[In the following mixed review of The Human Stain, Wood traces Roth's literary development, asserting he is “an extraordinarily intelligent novelist” whose intellect may actually contribute to his “vulgarianism.”]

If Philip Roth began his career as a fine realist who combed his distinguished prose in conventional directions, it might be said that he is ending it as a coarse realist who is all bristles. His early work approached character with a sensitive sentimentality; his late work dissolves character in sentimental essayism. He has become a vulgar naturalist of the emotions, a kind of H. G. Wells of the inner life—bludgeoningly explicit, crudely emphatic, always turning the convoy of consciousness into a freight train of emotions, determined to illuminate what might better be crepuscular, to color what might better be gray, to haul into speakability the wordless.

Yet this sensationalist of the soul is also an extraordinarily intelligent novelist, one of the most intelligent of contemporary writers, and his intelligence complicates, if it does not always refine, his vulgarianism. It almost becomes the sun that burns off his impurities. If there is such a mode as highly intelligent sensationalism, then Philip Roth is now practicing it. His new novel is an example. One cannot think of any contemporary novelist except Roth who would have chanced this story, in which a seventy-one-year-old black professor of classics who has been passing for white is hounded out of his job for a remark taken to be racist and spends his newly free time having oral sex with a woman almost half his age. And one cannot think of any novelist except Roth who could save such a tale from its own rigged extremism, from its political explicitness and bent premises. His intelligence does not quite save The Human Stain, but certainly makes it grotesquely alive.

Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's aging novelist-narrator, has come to live in seclusion in rural Massachusetts. He meets Professor Coleman Silk, who has recently been chased from his job as a classics professor at nearby Athena College. Coleman's crime was his use of a word to describe two absent students. “Do they exist or are they spooks?,” Coleman asks his class. The students, of course, are black. Hell is raised, but Coleman's honest protestations that he was ignorant of the students' race, and had anyway all but forgotten that the word had derogatory connotations, are useless. As a former dean of the faculty, Coleman Silk has made enemies, and suddenly finds that he has no important friends. His Torquemada is the current dean, a French literary theorist named Delphine Roux, a woman whom Coleman hired when she was twenty-four and just out of her graduate program at Yale.

The sacking drives Coleman into a storm of bitterness, which curdles into grief when his wife of many years dies. His consolation, indeed his salvation, is found in an intensely sexual relationship with one of the college's cleaners, an illiterate thirty-four-year-old divorcée named Faunia Farley. Faunia has suffered a life of abuse, first at the hands of a stepfather and then of a husband; and her two children died in a fire while she was having sex in a car. These two victims, Faunia and Coleman, find a savage bond in their mutual unhappiness and sexual hunger. But when Coleman's torturers at Athena hear of the affair, their opinion of the despised professor is only confirmed. Delphine Roux sends him an anonymous note which reads: “Everyone knows you're sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age.”

When Zuckerman first meets Coleman, two years have passed since the Athena episode. It is the summer of 1998, and the news of Bill Clinton's sexual adventures are everywhere in America. As Zuckerman (or Roth: it is the same old game) heatedly puts it:

It was the summer in America when the nausea returned … when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation … I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE. It was the summer when—for the billionth time—the jumble, the mayhem, the mess proved itself more subtle than this one's ideology and that one's morality. It was the summer when a president's penis was on everyone's mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America.

Zuckerman delivers this homily on the third page of the novel, and it announces the book's theme: the apparent triumph of ideology over human mess or jumble or mayhem (Athena College over Coleman Silk, Congress over President Clinton), followed by the real triumph of human mess or jumble or mayhem over ideology. The real triumph is seen to occur, is enacted, in Zuckerman's storytelling, in this novel itself: the book's reasonable presumption is that as soon as we acquaint ourselves with the actual mess of life, then ideology and morality will wither away, like a vampire at dawn. To spend time, even novelistic time, with the human stain is ourselves to be stained by it, and to turn angrily on the clean linen of ideology, and see its righteousness for what it is. Ideology is inexperience, really; and experience is the stain.

