particularistic Jewish middle-class home in the last gasps of its ethnic enclave of Newark, New Jersey; the pressures beneath the quest for assimilation and acceptance; the tumult of sexual identity and the lure of the shiksa; and the challenge and defiance of Zionism's New Jewish Male. All have been present in some form or another in nearly all of Roth's work over much of his career. But in The Human Stain, he universalizes the particular, by exploring Jewish otherness through the character of a black man. The moral of the story, the meaning behind the title of the book, is precisely this: that the inexorable stain of humanness means we can never escape the essential, the elemental aspects of our deeper, darker, inner selves. As Roth describes it, no matter how much you think you know a person, you never really do. This was true for Coleman Silk, a black man posing as a Jew, even to his entire family; it was true for Faunia Farley, white, working-class janitorial help at Athena College; and it is true for you and me. By including the very public troubles of President Clinton in the plot of The Human Stain, Roth is telling us that it's true for the president as well.

In fact, while the president only appears in a few brief passages, his presence haunts much of the book. Clinton's public battle with his eros, his shameful behavior in the eyes of some (like Senator Lieberman) or his utter humiliation to others, leaves no alternative but explains, on a deeper level, why Roth makes not just a passing reference to the affair but rather uses it to punctuate a series of grander statements about the peculiar American expectation for sexual purity and chastity in our leadership.

Eros has doggedly trailed Roth throughout his career. Try bringing him up to a younger generation of readers. They will know little of his profound insights into American Jewish identity, of hard-working and broken Jewish fathers, of unrelenting Jewish mothers, of the exigencies in the climb toward academic and professional success, of the sacred and profane connections to the Jewish enterprise in the Land of Israel. But what they can tell you is that some character or another in one of his books masturbated into a piece of meat. (Last summer's wildly successful teenage movie hit, “American Pie,” borrowed proudly from this episode.)

But without a prostate and evidently comfortable with his body now in this form, Roth delights in finally having his audience exactly where he wants them, as if to say, “Now that the sex is toned down, maybe you can really listen to what I have to say.” Let's say for a minute that the sequence of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain did not comprise a trilogy. Instead, let's imagine that the conversation with his readers which culminates in The Human Stain actually began with Sabbath's Theater, much acclaimed for its imaginative and dark exploration of a man coming to terms with death. But what do people insist on remembering first? Mickey Sabbath, the perverted old puppeteer, masturbating on his former lover's grave. It is here, I suspect, in the face of death (Sabbath's Theater, written in 1995, is dedicated to two recently deceased friends) that Roth sets out to explore his life in a way he never has before. To move in one's life work from masturbating into a fresh piece of meat in Portnoy's Complaint to a graveside release in Sabbath's Theater is more than a macabre statement on the state of one's sexuality. Like the kabbalistic mystics who found God in the spiritual annihilation of the self, Roth begins a particular meditation on death, impotence, and the existential self not in the form of a trilogy, but in the perfect, four-based diamond of the “great American novel.” He does so in order to lay bare his soul at the twilight of his life and to poke a few more holes in the idea of American sanctimony at the dawn of a new century. Leave it to a Jew to shed a little darkness on the apocalyptic impulse for light in the new millennium. The taste of death can sometimes do that to a man.

The purely comic artist of caricature has exited the stage and in his place is an older man, no longer motivated by the demons of provocation but still amused by the propensity of his readers and critics to see him in that way. It is perfectly appropriate that Sabbath (Roth not going quietly into the dark night of rest) is a puppeteer, manipulating characters from behind the scenes, no longer in need of being front and center, as he was in so many of his past literary excursions.

With American Pastoral, then, we barely encounter Roth's literary alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman. Instead, there is Swede Levov, the chief stud in Zuckerman's high school class, the Jew most likely to pass, who, in his encounter with the confidante Zuckerman, reveals a series of deep, dark secrets about his not-so-perfect life. There is, it seems, as in Sabbath's Theater, a reckoning with sexuality. For Sabbath, it was finding the very edge of sexual expression, for meeting his match in his lover Drenka. In American Pastoral, Swede Levov is imagined by Zuckerman to have caused his daughter's descent into terrorism and madness by accepting a kiss from her one day on an innocent drive—a kiss that would haunt Levov as either entirely innocent or terribly incestuous. As has always been the case in his astonishing career, Roth is less concerned with politics than he is with people and their motivations for engaging the politics of life and death, love and sex.

And this is precisely why President Clinton appears as one of the “spooks” in The Human Stain. The critic Greil Marcus, writing on Clinton, reminds fans of the 1992 Clinton campaign, when the Arkansas governor behind in the polls, decided to throw discretion to the wind and embrace the perception that he was nothing but poor white trash who had made it to Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale on sheer determination, hard work, connections, and, of course, charm. He did not, asserted finer observers, belong. This tension in American life—between those born with privilege and those challenged to break down the harriers of success, is another symbol of the past American century—and is well understood by blacks, Jews and, as Clinton demonstrates, poor whites. We would be missing an exceedingly interesting point about Roth's latest book to ignore the possibility of this idea, this stain of otherness, in the American skin; feigning Jewishness, oddly enough, allowed Silk, in the recreation of his outer self, to maintain a shred of connection to some kind of ethnic attachment, to something deeper than plain old whiteness.

But even Clinton is a derivation, a variation on a pop culture trope. In the din of America's search for meaning at the end of the millennium, it should not surprise us that Roth has sailed hack in time in search of a different kind of savior. From Nathan Zuckerman's solitary perch in a Berkshires cabin to Coleman Silk's reconstructed blackness, with the angry punctuation of Roth's running commentary on the hypocrisy of making sex in the White House a crime, we are left with the biggest surprise of all in any Philip Roth novel—Elvis. Mere mention of the name raises an image, an icon in American cultural discourse that sends the mind reeling. As a recently published series of essays by Marcus ably demonstrates, Elvis Presley conjures for American fans of popular music and culture the conflict between unlimited horizons for possibility and the staunch barriers of good taste. In Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives, Marcus writes that around Elvis is an aura of irreducible glamour and desire, an American mirror, a mirror that gives back horror and grace, success and failure, pride and shame.” And as Marcus shows, Clinton employed the Elvis myth to considerable advantage in his own two successive runs for the White House.

Though never referred to outright, Elvis is another spook floating beneath the surface in The Human Stain, precisely because for the first time in decades, Roth has decided not to put male Jewish eros front and center in his critique of contemporary American life. But the image that Roth deploys, written in post-cancer clarity, is veiled and truncated. Remember: even Ed Sullivan, who created some controversy by suggesting that “Negroes” appear on his musical program and who knew that Elvis represented not only a crossover act but enjoyed great support and popularity in the black community, ordered his cameramen to show Elvis from the waist up.

Roth understands that Clinton has articulated something throughout the presidency that has been known since that fateful night in 1992, when he donned sunglasses and appeared on Arsenio Hall to blow his saxophone, playing Elvis Presley's “Heartbreak Hotel.” From that night forth, through the stage lights of MTV and the organ groans of the black church, Clinton embraced his poor-boy roots and wound his fate as a man from Hope, Arkansas with that of a man from Tupelo, Mississippi. Even Nobel laureate Toni Morrison jumped into the fray in 1998, declaring in a New Yorker article that one of the subtexts to the viciousness of the impeachment campaign against the president was that, to many, he was America' first black president—a caricature of an over-sexed charmer who loves his women, his church, and his morning jog interrupted with a stop at McDonald's. Of course, beneath Morrison's caricature is great admiration for the president's ability to connect deeply and personally to American blacks in their shared language of the church—a concept Clinton has readily embraced in his recent appearances before the Congressional Black Caucus.

No matter who climbs the podium to take the oath of office in January when Clinton steps down, the country will bid farewell (fond or otherwise) to a president who presided over the last decade of this American century bringing more change in the area of race and ethnic ascendancy than perhaps any other in our nation's history. Like a prophet for contemporary times, Roth is obviously amused by the idea that if it were the Fifties all over again, he'd be forced to break down the barriers of sexual repression with his transgressive and comedic portrayals of angsty Jewish maleness. As it is, wiser and less sexually potent, he employs the spook of Elvis to show America, stains and all, from the waist down.