Adam Mars-Jones THE HUMAN STAIN by Philip Roth (Jonathan Cape)
Indian summers don’t come much more blazing than the surge in Philip Roth’s literary production that stretches from Sabbath’s Theater in 1995 at least as far as the last pages of this new novel. Yet while the intensity of this run of four books has been constant, their polarity is unpredictable. American Pastoral was nearly as ferocious a defence of the American way of life as Sabbath’s Theater had been an attack on it. The hero of The Human Stain is Coleman Silk, a classics professor who resigns in disgust when charged with racism – he used the word “spooks” to refer to two students who had never turned up for class, not knowing they were black and forgetting that the word had an insulting secondary meaning. He starts an affair with Faunia Farley, a functionally illiterate faculty janitor and part-time farmhand with a history of deprivation and suffering. She is 34 and he is 71. There is a scattering of Hawthorne references, but this is more than a recasting of The Scarlet Letter. From the outside the liaison seems exploitative to the edge of abuse – what could he find in a woman like that to treat with respect? – when in fact “their coupling is the drama into which they decant all the angry disappointment of their lives”. The relationship becomes public while another scandal is breaking in its own slow-motion fashion – the American president and what he did or did not do with Monica Lewinsky. The national mood, as well as the local, is an “ecstasy of sanctimony”, though an obsession with purity is a perversion in its own right. At the high-water mark of the Lewinsky affair, the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, dreams of a giant banner wrapped round the White House, in the manner of the artist Christo, bearing the message “A Human Being Lives Here”. Was there any more to the scandal than that? Roth’s output for a decade and more was preoccupied with alter egos and decoys, self-referential games that had rapidly diminishing returns for everyone, it seemed, but the author, frowning contentedly in his hall of mirrors. The reflexiveness of The Human Stain is more functional. Zuckerman, a reclusive novelist, befriends Silk and hears some of his confidences. Zuckerman is a usefully contrasting figure, having retired from the erotic arena even before a prostate operation interrupted his functioning, but for most of the book he recedes to a vanishing point. The internal topology of the book is paradoxical and satisfying, like that mysterious, self-violating shape, the Klein bottle, an impossible object that challenges our ideas of inside and outside, surface and edge. Towards the end Zuckerman becomes more intrusive – we learn that he is writing a book about Silk called The Human Stain – and that he will have to move away from the area, for his own safety, before it is published. One extended passage, from Faunia’s viewpoint, and containing the title phrase (“Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen – there’s no other way to be here”), seems awkwardly interjected, for once, out of the preoccupations of narrator or author. Yet the great thrill of the book is Roth’s ability to fill his creatures with their own vitality. The initial situation seems a little pat – the irresponsible accusation of racism inviting the conclusion that political correctness is the deeper problem. The patness turns out to be deceptive, and the book takes on the issue of race in America as seriously as a novel ever has. In the years since Portnoy’s Complaint Roth’s writing has explored a harsh, borderline, nihilistic notion of sex. His carnal philosophy is comfortless but cogent, seeing desire not as a search for wholeness but as the force that disrupts the artificial unity we make of our experience – “the redeeming corruption that de-idealises the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are”.
It’s puzzling, then, that Roth or Zuckerman should be so surprised by the “tyranny of propriety” and the prurient reaction to the Lewinsky scandal. In the opening pages of the book he comes close to moralising about moralising, preaching a sermon against sermons. If sex were simply recreation, it would be grotesque for people to rail against it so much. But puritans actually agree with novelist or narrator in seeing it as an inherently transgressive drive. It’s hardly a crushing criticism of this mighty novel to suggest that it connects more vitally with its other recurring reference point – Greek tragedy – than with the headlines of 1998. The dark sun of his gifts shines on.