The Human Stain

Dear Judith.

PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...SINGLE PAGE

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

I returned to Philip Roth in the '90s after a long period of avoiding his work. Like every other guy who was once a teen-ager, I was devilishly amused by Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint, the latter published in 1969, during my senior year in high school. Remember the way young Portnoy could reach orgasm with a few, savage strokes from that skillful right hand? But maybe you had to have once been a 15-year-old boy to even register that ...

I found much of the later Roth unbearable. All that writing about himself writing and about someone impersonating him and about himself writing as he impersonates himself was way too solipsistic. I agree with you that he turned a corner in Patrimony (1991) when he returned to his roots to write about his father's demise. Roth sees a shift in his work as well, but he marks the change at American Pastoral (1997), a big, roiling, handsome book set in the '60s in his native Newark, where a perfect family is rendered to bits when a promising daughter turns into a terrorist. American Pastoral let the world into Philip Roth's head, and all to the good. Writing about the '60s has obviously allowed him access to themes and ideas that once overwhelmed him. I Married a Communist and The Human Stain continue in this vein, though I wonder about whether or not the mental shutters are creeping closed again in The Human Stain.

I was amused in the early years when Roth's co-religionists attacked him for giving what they saw as an unfortunate view of his family in particular and the Jews in general. But Roth, as you point out, has never gotten over this. The Human Stain is redolent with Roth's sense that membership in an ethnic or religious identity group crushes individualism. But the Rothian format of choice--in which the individual struggles against group identity in the service of selfhood--does not fit the case of Coleman Silk, the fair-skinned black man who jettisons his family and his membership in the Negro race to live his life as a white. Tens of thousands of black people have crossed the line to live as "white" in the United States since the rise of the mulatto elite in the South in the 1850s. These people certainly exist (I have known a few of them, up close and personal), but their internal struggles are nothing like the one that Roth proposes for Coleman "Silky" Silk in The Human Stain. Roth portrays Coleman's decision as a product of his obsession with secrecy. Coleman likes lying about who he is and takes a quasi-erotic pleasure in it. He feels loss of stimulation when he takes a black lover and tells her everything, living openly as a Negro. As Roth writes (p135): "It continues to be fun, but some dimension is missing. ... it fails to feed the conception of himself that has been driving him all of his life." The jolt returns when he meets his wife-to-be, the Jewish Iris Gittelman (whom he chooses, oddly enough, because her hair is kinkier than his own "white" hair). As Roth continues, "He's got the elixir of the secret, and it's like being fluent in another language."

This is a clever formulation and allowable in the game. But the vast majority of black people who decide to live as "white"--and many still do, yes even after the millennium--do so to escape limits that even liberal white society places upon them. Limits that bar them from jobs, clubs, neighborhoods. Unconscious filters that cause them to be seen as inherently less bright or competent than the white folks around them. Roth picks up brilliantly on this point, when he illustrates a lighter-skinned black boy at Coleman's school who is given a lower grade because the teacher registers him as black--but goes back to fight for the grade he deserves.

Some writers have suggested that the Silk character was based on Anatole Broyard, the longtime book critic of the New York Times who was outed as black by Skip Gates in The New Yorker a few years back. But Roth says in a forthcoming interview with Charles McGrath in the New York Times Book Review that the novel sprang from an episode in his past. He met a fair-skinned black woman in the 1950s, when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. It seems to have amazed him to meet people who were "lost" to their "white" relatives on account of a little black blood--even though this phenomenon is common in American history. Roth barely tips his hat to a century and a half of literature about these so-called "new people"--the children of Sally Hemings, for example--who slipped across the line to live as white because, as "black," they were destined to live at the margins of society with no rights that white folks were bound to respect.

I agree with you on this point: Roth's manipulation of Coleman Silk affords the novelist an opportunity "to revisit the great subject of his early novels: his ambivalence about being Jewish." Roth has a right to fixate as he wishes. But by worshipping at the cult of the self and minimizing the impact of history, Roth turns both race and Coleman into little tchotchkes. Yes? Or no?

PRINTE-MAILRECOMMEND...RSS

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

This week, a discussion of Philip Roth's new novel, The Human Stain (click here to buy it, and here to read an excerpt). Judith Shulevitz writes Slate's "Culturebox" column. Brent Staples writes editorials on politics and culture for the New York Times and is the author of Parallel Time (click here to buy it).

SPONSORED CONTENT