[In the following review, Bernstein contends that Roth provides richly detailed character portraits in The Human Stain and feels this novel effectively explores crucial points of American postwar history.]

“Tell me something, is it at all possible, at least outside of those books, for you to have a frame of reference slightly larger than the kitchen table in Newark?” If the accusation sounds instantly familiar—and, at least about one phase of Philip Roth's own career, not entirely unfair—it is largely because Roth himself is voicing it with the outraged intensity that propels so many of his characteristic scenes. Here, for example, in The Counterlife (1986), perhaps Roth's finest novel up until then, the charge is hurled at Nathan Zuckerman, the fictional novelist whom Roth has called not so much his alter ego as his “alter brain”. Roth, however, isn't concerned merely to pre-empt criticism by incorporating it into his own work; instead, he seeks it out, embellishes and intensifies it, in order to summon a counter-voice that can rebut his detractors' claims with a corresponding ferocity. Whole chapters are constructed through dialogues that feel more like manic, clashing arias than real conversations, and if the operatic mode repeatedly threatens to drown out any more nuanced, reflective tones, it often ends up paradoxically confirming the authorial intelligence and imaginative sympathy that can allow such antithetical passions full rein and still enfold them within a single shaping narrative. The kitchen table in Newark, it seems, was a marvellous school for learning about from as well as rant, and at its best Roth's sense of timing—how long to let a tirade flourish before giving its rival centre stage—has a nearly Racinian precision.

But neither Nathan Zuckerman, nor, in all likelihood, Roth himself could have foreseen how far afield his writing would range during the following decade and how much of American life, history and politics his novels would set out to claim for their subject matter. All stories have to start somewhere, and if the Zuckerman novels still regularly return to reimagine the once familiar streets and houses of a Jewish Newark (now just as mythologized as Hawthorne's Puritan Salem, but demographically and socially even more radically transformed), it is no longer to exorcize familial demons, but rather to fashion a plausible origin and explanatory frame for more capacious narratives. It is the pressure of other voices and other stories, each one deeply, perhaps even too programmatically, entwined with the crucial turning points of American post-war history that orchestrates the trilogy of novels, American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and, now, The Human Stain. In these works, Zuckerman has become like Conrad's Marlow, a narrator, listener and occasional minor actor in the more intense dramas of powerful figures whose lives, in successive novels, are shattered by the collision of their private self-fashioning with the anti-Vietnam-war movement, the McCarthy era purges and, finally, the “ecstasy of sanctimony” and collective self-righteousness, the most visible public enactment of which was the national fixation on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal during the summer of 1998. What Roth has attempted in the trilogy is nothing less than the fusion of “the American Jewish novel”, among whose most skilled practitioners—and anarchic subverters—he has always been counted, with something like an updated version of what was once called “the condition of America” question. Not even Saul Bellow has so powerfully melded these two central strands in modern American fiction, and uneven though the three books clearly are (the middle one being by far the weakest), cumulatively the trilogy is a formidable achievement.

Roth's deliberate disruption of generic boundaries is the precise corollary, at the level of form, of the search for an unconstrained, self-determined identity that motivates each of the trilogy's central figures. Seymour (Swede) Levov in American Pastoral, Ira Ringold in I Married a Communist and, finally, The Human Stain's Coleman Silk have all taken seriously. America's promise of radical individualism and have fashioned a new existence for themselves, one that, in varying degrees, is alien to the expectations and loyalties of the communities in which they grew up. To refuse those expectations and reject the prescripted identity that accompanies even the most tolerant family love is the decisive first step in the ruthless process of reinventing oneself. The Human Stain examines both the stakes and the consequences of that ruthlessness with compassionate lucidity.