There is nothing wrong with this premise for a novelist. Indeed, it seems fair and right, the only possible literary direction. But since it is a novelistic premise—Roth invites us, in effect, to read the story of a human mess—it requires a novelistic enactment. It requires the novelizing of human mess and jumble and mayhem so that we might finish the novel confounded by the messy stories that themselves confound ideology's simple hygiene. And this is where Roth is most vulnerable. For his sermon that life is all unknowable mess and stain has become the promotion of a message rather than its dramatization.

Roth is telling us too often about how confounding life is. When Nathan first sees Coleman's shirtless torso, he spots a small tattoo and expatiates on the unexpectedness: “A tiny symbol, if one were needed, of all the million circumstances of the other fellow's life, of that blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography—a tiny symbol to remind me why our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong.” This is Nathan Zuckerman's anthem, of late. In American Pastoral, a very powerful novel, he discovered that an old childhood friend had not had the gilded life he had assumed for him. “The fact remains,” he tells the reader, “that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.” Later in The Human Stain, Zuckerman replies in his head to Delphine Roux's note, with its charge that “everyone knows.” It is a good, boiling, Rothian rant:

Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows. … How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows, Professor Roux. ‘Everyone knows’ is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

And again, as the book closes, Nathan announces: “There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies. Caught between, I thought.”

The dangers of this hectoring are obvious. If we are only being told, again and again, how messy things are, we will not really experience it, and the desired vanquishing-of-ideology-via-the-experience-of-the-novel will not occur. Further, if the messiness of things is repeatedly compacted into a lecture, things will not seem messy; instead the lecture will start to seem too neat, too clean, too unmessy. If “everyone knows” is the “invocation of cliché,” then “nobody knows”—and especially, “nobody knows,” with those leaning Rothian italics—may represent no less of a cliché, rather than the beginning of wisdom. At such a point, the messiness that Roth so fervently believes in may become a dogma—even an ideology. And then the novel may merely position two angry ideologies—everybody knows and nobody knows—at each end, and let them shout themselves hoarse.

This very nearly happens in The Human Stain. The mayhem and the jumble of which Zuckerman speaks are inscribed not only in what we see of Coleman's lusty relationship with Faunia, but more centrally in the revelation of Coleman's great secret, that he is black and has been passing for a Jew for most of his adult life. In a long, moving second chapter, Roth narrates the story of Coleman's dissembling. We begin with his childhood in East Orange, New Jersey. The light-skinned Silks were the only black family in the street. Coleman's father, a saloon-keeper, was a stern, upright man who guarded the standards and the language of his intelligent children. Coleman grew up extraordinarily free of any sense of race. It was only when he arrived at Howard University—his father's choice—that he discovered that he had already been defined by society.

An encounter at Woolworth's, in which he is refused a hot dog and called a nigger, sours his mind, and he determines to escape the tyranny of definitions. As Coleman remembers it, at the age of seventy-one:

He saw the fate awaiting him, and he wasn't having it. Grasped it intuitively and recoiled spontaneously. You can't let the big they impose its bigotry on you any more than you can let the little they become a we and impose its ethics on you. Not the tyranny of the we and its we-talk and everything that the we wants to pile on your head. Never for him the tyranny of the we that is dying to suck you in, the coercive, inclusive, historical, inescapable moral we, with its insidious E pluribus unum. Neither the they of Woolworth's nor the we of Howard. Instead the raw I with all its agility. Self-discovery. … Singularity. The passionate struggle for singularity. The singular animal. The sliding relationship with everything. Not static but sliding. Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?

And so Coleman embarks on his impersonation of a Jewish academic, quitting Howard and enrolling at NYU. He keeps his secret even from his wife and children. Naturally, when Delphine Roux and the priests of piety attack him, they have no idea of a secret that Zuckerman only discovers after Coleman's death.

Roth is more convincing and more affecting when describing Coleman's secret swerve from his origins than when laying out the terms of his battle with the political correctors. And, in turn, he is more convincing and affecting when describing the ordinary fallible human selfishness of Coleman's decision to pass as white—the actual messiness of it—than when offering us lessons on the importance of Coleman's bold struggle against the tyranny of race. Insofar as we see that Coleman's impersonation of a Jew has about it elements of opportunism and weakness, our sympathy is stirred, and Coleman lives a little on the page. But as soon as we feel that Coleman's hidden blackness is a novelist's trick, that it is Roth's attempt to rig the argument in favor of Coleman against the politically correct inquisitors, Coleman dies on the page, and the novel loses luster.

