Roth's new novel, ''The Human Stain,'' loosely belongs to a trio that includes

these last two novels. They have many things in common: a nostalgia for old
Newark; a handsome hero-fool; the handsome hero-fool's tell-it-like-it-is
brother; and the presence of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary
doppelgnger, who is observer, bit player and imaginary channeler of all
three novels. Moreover, although none of these novels is a political one per
se, each is set in a politicized landscape, positioning a messy family drama
within the politically charged setting of the presidential years of Nixon,
Eisenhower and Clinton, respectively. Of the three, ''The Human Stain'' is, to
this reader, the most interesting book; its particular hero-fool is arguably the
most socially intriguing character to whom Roth has ever devoted himself.
Jewish identity crises are, of course, Roth's signature subject:
his fictional portraits tend to be of Jewish men fashioning for
themselves independent ways of being Jewish; authenticity
and existential freedom are his themes, and his narratives
generally proceed by argument, often in
the form of dialogue. In ''The Human
Stain'' Roth gives us Coleman Silk,
classics professor at fictional Athena
College in western Massachusetts. Silk is
a neighbor of Nathan Zuckerman, as
Gatsby was of Nick Carraway, and ''was
also the first and only Jew ever to serve
at Athena as dean of faculty.'' But Silk's
Nancy Crampton/ Houghton
Mifflin
Jewishness contains a secret. As it turns
out, he is not actually Jewish at all. Roth Philip Roth
has given us a man struggling with a
truly independent way of being Jewish:
pretending to be Jewish. Being Jewish, for Coleman Silk,
means being white. Silk is actually a very light-skinned black
man, the son of a New Jersey optician, who, in his early 20's,
seeing he could pass for white, decided to go ahead, disown
his family and pass. ''To become a new being,'' thinks
Zuckerman. ''To bifurcate. The drama that underlies
America's story, the high drama that is upping and leaving -and the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands.''
When Silk tells his mother his decision, her stoicism is heartbreaking. To see
her future grandchildren, she says, she'll just sit quietly on a park bench if
Coleman will walk them by. ''You tell me the only way I can ever touch my

grandchildren is for you to hire me to come over as Mrs. Brown to baby-sit

and put them to bed, I'll do it. Tell me to come over as Mrs. Brown to clean
your house, I'll do that.'' It is a valedictory between mother and son on a par
with Hector and his weeping mother (just before Hector is slaughtered by
Athena). Not for nothing is Coleman Silk a classical scholar. His favorite
book, in fact, is the ''Iliad.''
The cost and purposefulness of Silk's reinvention is extraordinary, even
within the fictional world of an author who has written valentine after
valentine to the idea of trespass. ''Did he get, from his decision, the
adventure he was after, or was the decision in itself the adventure? . . . Was
it the social obstruction that he wished to sidestep? Was he merely being
another American and, in the great frontier tradition, accepting the
democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes
to the pursuit of happiness? Or was it more than that? Or was it less?'' It is a
decision that Silk's fate comes to mock profoundly. Roth gives Silk a Jew's
life but also a Jew's death -- that is, he is singled out as a Jew by an antiSemite and marked for death. The message of the kaddish, Zuckerman
notes, is ''a Jew is dead. Another Jew is dead. As though death were not a
consequence of life but a consequence of having been a Jew.''
In a novel abounding with harsh ironies, one of the most peculiar is the one
the novel begins with, the one that has Silk summoning Zuckerman before
him. Professor Silk, we come to learn, has been forced into retirement. Two
years before, he used the word ''spooks'' in class, meaning ghosts or
phantoms, but it was mistaken for a racial slur and a complaint was brought
against him. When he refused to apologize in any way whatsoever, and
instead grew more and more furious, his resignation became inevitable. This
incident, he feels, is his tragedy (slaughtered by Athena!), for he devoted his
life's work to the college, as both teacher and esteemed dean. He blames the
scandal for the death of his wife, Iris (in the midst of the controversy she
died of a stroke), and in his sorrow and fury continues to alienate not just his
colleagues but his children and friends. He begins writing a book called
''Spooks'' and asks Zuckerman to help him with it.

