[In the following excerpt, Allen praises Roth's depiction of Coleman Silk in The Human Stain, viewing him as a “powerfully imagined and deeply appealing character.”]

That at the age of 68, and with 25 books behind him, Philip Roth still has so much to say and still says it as well as he does in his new novel, The Human Stain, is astonishing. Indeed, it might appear something of a miracle, except that Saul Bellow, who is 84, has just issued Ravelstein, his most engaging work in years. Both books are tales of old age set in an academic milieu; both feature, to a greater or lesser extent, characters based on recently deceased intellectual stars.

Roth is clearly enjoying himself. The Human Stain is as fresh, as angry and as bitterly amused as his early fiction. It vibrates with mockery, disapproval, poetry, and a healthy dose of personal vindictiveness that one would be tempted to dismiss as unworthy if it weren't so funny. The novel completes a trilogy that began with American Pastoral and continued with I Married a Communist. Taken as a group, the three volumes provide a rough picture of American social and political history during the course of Roth's adult life. Each describes a moment of national hysteria. I Married a Communist takes on the McCarthyism of the early '50s, American Pastoral the radicalism 15 years later. The Human Stain is set against the background of the outrage and titillation that spread across the country in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

It is mid-1998, “in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism—which had replaced Communism as the prevailing threat to the country's security—was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-age President and a brash, smitten 21-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America's oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony.”

What place in America is more sanctimonious these days than a college campus? Roth sets his novel at a smallish liberal arts institution called Athena (think Amherst or Skidmore), situated in a picturesque town near Nathan Zuckerman's place of self-imposed exile in the Berkshires. It is a spot, comments Zuckerman, Roth's longtime literary alter ego, about “as harmless and pretty as any on earth.” It is not without its own share of pertinent cultural baggage, though, as the region once “most identified … with the American individualist's resistance to the coercions of a censorious community—Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau come to mind.”

The Human Stain is the tale of another determined individualist who finds himself up against the tyranny of decorum. Roth's protagonist is Zuckerman's neighbor Coleman Silk, a 71-year-old classicist, longtime Athena professor and, in the last 16 years of his career, its high-powered dean of faculty. During that time Coleman cut a formidable figure on campus, both respected and feared; he had made it his business to drag the college into the contemporary world by ruthlessly hacking out the dead wood, hiring Young Turks from Yale and Princeton, and turning Athena into one of the country's more prestigious institutions.

His initial downfall occurs when, taking attendance in one of his classes, he asks about two students who have never shown up. “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?” The absent students, it turns out, are black, and Coleman's use of the word “spooks” is taken as a racist slur. With cruel dispatch, he is hounded out of his job in a crusade spearheaded by the very element—the young, the hip and the radical—he had been responsible for bringing to Athena.

The irony is that Coleman Silk, unbeknown to anyone including his wife and children, is himself black. (The Human Stain is, in part, an imagined life of the late Anatole Broyard.) He presents himself as a Jew, and is a professor of the whitest subject in the curriculum on the whitest campus in America, but he was born into a black family in East Orange, New Jersey.

Through the narrating voice of Nathan Zuckerman (as unsatisfactory a device as it was in Roth's two previous novels, for how can Zuckerman know all he claims?) we are shown, in a long flashback, Silk's former existence. Even as a child his brilliance was evident. To his mother, “her younger son was wrapped like a gift in every ameliorating dream.” This was an ambitious, highly educated family, and Coleman received all of its advantages and suffered all of its expectations. After he graduated as class valedictorian, it was planned that he would go on to Howard “to become a doctor, to meet a light-skinned girl there from a good Negro family, to marry and settle down and have children who would in turn go to Howard.”

Coleman, however, hated the university and all it stood for. “At Howard he'd discovered that he wasn't just a nigger … he was a Negro as well. A Howard Negro at that. Overnight the raw I was part of a we with all of the we's overbearing solidity, and he didn't want anything to do with it or with the next oppressive we that came along either. You finally leave home, the Ur of we, and you find another we? … No. He saw the fate awaiting him and he wasn't having it.”

Coleman is, in short, that classic American figure, the convinced individualist who reinvents himself and escapes the prison of his past. “All he'd ever wanted, from earliest childhood on, was to be free: not black, not even white—just on his own and free.” His father's death during Coleman's first year at Howard was the catalyst. He realized he could “pass” and began a new life as a white student at NYU.