For isn't the premise, in the end, something of a trick? The “racist” professor is not only not racist, but black to boot! And he is not only a victim of the purists of Athena College, but a kind of victim of the purists of race. Coleman is the American individualist, who knows that “you can't let the big they impose its bigotry on you any more than you can let the little they become a we and impose its ethics on you.” In this way, Delphine Roux and the white redneck at Woolworth's, though separated by forty years, are ideological mates. Silk seems to think this. Does Roth? Certainly the premises of the novel are in agreement with Silk, and Roth allows the novel to confirm Silk's sense of himself at its end, when a black professor eulogizes him at his funeral, thus: “an American individualist who did not think that the weightiest things in life were the rules, an American individualist who refused to leave unexamined the orthodoxies of the customary and the established truth, an American individualist who did not always live in compliance with majority standards of decorum and taste—an American individualist par excellence. …”

The black professor, who of course thinks that Coleman was a Jew, is praising Coleman only for his lonely struggle against the conformities of Athena College. If the professor had known that Coleman were black and had lied about it, he would probably not be standing at Coleman's funeral saying such things. Roth wants us to relish this irony. Yet he also wants us, I think, to conjoin Coleman's battle with Athena and his battle with race, and see in both “an American individualist” who has been done in by “the rules” and “the orthodoxies of the customary.”

Yet difficulties crowd in on this conclusion. These are very different tyrannies, in very different epochs, and it seems a mistake to write them all into the same plaint. The tyranny of race is large; the despotism of Delphine Roux is small. And do either of these abuses have anything to do with “the rules” broken by Bill Clinton? Roth would like to aerate his novel somewhat, and blend Silk's struggles with the president's. While it might be true that Coleman defied “the orthodoxies of the customary,” is it not the case that the president's behavior with Monica Lewinsky was entirely, depressingly orthodox? Though the Starr report cannot be cherished for much, it at least exposed the piddling banalities of the affair, the clichés and customary lies. It is very hard to make a case for the individualism of Monica Lewinsky's powerful lover.

But the more important objection to the picture we are offered of Coleman has to do with the vandalism that it does to the novel itself. The more Roth praises and pities his protagonist, alternately seeing him as a victim and an individualist, the more fixed, the more foreclosed the book seems. This is what I mean by referring to this novel's story as a form of rigged extremism. The novel seems too confirming of Coleman's victimhood, as if the questions that the novel raises had been answered before the novel began, and answered by the very story that the novel tells. That is the definition of a parable: a tale whose form is the answer to its own questions. But a parable is in many ways the opposite of a novel. A parable cannot finally tolerate or explore a mess and a jumble. The parabolic form tampers with proper novelistic delicacy, with the sense that genuine surprise might confront and contradict our expectations.

How much stronger this novel might be as a novel, as a drama, if Coleman were merely a Jewish professor, even a rather bigoted and racist one. Or if Coleman's decision to hide his true race were shown to be itself somewhat racist, somewhat self-hating. In both cases, one feels, the novelist would have real work to do, and the battle between Delphine Roux and Coleman Silk would be a novelistically equal one. Imagine the novelistic task of showing that an unpleasant old racist, an aging bigot, had become the victim of political correctness, and was a rule-defying American individualist. Bigotry as the purest American individualism! That would be a novel to savor.

Of course, Roth has already written it. It is Sabbath's Theater, the story of an unsavory nihilist (sexist, racist, brutalist) whose battle-cry is “fuck the laudable ideologies.” Mickey Sabbath is an enthralling creation, in part because, in order to make a convincing case for him, Roth has to animate Sabbath. Sabbath has to live on the page, or the novel would be only repulsive. Coleman, by contrast, is too easy for Roth, since he is clearly something of an American hero to Roth: an aging, sexed-up, virile academic who has defied the rules and has been punished for it.

What was powerful about Mickey Sabbath is that he was entirely his own victim, so that his self-pity had a curious dramatic power, and as a character he had true freedom. The novel, as it were, did not agree with his own self-assessment, which made it more powerful. The reader provided the sympathy for Sabbath that the novel did not always give. Coleman Silk, by contrast, is the victim of others, and he is the novel's pet case. This novel is in too great an agreement with him, and the reader, sensing a “palpable design” on himself, feels inclined to withhold somewhat his sympathy from such a pampered prisoner.

