[In the following review, Jacobs provides a laudatory assessment of The Human Stain.]

Philip Roth has long been one of the great chroniclers of contemporary American life. There have been a few less-than-great novels, but from Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint through American Pastoral, Roth has given us quintessential portraits of men in their times. In The Human Stain he is at the height of his powers. In fact, at one point he has his narrator and recurring alter ego Nathan Zuckerman tell us, “For better or worse I can only do what everyone does who thinks they know. I imagine. I am forced to imagine. It happens to be what I do for a living. It is my job. It's now all I do.” And indeed, Roth's imagination is as rich and as deep as his prose is textured and brilliant.

Taking as his starting place the intrinsic ability of Americans to reinvent themselves, Roth creates Coleman Silk, a reinventer if ever there was one. By making the microcosm of one man's life his focus and following it through a variety of truly surprising events, Roth manages to skewer academia, intellectual pretense, American politics, and the problems of race and class in America.

Coleman Silk is a victim of the very same America that gave him his opportunities. Intelligence, savvy, and subterfuge lifted him far away from his origins, but he pays a hefty price for his choices. He is living the American Dream, but it is a dream with a dark and demonic underside. A light-skinned black man who has opted to pass as a Jew, Silk struggles with the fear of exposure at every turn. In an ironic twist, he is condemned by the politically correct fervor at the college for innocently using the term “spooks” to refer to several missing students who just happen, unknown to the professor who has never seen them, to be black. The academic downfall of the seventy-year-old Silk is accompanied, through the aid of Viagra and a thirty-four-year-old illiterate janitor, Faunia Farley, by a rise in his sexual passions.

Zuckerman, who is Silk's neighbor, is a few years younger and equally outraged by academic Puritanism masquerading as political correctness. He feels closer to Silk than ever before and functions as something of a voyeur to his life as he tells his story.

Roth has long been one of our premier revelers in American idiomatic prose, and in The Human Stain he surpasses himself. The language is exciting and exacting, the characters almost universally well drawn and affecting. In fact, the power and pain of this novel is so great that at times the reader might have to take a brief respite, maybe a walk around the reading room, to take it all in. The only character who comes close to being a cartoon is the Yale-educated faux feminist Delphine Roux, who is the cause of Silk's retirement and grief. But even she resembles recent academic reality closely enough to cause a reader with even the vaguest connection to a collegiate environment to wince.

The Human Stain is that rare thing, a totally satisfying novel. With it and his two other recent novels, American Pastoral and I Married a Communist, Roth has emphatically confirmed his position in the front rank of American novelists.