[In the following mixed assessment, Hynes asserts that Roth displays passion and an eloquent search for meaning in The Human Stain.]

The hot engine powering all of Philip Roth's novels is rage. Years ago it was a young man's rage at small-minded, bourgeois provincialism, but over the years, as Roth has become more intellectually ambitious, that rage has broadened its scope into something like a general critique of American culture. Indeed, his most recent books, American Pastoral and I Married a Communist, constitute a sort of fictional history of American radical politics since World War II.

The Human Stain, his newest novel, seems to start out as something less substantial—a satire of the hothouse politics of academia, where the culture wars smolder and vent gases like a decades-old coal mine fire—but without warning the novel veers into much more important territory.

It starts out simply enough. Roth's usual stand-in, the fictional novelist Nathan Zuckerman, narrates the decline and fall of Coleman Silk, a former classics professor at Athena College, a small liberal arts school in New England. As a powerful dean of faculty, Silk was responsible for reviving the institution, mainly by firing the deadwood and hiring bright young things. Once he steps down from the deanship and returns to teaching, however, Silk inadvertently ruins his long career with an offhand remark. Taking attendance one day well into the semester, he notes a pair of names who have never appeared in class and asks, “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?”

The missing students, it turns out, are black, and Silk's use of the word “spooks” is interpreted as racism. A witch hunt ensues, exacerbated by the ill will Silk accrued as a powerful dean. He is hounded in particular by Delphine Roux, a beautiful young French literary theorist who is now chair of his department—and whom Silk hired when he was dean. Shortly after Silk resigns in disgust, his wife dies—killed, he is convinced, by the stress of the scandal. Now he is living on a farm near Athena, writing a book about the scandal, and conducting an affair with a much younger local woman, the improbably named Faunia Farley, an illiterate incest survivor who works as a janitor at the college. As Nathan Zuckerman enters the story, Silk has just received an anonymous poison pen letter, almost certainly from Professor Roux, that reads, “Everyone knows you're exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age.”

Then, on page 86, Roth reveals a secret about his main character that changes the book into something else entirely. This revelation has the paradoxical effect of undercutting the importance of everything that came before, while simultaneously making the story of Coleman Silk much more interesting than mere academic shenanigans. It also adds to the frustration of reviewing an already frustrating book, since, on the one hand, your honest reviewer doesn't want to spoil the complex pleasures of the secret, but, on the other, he can't discuss the central subject of the book unless he reveals it. Suffice it to say that for all of Roth's harrumphing disdain of literary theory and postmodern identity politics, his real subject here is that obsession of modern academe: gender, race and class.

All that's left for a reviewer to do in this situation, then, is to evoke the experience of reading the book. As the scope of his ambition has broadened, Roth has become an increasingly frustrating writer. He was never an elegant stylist—he's always been much too prickly for that—but the best of his early work showed an economy and an attention to craft that he seems to have abandoned. To use E. M. Forster's distinction, there is a story here but not much of a plot, as the narrative tunnels for pages at a time into dense, elaborate and sometimes seemingly improvised set pieces in which characters' lives are dissected at great length.

Some of these set pieces are stunning: The long second chapter of the book, revealing the true history of Coleman Silk, is as brilliant as anything Roth has ever written. And he is surprisingly gentle with Delphine Roux, drawing a dead-on portrait of a certain sort of hustling young academic without reducing her to caricature (though it is gliding the lily a bit to introduce a devotee of French theory who is actually French, especially since the French intelligentsia have largely abandoned the old theorists: These days Jacques Derrida is France's answer to Jerry Lewis, a hero to Americans but the butt of jokes in his own country).

Apart from Professor Roux, however, Roth still has his Woman Problem: Silk's lover Faunia Farley is an utterly incredible character, in every sense of the word. Blonde, striking, sexually avid and illiterate, she comes across as more of a creepy masturbation fantasy than a living character. Nearly 40 years on from Goodbye Columbus, Roth's aggressive vulgarity on the subject of sex seems less liberating than simply adolescent. Faunia moonlights as a worker on a dairy farm, and in one not particularly oblique passage, Roth comes very close to comparing her to a cow.

Her husband, Lester, though, is even more unbelievable, if that's possible. He's the hoariest of modern stock characters, the deranged Vietnam vet looking for payback, and as such he is nothing more than a device. Yet Roth lavishes on him nearly as much attention as he lavishes on the other major characters, in long passages that are excruciatingly leaden and tin-eared. Indeed, much of the book is a chore to read, as the clotted prose circles round and round the same points over and over again, in a style that's meant to be incantatory but instead is more evocative of a brilliant narcissist dominating a dinner party. Very little is dramatized, so there's no story to lose oneself in, and for much of the book, even the argument of the novel, fascinating as it is, is flattened by the overbearing force of the author's personality.

And yet. As frustrating an experience as reading this book was, I already know that I will remember much of it a good deal longer than I'm liable to remember more carefully crafted novels. Roth's rage—perhaps a better word is passion—for the truth is pretty unfashionable in American fiction these days, as is his relentless fascination with the larger meanings of his characters' lives. The sense of clashing armies that comes from the graceless prose itself, the feverish worrying at an important and complex subject (you'll just have to take my word for it)—these are signs of a passionate engagement with the most important things in life, which is, or ought to be, what great literature is all about. Just because Philip Roth is shouting at us doesn't mean that we shouldn't listen.