BOOKS
Born Again
THE
HUMAN STAIN. By Philip Roth. Houghton Mifflin Co.
$26.00.
PHILIP ROTH'S LATEST NOVEL,
The Human Stain,
forms the third, and
perhaps concluding, volume of his recent "historical" novels or chroni–
cles
(American Pastoral
[1997]
and
I Married a Communist
[1998]),
while at the same time harking back to his great novella
The Ghost
Writer,
published twenty years ago. All of these books are narrated by
Nathan Zuckerman. In
The Ghost Writer
Zuckerman is a wide-eyed
twenty-three-year-old writer, flush with his first success, on something of
a pilgrimage to the New England backwoods (actually, the Berkshires)
where in ascetic isolation his aesthetic father E.
I.
Lonoff has settled.
Now, in
The Human Stain,
Zuckerman has out-Lonoffed Lonoff. He
has learned altogether too much about the writer's life and is happily
launched into self-imposed exile in, yes, the Berkshires; aging, inconti–
nent, impotent, living in a two-room cabin sans prostate, women, ger–
bils, dogs, or cats, having arrived at last at a spareness that Lonoff
himself could have envied.
As a kind of monk, Zuckerman is hardly an actor at all in the drama
of the novel but rather a rapt listener to the stories of others, in partic–
ular to the story of his neighbor Coleman Silk, the long-time reforming
dean of nearby Athena College. Silk, someone with whom Zuckerman
has previously had no more than a nodding acquaintance, one day
shows up on Zuckerman's doorstep and insists that he write the story
of his (Silk's) career, which the dean himself has been trying to write
without success, under the title
Spooks.
It
turns out that, besides Lonoff,
Silk has been the only other Jew on the Athena faculty and the only Jew–
ish dean of faculty in the college's history. His reforming days abruptly
ended by the departure of the college's president for a bigger job at a
more imposing school, Silk returns to the faculty after sixteen years out
of the classroom as something of an anachronism (that is, as a human–
ist), and soon enough his return explodes into scandal when he asks out
loud about two students who have never showed up for his classics
class-"Do they exist or are they spooks?" The two absent students, it
appears, are black; Silk is accused of racism; foe and friend on the fac–
ulty wash their hands of him; in the fierce craziness that ensues, Silk's
wife
dies-"They
killed her!" Silk rages....You get the picture.
But in one of a number of wicked twists in the novel, Zuckerman
discovers that Silk has a secret that puts everything in his story in an
