62
PARTISAN REVIEW
Many reviewers pointed out the similarities between (fictional) Cole–
man Silk's situation and that of Anatole Broyard, the
New York Times
book reviewer who passed as white because he wanted to make his way
as a
writer,
rather than as a
black
writer, but we need not be drawn into
possibilities that, characteristically enough, Roth will neither confirm
nor deny. What matters is that the novel-qua-novel dramatizes that
Roth's characters tend to get more interesting the more riled up they get;
and when they finally let bottled-up anger loose, their tirades fairly soar
off the page. Silk is of course not the only character who finds himself
in this condition; Zuckerman has been so infuriated by the neo-Puritan–
ical witch-hunt surrounding the President Clinton and Monica Lewin–
sky affair that he can barely contain himself. The point, however, is that
Roth can contain himself, and he does this by shaping Zuckerman's
excess in a way that Lonoff would applaud, even if Clinton's behavior
would probably have given him pause. More important,
The Human
Stain
is part of a series of books in which Nathan Zuckerman is cast as
the one learning rather than the one forever tonguing a sore tooth over
a sour marriage or bad press among the Jews. In this case, he learns dur–
ing his long, tangled investigation into Silk's fascinating history that race
is more abiding, complicated, and, yes, tragic than either he (or Silk for
that matter) have imagined. Indeed, this is what makes
The Human
Stain
such a compelling American story, and why it completes the tril–
ogy of ruminations into American history and cu ltu re that began with
American Pastoral
(1997)
and
I Married a Communist
(1998).
Much, probably too much, of Roth's earlier work was given over to
the hysterics of justification and defense. Given the ugly personal
attacks that
Portnoy's Complaint
unleashed, it is hardly surprising that
Nathan Zuckerman, his resident mouthpiece, would spend so much
time-and so many novels-worrying about the costs that being rich
and (in)famous brought him. At one point Roth invents Milton Appel,
a literary critic who specializes in moral
gravitas
and who has been par–
ticularly hard on Zuckerman's fiction . Zuckerman/Roth then goes on to
give him the comic pasting he presumably deserves for being such a
pinch-face. The pinch-face in question is, of course, based on the late
Irving Howe, hardly a spokesperson for the easily offended Jewish–
American community. What so infuriates Appel-or Howe, if you pre–
fer-is that Zuckerman has no historical sensibility, that he comes from
what Howe, in a devastating put-down of Roth, called a "thin personal
culture." I realize full well that it is often difficult to keep the lines
between Roth and his fictiona l inventions straight, but this is a function
of Roth's style. Take the prefix "counter-," for example. Not only does