But shedding the shackles required a ruthlessness that nearly negated the benefits. When Coleman decided to marry as a white it meant severing ties with his family. Telling his mother was “the most brutal thing he'd ever done.” His brother Walt—who as a community leader and a pioneer in black education would go on to have the very career Coleman renounced—forbade him to come near the family again. Even his own children have been blighted by the lie they sense yet don't know. His youngest son Mark sees him, without really understanding why, as a destroyer, and spends his life in a futile search for meaning—primarily, ironically enough, in Judaism.

Zuckerman befriends Coleman two years after his ouster from Athena, which was quickly followed by the stress-induced death of his wife Iris. Coleman's biggest secret is still a secret, but his smaller one is becoming common knowledge; rejuvenated by Viagra, he is having an affair with an illiterate, tragic young woman half his age, whose children died in a fire and whose estranged husband, a deranged Vietnam veteran, constantly threatens her. Since Coleman is no longer associated with the college, one might think he can do as he likes with another consenting adult. Instead, the morality police, led by the trendy young Parisian Chair of the Languages and Literature Department, Delphine Roux, are out to get him.

The affair between Coleman Silk and Faunia Farley is, despite appearances to the contrary, a match between equals. But in its deviation from the norms of propriety—71-year-old grandfathers aren't supposed to sleep around, for God's sake, much less with menials who can't read—it outrages the campus social arbiters, radical as they may think themselves.

Appropriate. The current code word for reining in most any deviation from the wholesome guidelines and thereby making everybody “comfortable.” … As a force, propriety is protean, a dominatrix in a thousand disguises, infiltrating, if need be, as civic responsibility, WASP dignity, women's rights, black pride, ethnic allegiance, or emotion-laden Jewish ethical sensitivity. It's not as though Marx or Freud or Darwin or Stalin or Hitler or Mao had never happened. … It's as though Babbitt had never been written. … Here in America either it's Faunia Farley or it's Monica Lewinsky! The luxury of these lives disquieted so by the inappropriate comportment of Clinton and Silk!

The campus, like the larger culture, is in fact reactionary, no matter what self-flattering guise it chooses to dress up its reaction, The retired dean will not be allowed to enjoy his Aschenbachian madness, his entirely inappropriate reconnection with the remnants of the sexual brute he once was, temporarily happy though it makes him.

Coleman has two principal foes: the insane Les Farley and the confused, enraged Delphine Roux. Roth succeeds surprisingly well with Les, considering what a hackneyed figure the crazed Vietnam vet has become over the last three decades. He is truly terrifying, yet sympathetic—a big dumb friendly guy who was ruined, emotionally and morally, by his experiences. He is even rather comical. One scene that has Les visiting a Chinese restaurant along with his veterans' support group, all of whom nearly go ballistic at the sight of the gook waiters and cooks, is on the level of Roth's very funniest.

Delphine is funny too, but even as we laugh at her we are aware that Roth is laying it on too thick. She is a type that the author and those who enjoy him find just a little too easy to make fun of. Here she is, for example, reflecting on her wardrobe and accessories, carefully chosen for effect: “Even her one piece of jewelry, the large ring she'd placed that morning on the middle finger of her left hand, her sole decorative ornament, had been selected for the sidelight it provided on the intellectual she was, one for whom enjoying the esthetic surface of life openly, nondefensively, with her appetite and connoisseurship undisguised, was nonetheless subsumed by a lifelong devotion to scholarly endeavor.” Roth goes through the motions of making Delphine human. She is lonely, confused, sexually frustrated, intimidated by her mother's high-powered career—but in the end she is little more than a cartoon version of a pretentious French intellectual.

It may be said, without ruining the story, that the novel does not end happily. Coleman is a specialist in Greek tragedy after all, and enough references are dropped to Agamemnon and Menelaus, among others, to make the reader thoroughly conscious of Coleman's status as a tragic hero, with all his requisite great gifts balanced by his great flaw. Readers who pick up The Human Stain because of a prurient interest in Anatole Broyard will soon develop another, and perhaps greater, interest in Coleman Silk. He is a powerfully imagined and deeply appealing character, a man “who decides to forge a distinct historical destiny, who sets out to spring the historical lock, and who does so, brilliantly succeeds at altering his personal lot, only to be ensnared by the history he hasn't quite counted on: the history that isn't yet history, the history that the clock is now ticking off, the history proliferating as I write, accruing a minute at a time and grasped better by the future than it ever will be by us.”

That has been a recurrent theme of the trilogy. American Pastoral's Swede Lvov was kind and intelligent, but had an innocence that left him fatally exposed. I Married a Communist's Ira Ringold was ambitious and thrusting, but too stupid to protect himself. Coleman Silk is a tougher, smarter and worthier tragic hero than either of them, but even he is not quite smart enough to keep from being destroyed by the ironies of his historical moment.