He enlists in the Navy as "white", attends college as "white", and marries a white woman as "white". This review discusses it. Houghton Mifflin, 2000, 352 pages The Human Stain Book Summary and Study Guide. One of those books where an aging author insertcollege professor rediscovers his penishimself by screwing a younger chick. For the first third of The Human Stain I thought similarly, but as the book progressed, and the story didn't in any depth, I eventually grew weary of the world view and the over-writing, and skimmed to the end. It's also about the way that carefully constructed new personas, no matter how scrubbed and burnished, can't erase the stain of the original. His book is called The Human Stain. . One of those books where an aging author insertcollege professor rediscovers his penishimself by screwing a younger chick. Log In. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Book Review: The Human Stain, by Philip Roth . The Human Stain is a novel of sweeping ambition that tells the stories not just of individual lives but of the moral ethos of America at the end of the twentieth century. That's because … Ernestine tells Zuckerman about how Silk's family divorced him, and is amazed that Coleman didn't reveal his race when charged with racism. It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The Human Stain bears all the scars and stretch marks of a work that has tried to condense the necessarily literary elements of an esteemed novel into a feature film format. The Human Stain By PHILIP ROTH Reviewed by LORRIE MOORE "[Its] hero-fool is arguably the most socially intriguing character to whom Roth has ever devoted himself. In the turbulent summer of 1998 (while the country reacts with prurient dismay to the Bill … A light-skinned negro decides to "pass" as white and to do so successfully, he separates himself from his family. And this isn't a movie like 'The Crying Game,' which is really about its secret." . In what ways does The Human Stain resist this "conventionalizing" need for closure? The Human Stain Philip Roth, 2000 Knopf Doubleday 384 pp. ISBN-13: 9780375726347 Summary Winner, 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award . Roth's extraordinary recent productivity (the prizewinning Sabbath's Theater, 1995, and American Pastoral, 1997) continues apace with this impressively replete and very moving chronicle of an academic scandal and its impact on both the aging professor at its center and his friend—alter ego novelist Nathan Zuckerman. The first book of the group, American Pastoral , won the Pulitzer Prize; the second was I Married a Communist . This review discusses it. Detailed plot synopsis reviews of The Human Stain; Narrator Nathan Zuckerman, a successful writer, has retired to the Berkshires near the small New England college of Athena, and becomes friendly with a neighbor named Coleman Silk. "There's no way we can contain the secret, and we're not even trying to," the film's producer, Tom Rosenberg, told me at the Toronto Film Festival. How does it alter the classical unities of beginning, middle, and end? The Human Stain: A Novel (American Trilogy Book 3) and millions of other books are available for instant access. After a clunky beginning, in which crusty Nathan Zuckerman is carrying on about the orgy of sanctimoniousness surrounding Clinton's Monica misadventures, his new novel settles into what would seem to be patented Roth territory. Note: "The Human Stain" contains a significant secret about one of the characters. The Human Stain is the final book in a loosely connected trilogy of novels about postwar America that Roth has produced over the last four years. The book is set in late 1990s rural New England.Its first person narrator is 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, who appeared in several earlier Roth novels, and who also figures in both American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), two books that form a loose trilogy with The Human Stain.