It is hard for Roth to convince us of the unideological messiness of Coleman's life when the reader feels, in protest, that too many of the details of that life have been neatly chosen by Roth to make a case. For The Human Stain is an immensely paradoxical work, not least in that it is messy without being free. Roth certainly provides his characters with full and lively histories; he is such a vivid, intelligent, lucid writer that he hardly ever fails at the rudiments that fell lesser novelists. His creations simmer nicely in the broth of the atmospheres with which he furnishes them.

Roth's historical and biographical details are not merely piped in from his historical sources, they are also channeled into genuine currents of life. Coleman, for instance, is not merely an exercise in writing, as he might be in countless other books. The reader comes very close to experiencing his childhood, and very close to tasting the complexity of his decision to hide his color. Similarly, Roth does not leave Roux as nothing more than a bloodless enforcer of the impeccable. In a wonderful passage, he fills in a more complicated reality, a messier reality, in which Delphine admits to herself that some of her rectitude, and a good deal of her Yale-fed jargon, are not native to her Parisian sensuality, but American additions, found to be useful in the academic market.

Still, the reader is not allowed to get quite close enough to the potential mess of these realities, and the reason is that none of Roth's characters in this book is ever freed from the writer's controlling and fiercely comprehending grasp. None is quite free, and thus none is quite a reality. To begin with, all without exception sound like each other, and all sound like Roth (or Zuckerman). All of them engage in exactly the same kind of boiling monologue, whether speaking aloud or internally: the same beseeching italics, the same dunning repetitions, the same one-word sentences. One quickly wearies of a prose that is always yammering or orating like this, that is always going into cardiac arrest. The horror of a prose like this. The idiocy. The imprisonment. The imprisonment that is also the idiocy! The great scandal of a prose like this! The great fucking scandal of it! How it seems careless. How it may in fact be the utmost carefulness. But still a form of condescension, really. Because we must be stupid if we need to be told everything so explicitly.

The effect is that of a novel without internal borders; everyone partakes of everyone else's reality. The novel thus becomes a single, undifferentiated canton of anger, in which, very strangely, each character is shouting at his own soul in exactly the same way. (Sabbath's Theater bypassed this basic Rothian deficiency by dispensing with other characters, and sharpening itself around the whetted blade of its protagonist.)

Here, for instance, is Coleman, reflecting on the freedom he felt once his father was dead, and the freedom of his great secret: “Free on a scale unimaginable to his father. As free as his father had been unfree. Free now not only of his father but of all that his father had ever had to endure. The impositions. The humiliations. The obstructions. The wounds and the pain and the posturing and the shame—all the inward agonies of failure and defeat. Free instead on the big stage. Free to go ahead and be stupendous.” This curious self-chorus, so thirsty for an irrigating comma, is boring to read.

One also feels it might go on forever. Why not a thousand more sentences beginning with the word “free”? It is a piece of tape spliced from a larger, possibly endless reel. That it might never end tells us that it has no literary form; the only form that it has is the open-ended and reiterative form of anger. Coleman is exultant at this moment, but his mode of expression—its repetitions, its orphaned one-word sentences, its vascular pressure—has the form of anger, which is the form of almost all the prose in this book. And just as, late at night, a domestic argument can lazily yet bitterly carry on for hours without any obvious formal stop, so Roth's monologues, whatever the emotion being expressed, have the same roiling limitlessness.

Later in the novel, by comparison, three men are overheard by Coleman talking about Clinton and Lewinsky. They are supposed to be professors at Athena, but again they sound like Coleman, who sounds like Roth: “She's part of that dopey culture. Yap, yap, yap. Part of this generation that is proud of its shallowness. The sincere performance is everything. Sincere and empty. Totally empty. The sincerity that goes in all directions. The sincerity that is worse than falseness, and the innocence that is worse than corruption. All the rapacity hidden under the sincerity.” And later still, Faunia Farley, in a highly improbable monologue, tells Coleman what a victim he is, and confirms the novel's over-generous vision of its hero. Faunia, of course, also sounds like Philip Roth.

