The Unremovable Stain

Short of homicide, how far will a man go to escape his background and reinvent himself as an unaffiliated member of the human race? If you are Coleman Silk, the gifted self-liberator in Philip Roth's new novel, The Human Stain (Houghton Mifflin; 368 pages; $26), you first tell your fiance that your widowed mother is dead when she is not. Then you tell your mother that she will never be allowed to see her future grandchildren.

It gets better, or worse, depending on your tolerance for this kind of biting humor. "You come to the railroad station in New York and you sit on the bench in the waiting room," Silk tells his mom. "At eleven twenty-five a.m., I'll walk by with my kids in their Sunday best. That'll be my birthday present."

Coleman Silk is not a character who invites easy sympathy. But by the time Roth finishes with him, pity is not out of the question. Roth's veteran mouthpiece, Nathan Zuckerman, tells Silk's story from the perspective of 1998. The nation is blanketed by the Clinton-Lewinsky dalliance, and Zuckerman is not amused. "The righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band...to enact the astringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch."

Two years earlier, Silk, dean at a small liberal-arts college in western Massachusetts, had his own purification problems. He was forced to resign after inciting the guardians of politically correct usage. "Does anyone know these people?" he asks his class about two no-show students. "Do they exist or are they spooks?"

They do, and they are African Americans. The 70-year-old dean is branded as a racist, which is a bitter irony. Since graduating from Howard University as a "Negro" (black by birth, his skin is "white as snow," according to his mother), Silk has passed as a Jewish intellectual.

At 67, Roth has not lost one ampere of his power to rile and surprise. When Alexander Portnoy, David Kepesh (The Professor of Desire) and Zuckerman writhed between desire and conscience, the psychoanalytic model was turned into serious comic fiction.

In recent years Roth has found inspiration in history and sociology. Ira Ringold, in I Married a Communist, is a left-wing actor caught up in Joe McCarthy's '50s witch-hunts. The wrenching American Pastoral drew on the anarchy of the '60s and '70s. Swede Levov, glove manufacturer and good suburbanite, is devastated when his daughter becomes a fugitive terrorist.

Is Roth's new look meant to impress the Swedish Academy? Who knows, but who could blame him? Roth has already won every major book award, and literary-conspiracy theorists could point out that a wider world view may have helped Saul Bellow win a Nobel Prize in 1976. Like Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet and The Dean's December, The Human Stain makes a good case for the decline of humanism, civility and common sense. Roth also gives us a bleak look beneath the surface of the nation's current self-satisfaction. Silk's off-campus troubles include an affair with Faunia Farley, a 34-year-old janitor who is crazed because her two children were killed in a house fire while she was having sex in the driveway. Les, her estranged husband, must add that anguish to his tormenting memories of Vietnam combat.

No illusions are asked for and none are given in The Human Stain, defined at one point as the inevitable and indelible messy trail of our existence that no amount of pious instruction or punishment can remove. But Roth being Roth, the book title also suggests a certain blotch on a certain blue dress. In an unexpected routine reminiscent of Lenny Bruce, Bill and Monica are accused of failings more serious than sex at the office. His are unprintable. One of hers is that she represents a "generation that is proud of its shallowness."

Most novelists wouldn't or couldn't handle the variety of elements that Roth does here. Few have his radical imagination and technical mastery. Fewer still have his daring.