[In the following excerpt, Wilhelmus describes The Human Stain as a well-knit novel that explores controversial racial and ethnic dilemmas.]

Two recent novels deal with the problems of community and morality more in terms of their failures than in terms of their possible accommodations. The first is Philip Roth's bitter analysis of racial and ethnic dilemmas in The Human Stain, third in a trilogy of novels in which the author analyzes America's cultural decline during the 1950s through the 1990s. All three novels, narrated by doppelganger Nathan Zuckerman, focus on loss of personal and sexual identity in a culture seemingly organized to assure their defeat. The previous two—American Pastoral, 1997 (which won the Pulitzer Prize), and I Married a Communist, 1998—dealt with effects of the Vietnam War and the McCarthy era. The Human Stain deals especially with political correctness, sex, and sexual harassment in the nineties. Yet despite its ire, it shows a surprising amount of pity even for the negative characters it portrays.

A well-knit novel, The Human Stain explores the life of Coleman Silk, a distinguished professor of classics, in his seventies, who has resigned from a small New England college after being accused of racism by some of his black students. Silk has spent two years writing a book refuting these charges but has given it up as pointless because it will not bring back his wife (who died of an aneurysm caused by her intense anger over her husband's mistreatment) and because it will draw attention to his current love affair with a divorced woman, Faunia Farley, who is half his age. The affair is significant because it has become a means for Silk to renew an “entanglement with life” from which he had become increasingly estranged. A similar estrangement is felt by Zuckerman, now impotent as the result of a prostate operation, and may be the initial reason he is interested in Silk. All the more maddening to Silk (and to Zuckerman) is an anonymous attack on Silk by the campus feminist who has learned of the affair and accuses Silk of victimizing a younger, illiterate woman.

This much is revealed in the novel's first hundred pages, allowing the reader to imagine that the remainder will be a rant against the evils of speech codes, ageism, and a prudish (if not to say Marxist-Feminist) rejection of sexuality. Roth, however, finesses any such expectation by revealing that Silk is really a light-skinned African-American who has been passing himself off as white for over fifty years. The twist itself is exquisitely disorienting for what it does to the charge of racism. But its ramifications touch on every other aspect of the plot as well.

Silk's youthful decision to become a self-created man is as grand in its way and as fragile as Gatsby's and as totally and intensely self-defining as Gustav von Aschenbach's in Death in Venice (to whom Silk is sometimes compared). All through the years he must have feared having his secret revealed, and now, just as he has apparently come through, the privacy he had earned through talent and hard work has become the target of fools.

Throughout the novel, Roth's outrage at the invasion of Silk's privacy parallels a similar outrage over the impeachment of Bill Clinton, mentioned prominently in the novel. When Delphine Roux, the campus feminist, attacks Silk spitefully and with innuendo, Roth points out that sex between an older and conceivably more powerful man and a consenting woman—either Silk or the President—is not ipso facto the great wrong some people feel it must be. The point is a salient one; nonetheless, Roth's opinions about Roux are artistically the weakest part of the novel. French, deconstructionist, leftist-feminist, and reader of The New York Review of Books personals, she is too much of a cartoon to take seriously even as a threat to a person as vulnerable as Silk.

Roth has a similar difficulty in describing other women in the novel, including Faunia whose stumbling pronouncement that we are all infected by “the human stain” gives the book its title. Humanizing as this insight is, it's difficult to muster much sympathy for Faunia because of her general inarticulateness and remoteness. Roth is more successful with Faunia's ex-husband, Lester Farley, a Vietnam veteran who embodies an evil we certainly can understand but only partly forgive. Ignorant, violent, and cunning, Lester was sent to the wrong war, turned into a killer, and returned without acceptance or rehabilitation. He is as much a victim of history as his enemy Coleman Silk. Through Farley, Roth lets us peer deeply into the heart of darkness and take responsibility for what we, as a culture, have created—an understanding that softens the novel's outrage and lets us begin to imagine how we are all implicated in the tragedy it seeks to explore.