[In the following excerpt, Krupnik draws a connection between the events portrayed in The Human Stain and those occuring in the American political scene during the late 1990s.]

Philip Roth's powerful new novel [The Human Stain] takes place during the time when news of Bill Clinton's misconduct with White House intern Monica Lewinsky dominated dinner parties and casual conversations. Roth tells the story of a professor of classics who is drummed out of his job by a pack of faculty jackals. The author wants to make vivid a parallel between the scapegoating that destroys a professor and the scape-goating that all but destroyed a president. The persecutors are politically correct, which in the context of American higher education is left-liberal or “progressive.” But for sanctimonious intolerance there is not much to choose between the haters on the left and those on the right.

Roth's hero-victim is one Coleman Silk, an African-American who has passed for white as a dean and professor of classics at Athena College in western Massachusetts. Roth's point of departure is replete with ironies that will require the whole of his narrative to work through. Five weeks into a new semester, Silk, in the course of taking attendance in a class, inquires about two students who are on his list but who have never shown up. He asks whether they are really “spooks,” meaning, “Are they for real or are they ghosts?” Silk doesn't intend any harm by the word and is certainly not using it as a term of derision for blacks. As fate would have it, however, the two absent students are African-American, and the faculty is scandalized by what they take to be Silk's racism. In due course the errant professor is brought to his knees by a cabal of the politically correct together with other members of the faculty who hate him for more directly personal reasons.

Reviews have praised The Human Stain for its narrative inventiveness and its characterization of Silk. But the reviews haven's paid sufficient tribute to Roth's rhetorical power in giving vent to his savage indignation toward the people who are always ready, in his view, to crush anyone who seems not to have hewed to the current party line.

Impassioned rhetoric in literature always carries a risk. It may be a sign, as Yeats warned, that an author is using his will to do the work more appropriately done by the imagination. Still, I was exhilarated by the energy and intelligence of Roth's counter-rage. He writes with scarifying fidelity of the summer of 1998, when “Bill Clinton's secret emerged in every last mortifying detail.” How perverse that those who demanded ever more in the way of public “accountability” can have been so insensitive to the degree to which he had already been shamed, which so much exceeded what any modern president had been made to suffer for his misdeeds. One thinks how easily Ronald Reagan got off for his administration's involvement in the Iran-contra deal, a much more important violation of public trust than Clinton's dalliance with Lewinsky. But of course Reagan's misdeeds did not involve sex, and in America there is no immorality like sexual immorality.

Roth nearly overwhelms the reader with long sentences in which he recalls “the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge” when the revelation of every last detail of Clinton's folly “revived America's oldest communal passion, … the ecstasy of sanctimony,” and when there were “in Congress [and] in the press” the great hypocrites, “the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish,” all of them infected with what Roth, quoting Nathaniel Hawthorne, calls “the persecuting spirit.” For example, William Buckley, a man always pleased to emphasize his religiosity, proposed that in the Clinton crisis impeachment might not be enough. “When Abelard did it,” Buckley reminded readers, “it was possible to prevent its happening again.”