Coleman Silk, the seventy-one-year-old disgraced former Classics professor and Dean of the Faculty, now shunned as a racist pariah by the people he had once hired, is both fiercer and more self-aware than Levov or Ringold, and his fate has a correspondingly larger resonance. Hounded from his job because of a chance comment about two absent students who had not shown up for a single class (“Do they exist or are they spooks?” is what he asked, never suspecting that the two were black and would immediately file a protest against him), Silk has cut all ties with an institution that had defined his life for almost forty years. To compound his break with the official values of his former colleagues, Silk, recently widowed, has begun an impassioned, Viagra-aided affair with Faunia Farley, a thirty-four-year-old local cleaning woman, who has two years of high-school education and a long history of sexual victimhood. To his enemies at Athena College, Silk has merely added misogyny and sexual exploitation to his catalogue of sins; to Zuckerman, however, Silk's thrilling rediscovery of “the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication” provides “the defiant rebound from humiliation” that finally frees him from a futile obsession with proving his innocence.

And indeed, Silk does turn out to be far too interesting for the chimera of innocence. Long ago, he severed much deeper and more defining bonds than collegial friendships and betrayed more fundamental loyalties than any faculty code of conduct. Zuckerman gradually learns that Silk is a black man who wilfully and deliberately chose to cast off his racial identity and pass himself off, even to his wife and children, as a Jew. Silk understood precisely what he was doing, and there is something simultaneously appalling and breath-taking in such a clear-eyed, all-encompassing repudiation. It is the urge to improvise his own story, to not let it be written for him by any collectivity, white or black, that Silk longs for, and that makes his deception at once so imaginatively tempting and so humanly costly. Silk turns his back for ever on his doting mother and siblings, and becomes, in their haunting phrase, “lost to all his people”.

We see the cruelty his decision inflicts on those who loved him and the life of permanent lies into which it forces him. In his ghostly Jewishness, Silk is the novel's only real “spook”, and yet so powerful is Roth's rendering of his character's complex motives that Silk never entirely losses our sympathy or turns into a cautionary case history. No American writer except Roth would risk such a premiss, and, more importantly, none could depict Silk's motivation with such persuasive inwardness.

“I suppose any profound change in life involves saying ‘I don't know you’ to someone.” It is Silk's heartbroken mother who speaks these lines to her twenty-six-year-old son the last time they meet, and the whole novel can be read as a scrupulous playing-out of her insight. The Human Stain is willing to regard even racial and ethnic affiliation—the most sacrosanct of all contemporary pieties—as provisional choices, social constructs with no more inherent authority or stability than professional codes or marriage vows. The book is enlivened by a whole litany of splendid rants against the American craze “to blame, deplore, and punish”, but the critique of what Hawthorne, in the 1860s, already had diagnosed as the nation's “persecuting spirit”, is not the work's all-controlling centre. One of the strengths of this novel is how it does not force its linked themes into a single pattern. The affair between Silk and Faunia Farley, for example, takes on a tremendous novelistic energy of its own. Farley is one of Roth's most interesting female characters, and she sees Silk more clearly than anyone since his mother. In one exchange, Silk is so dazzled by the rediscovery of long-forgotten feelings that he cries out: “This is more than sex.” “No, it's not”, Faunia corrects him. “You just forgot what sex is.” In such exchanges Roth comes close to the astringent wisdom of his masterpiece, Sabbath's Theater (1995).

Zuckerman's strategic withdrawal from the story's centre quickens his curiosity about others, and The Human Stain contains richly detailed portraits of people and settings unlike any encountered in earlier Roth novels. From the moving depiction of Faunia's ex-husband, a Vietnam-war-damaged veteran struggling to contain his lethal rage, to the fine descriptions of Silk's growing up, the virtuoso setpieces and arias that orchestrate the action continually open up the story's emotional range. But they do so with an awareness of the ultimate impenetrability of human motives that is at the core of the trilogy's great argument with America. “Everybody knows” is the premiss both of Silk's tormentors and of all the “righteous grandstanding creeps”, from McCarthy to today's moralizing thought police who revel in the all too licit pleasures of passing judgment. Against their certainty, Roth's trilogy holds up a different ethos, the conviction, as he puts it in American Pastoral, “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.” For a novelist to be able to make such a pronouncement vivid, earned, and concretely realized in his stories, seems to me a sure sign of getting it right.