ROTH READS FROM

'THE HUMAN STAIN'
"The summer that Coleman took
me into his confidence about
Faunia Farley and their secret was
the summer, fittingly enough,
that Bill Clinton's secret emerged
in every last mortifying detail -every lastlifelike detail, the
livingness, like the mortification,
exuded by the pungency of the
specific data. . . . In the Congress,
in the press, and on the
networks, the righteous
grandstanding creeps, crazy to
blame, deplore, and punish, were
everywhere out moralizing to
beat the band: all of them in a
calculated frenzy with what
Hawthorne (who, in the 1860s,
lived not many miles from my
door) identified in the incipient
country of long ago as 'the
persecuting spirit . . .'"
-- from the first chapter of "The
Human Stain."

Although Zuckerman does not

directly help Silk, he begins
tentative investigations on behalf
of his own book, ''The Human
Stain,'' a title that clearly refers
not just to the taint left upon this
earth by our species but also to
the pigmentation that so
arbitrarily colors human skin.
Zuckerman's imagining of Silk's
story leads him to other ones,
especially that of Silk's new
girlfriend, Faunia Farley, who is a
janitor at Athena College and is a
woman so unformed by societal
expectations, so unimaginably
assaulted by life, that she is
Philip Roth reads from "The
accepting of everything Silk could Human Stain" (2000)
possibly reveal about himself. ''It
was the closest Coleman ever felt to anyone! He loved her.
Because that is when you love somebody -- when you see
them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous.
Not heroic. Just game.''

The novel's weakest parts involve hatefully rendered interior monologues of

two characters, the first being Lester Farley, Faunia's psychotic ex-husband
and Vietnam veteran, whom Roth seems to construct from every available
cliche of the Vietnam vet. The second is Delphine Roux, a lonely young
classics professor who dresses like a schoolgirl and becomes the target of
Roth's fierce but unconvincing satirical commentary. (In what can only be
described as a kind of pedophobia, the villains of Roth's last two novels
were schoolgirls -- spoiled and oddly dangerous to middle-aged men.) The
book indulges in the sort of tirade against political correctness that is far
drearier and more intellectually constricted than political correctness itself.
Roth, usually fond of both sides of an argument, fails to extend
understanding toward -- and only makes fun of -- the possible discomfort of
minorities or women in settings like Athena, where prejudice may be trickily
institutional and atmospheric, causing events like the ''spooks'' utterance to
be seized hold of and overinterpreted. Such seizing is like nabbing Al
Capone for tax evasion -- neither accurate nor wrong. And despite the
protests against Black History Month, brazenly placed in the mouth of Silk's

African-American sister, the novel shows that Zuckerman's education would

indeed have benefited from such a month.
he novel is strongest and is even magical when Zuckerman is actually
present on the page -- and, in this case, in the room with Coleman Silk,
observing him with articulate infatuation. Silk is quick, lithe, charismatic, in
ways indomitable, ''an outgoing, sharp-witted, forcefully smooth big-city
charmer, something of a warrior, something of an operator, hardly the
prototypical pedantic professor of Latin and Greek.'' At one point they foxtrot together on Silk's porch. ''Come, let's dance,'' says Silk, barechested and
in shorts, hearing a Sinatra song on the radio.
''But you mustn't sing into my ear,'' says Zuckerman, who, once he is
dancing, adds, ''I hope nobody from the volunteer fire department drives by.''
The homoerotic moments in ''The Human Stain'' are not ''overtly carnal'' but
playful and warmhearted. At one point the book even contemplates the
sexual allure of Milan Kundera -- from the point of view of Delphine Roux,
but still: as a writer, Roth knows how to have fun.
In addition to the hypnotic creation of Coleman Silk -- whom many readers
will feel, correctly or not, to be partly inspired by the late Anatole Broyard -Roth has brought Nathan Zuckerman into old age, continuing what he began
in ''American Pastoral.'' Alone, prostateless, now outside the sexual fray,
Zuckerman has become a melancholic poet of twilight and chagrin; the
combination of perspicacity and weary tranquillity becomes him as a
narrator. He is like that beloved American character, the retired private eye,
brought back in for one more case. When he accidentally befriends an
African-American, the national story of race opens up for him in all its
particularities -- or, rather, one fascinating set of them. He says of Silk: ''The
dance that sealed our friendship was also what made his disaster my subject.
And made his disguise my subject. And made the proper presentation of his
secret my problem to solve. That was how I ceased being able to live apart
from the turbulence and intensity that I had fled. I did no more than find a
friend, and all the world's malice came rushing in.'' ''The Human Stain'' is an
astonishing, uneven and often very beautiful book.