You didn't deserve that hand, Coleman. That's what I see. I see that you're furious. And that's the way it's going to end. As a furious old man. And it shouldn't have been. That's what I see: your fury. I see the anger and the shame. I see that you understand as an old man what time is. You don't understand that till near the end. But now you do. And it's frightening. Because you can't do it again. You can't be twenty again. It's not going to come back. And this is how it ended. And what's worse even than the dying, what's worse even than the being dead, are the fucking bastards who did this to you. Took it all away from you. I see that in you, Coleman. I see it because it's something I know about. The fucking bastards who changed everything within the blink of an eye. Took your life and threw it away. Took your life, and they decided they were going to throw it away. … They decide what is garbage, and they decided you're garbage. Humiliated and humbled and destroyed a man over an issue everyone knew was bullshit. A pissy little word that meant nothing to them, absolutely nothing at all.

This is certainly “messy.” But because none of these characters has his own individual mess, the mess is all the author's, and it comes to function as a chorus, rather than as a series of differently bestowed melodies. And the chorus is rather as if Roth were standing on a street-corner inside a sandwich board that reads: LISTEN TO ME! LIFE IS A BIG SURPRISING MESS. HUMAN BEINGS LIVE HERE.

Roth's fiction is now a very curious set of vessels. The characters all resemble their maker, yet each is socially differentiated, often densely so. Roth sleeves his characters in thick coverings of social history, taking great care with detail. He is now a kind of positivist in his fiction, anxious to get it right. Sociologically, his creations are intensely distinct: Roth has become an archivist, a kind of brilliant parish historian of Newark and its New Jersey environs. As souls, however, none of these people has enough distinction, and all shout like each other. Their differences with each other are too much a matter of externalities. They are not quite real, as a result; yet, and it is an important proviso, they are never dead either, for each is animated by Roth's own powerful, intelligent vivacity. In this they resemble Céline's characters, perhaps (and Céline is one of Roth's avowed influences), or Lawrence's. Insofar as they have life, the life is syringed from the bleeding writer.

This perhaps explains why Roth's characters are forever reprising the situation of the novel thus far, in long monologues of the kind that Faunia Farley speaks to Coleman. They are reprising the emotional facts of the case; and in the absence of real animation, this is their animation. Yet precisely because they lack real animation, they are made to undergo this forced animation, and to shout at us in an impersonation of vividness. They are involved in a kind of picaresque of anger, in which they move from one mind-storm to the next. Yet these picaros are really moving in the same place, from foot to foot. They are repeating themselves.

It might be fairly argued that Roth's noisy way with his characters is a legitimate response to the crisis of character in contemporary fiction, a crisis of literary representation. After all, his early work does not suggest that he is incapable of the reality of personalities other than himself. Perhaps such people are the best way for Roth at the moment to write the kind of essayistic fiction that he now writes, while retaining enough reality for the novelistic, the dramatic, to survive? This would link Roth with Beckett and Bernhard, and more generally with the kind of novelist who forcefully uses his characters within a philosophical or essayistic medium.

There is some justice to this. With writers such as Beckett and Bernhard, however, the impression offered is that nihilism has corroded the souls of their characters so that they have in effect disappeared from the text. The negative has deformed them out of reality. Roth has powerful reserves of nihilism, as one saw in Sabbath's Theater, a book with a large deformation at its center. But The Human Stain, like its predecessor, I Married a Communist, does not deal in nihilism, or in anything as deep or uncontrollable. Indeed, despite the apparent corrosions of Roth's anger, this novel has an optimism, a sentimentality at its heart—which is that we are gloriously unfathomable, or, as Nathan has it, that “there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless.”

Might be something almost complacent about Roth's assertion of the endlessness of human truth? Where Beckett and Bernhard see obscure damage, Roth sees an occluded healthiness, a kind of virility of the soul, that needs only to be uncovered for its bottomless confusions to shine. Roth tells us how bottomless we all are, but he is contradictorily engaged in the creation of characters who are entirely controlled and voiced by Roth, and who thus seem the opposite of bottomless. He never seems to hit a real obstacle to his impressive lucidity. This is a late trap for late Roth: an anger that is in fact a sentimentality, a pessimism that is really an optimism, and a commitment to the bottomlessness of people and situations that is shallower than it wants to be. And running through it all is Roth's grinding, unappeasable intelligence, which in this novel is perhaps too easily appeased.