The Human Stain

I have a problem with Philip Roth.  It’s not that he’s humourless and his books are dry, although both are true.  I don’t enjoy reading him because I don’t think for a second he is writing for anyone remotely like me.  Roth’s books are about old successful American men who are largely unable to understand how privileged they are.  It doesn’t make for sympathetic characters and it doesn’t make for a fun read.  The Human Stain would be so much a better book if its main character were even remotely likeable.  I might of care about his moral quandary if that were the case instead of spending a couple of hundred pages wishing he’d shut up. 

The Human Stain is about Coleman Silk; a fair-skinned black man who decides to pretend to be Jewish for the rest of his life to avoid discrimination.  Despite Silk’s fairly poor grasp of history, there are no consequences to this.  One day he is black, the next he is white; all he loses is a family he doesn’t seem that keen on anyway.  He gains a wife and kids, a successful career (ironically ended by accusations of racism) and a frankly sickening sense of entitlement.  He seems to spend a good deal of his time lying to his wife; then scapegoating his former employers for her death.  She dies of a stroke.  It is no-one’s fault.  He is only able to get over this by sleeping with Faunia Farley, a woman 37 years younger than him.  Naturally, when his kids find out he doesn’t understand why it’s a big deal.  Almost all of this is forgivable, but near the beginning of the book he is speaking about Faunia (who was sexually abused as a teenager) and describes her sexual prowess as, “a gift of the molestation.”  I kind of can’t give a fuck about the problems of anyone who uses that phrase.

Okay, so the book biased me against its main character twenty-odd pages in.  That doesn’t mean it’s a bad book.  I’m the first to admit that I’m reading it from a feminist slant and Silk, if not Roth, is anything but a feminist.  But all the female characters are just terrible.  The only one with any spine or agency of her own is Delphine Roux; a young academic who teaches at the college Silk is fired from.  She actively dislikes Silk and scores points with me already for this alone.  And then it turns out that she’s so anti-Silk because he’s her perfect man.  Him!  It’s not believable.  Fine, I’ll accept that no-one questions his race, but why does no-one notice that Silk’s an utter twat-bag?  Well, no-one except his clever (and all but absent) brother.  Any ill-will his former colleagues hold for him is over ridden by his death and yes, if they dislike him it is for the wrong reason, but he doesn’t ask or earn their forgiveness.  His great secret is not revealed.  His death doesn’t prove he was not a racist, and yet he is atoned.

I’m also not that keen on the book’s narrator Nathan Zuckerman.  Roth uses him in a couple of his other books only one of which (American Pastoral) I’ve read.  Zuckerman is an author with an unfortunate tendency for hero worship.  Despite my earlier criticism of Roth, I remember quite liking American Pastoral, but parts of it are so similar to this book that I want to scream.  Roth needs to write something that doesn’t involve being a Jewish man from Newark.  I mean, he’s really taken that write what you know concept and just run with it.  Even The Plot Against America is essentially about the same thing.  I don’t think Roth has any concept of how privileged he or his characters are or any idea about women at all.  And it is infuriating to read. 

I’ve just started on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch.