(different cover)
I don't know why I picked this up many years ago...although I had read Portnoy's Complaint and enjoyed it. Hasn't this been filmed recently?

Now being read as it floats towards the top of mount 'to-be-read' - at the risk of mixing a metaphor!

(25/06) Roth seems to be the darling of the American literatti, and influential others, how else would he have so much critical acclaim, feature so heavily on the ‘1001 Books to Read Before you Die’ – but be almost unknown to your man/woman on the street (I know cos I’ve done a survey!)

Between this and my other Roth (Portnoy’s Complaint) I can pull out a few possible explanations; his books are well written, if a little heavy on detail/elaboration; they tackle important current themes & issues, although again I think in an overblown way, and last and not least; they seem to feature middle-age American man having sex a lot and/or behaving badly!

*spoiler*
The unbelievable - IMHO - Coleman ‘Silky’ Silk is an intelligent athletic black man who joins the segregated 1940’s navy as a white man. He then further cuts himself off from family, home and history by ‘becoming’ a white man, an energtic and successful father, classics professor and Dean at an Ivy League New England college. The book starts and finishes with Coleman in his early 70’s fighting a rearguard action against prejudice of various kinds, including racism, ageism, and an insidious educational elitism & separateness (not quite class).

So late in life to be battling against the world, his wife died, his children absent, estranged or both, Silk’s only confidante is a local writer and friend (the books narrator/’writer’), and a 34 year-old illiterate cleaner, the improbably named Faunia Farley.

The cinematic ending has the writer meeting Silk’s killer, Faunia’s psychotic ex-husband, as the latter fishes in a hole in the ice. Both men, to a greater or lesser extent cut off from life, trying to come to terms with the complex world of Coleman Silk, and in the latter’s case the crushing weight of his own experience and cruelties of fate.

The 'Human Stain' refers to an unconscious mark we leave in the world, '...we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen' - nice!

So only 6*’s – I thought it was far too wordy, full of incredible, i.e. not credible, people and circumstances. It does have some interesting things to say about modern America (e.g. Clinton, class & prejudice) and recent history, but not really worth the effort :(


And finally, to end a relatively positive note, a philosophical quote about the nature of cause & effect, the opposite of fate '...nothing that befalls anyone is ever too senseless to have happened'

RELEASE NOTES:

Going to the UnCon or for release in Brighton; maybe someone who is reading the '1001 books...' might like to add this to their collection?

Picked up from the aptly named 'Table of Temptation' at the Uncon.
Thought it might be onthe 1001 books list, and there was a helpful sticker on the front to confirm what I thought, so onto Mount Toobie it goes.

Thank you BGM

I don't get on well with modern American literary fiction, but I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it's just too far from my experience, or maybe I've been reading the wrong people, but somehow or other I just don't seem to get it and find the books hard going. So I was somewhat nervous about this, my first Roth novel. It was better than I anticipated, but that 4 would be a 7 on a 10 point scale - I'd say it was good, but there were definitely things I didn't like and others I didn't understand.

Coleman Silk's secret, the consequences of keeping it and the changes in perspective caused by its gradual discovery form a powerful story that I don't think has been enhanced by Nathan's moves into third person omniscient narrator. Oh it fills in the backstories clearly, but it's hardly subtle and very annoying when the prose shows a level of erudition in the writer that makes it clear he could do the same job in a less jarring and more consistent way. And Faunia. I can understand the anger and being content with hard but intellectually undemanding jobs, but not deliberately setting out to have people think she's illiterate. I can see it's meant to counterpoint Silk's voluntary concealment of his identity, but could there not be a more understated and credible parallel?

The Vietnam vet stuff was scary, and, in some ways, Les was the most credible character in the book: Coleman alternated between a cipher and a caricature, maybe because his emotions - other than his anger - are never quite unpicked; he does not have a scene with a crow to unburden himself.

So, although this wasn't bad, it still left me feeling that I'm too thick - or at least, like Delphine, too much of an old-fashioned European - to understand the Great 20th Century American Novelists. But I won't give up, I promise.