Set in the summer of 1998, with Bill Clinton's impeachment lingering in the background, ‘The Human Stain’ chronicles the scandal and downfall of Coleman Silk, a celebrated classics professor at New England's small Athena College. Coleman silk has been also depicted as racist. When Silk asks about two absent students, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" a specious charge of racism is brought against him, and in the harsh fight that follows, his life begins to unroll. After his wife's death, which he attributes to the harassment they have borne, Silk resigns, cut all ties with the college, and begin a liaison with a thirty-four-year-old janitor, Faunia Farley. This, too, is revealed and turned into a public scandal by Delphine Roux, the aspiring Yale-educated literary theorist who led the attack against Professor Silk over his alleged racism. But Silk has another secret, a secret he has kept from his colleagues and friends, even from his wife and children, for fifty years, a hidden secret more scandalous than anything his foes would have visualized. It is the stunning revelation of Silk's real identity and his hidden history that the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, tracks in ‘The Human Stain’. In so doing, he unveils a life that is both simply fascinating and yet intensely representative of an essential American impulse.

Roth's lookalike Nathan Zuckerman tells Silk's story. It is Silk, who comes banging on Zuckerman's door, just after his wife died. Complications arise from Silk's pillorying, demanding that Zuckerman write the story of Silk's disesteem and humiliation; insisting, like some peasant supplicant to a warlord, that Zuckerman be the instrument of Silk's vengeance. The way Zuckerman is drawn into Silk's defense is the way in which Roth immerse himself to defend Clinton against his enemies. Roth's narrative pose is not just a defense of Silk and, by extension, of Clinton but of the broader idea that people lead sloppy, complex lives. To see a human being through a single lens, to define him through a single byte of information is not only to misinterpret him but to do injustice to him.

Just like the Clinton scandal, here there are lies within secrets and secrets within lies. Characters cry out at once for denial, for pity, and for sympathy. Maybe Silk is the victim of some serious unfairness. Silk's lover, Faunia Farley, ran away from home at age fourteen to escape her stepfather's sexual predations, but she also lost her two children in a fire she most likely could have prevented had she not been servicing a man in a truck just outside her trailer. The narrative races like a spirit, successively in custody of innermost interval of each character's mind. Roth shovels this multiplicity of voices with precision and grace, in spite of a few false notes. What is most impressive about The Human Stain, though, is how simply and exquisitely the story reveal without resorting to reductive proportion. It suggests at first a simple irony that Silk, a black man should be deceitfully charged with racism. However, the consequences of Silk's deception or betrayal are deeper than that. Silk's children, especially his daughter and youngest son, are damaged, and broken, unable of establishing lives and individuality for themselves.

“Against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, when, as Zuckerman writes, "the smallness of people was simply crushing," Coleman Silk, a Jewish professor of Classics at Athena College, is hounded from his post. Two of his students haven't shown up by the fifth week of the semester and Coleman asks his class, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" Both students turn out to be African-American and complain; and since the Classics Department is run by Professor Delphine Roux, a Frenchwoman who is a complex mix of vanity and insecurity, and since Coleman has made his enemies over the years, and since--Roth seems to suggest--this brand of political correctness is to '90s college campuses as Red-baiting was to the McCarthyite '50s, the case drags on for years. When Coleman's wife suddenly dies, he blames the scandal and demands that Zuckerman, the great writer, tell his story. Eventually, Coleman, 71, becomes involved with Faunia Farley, a college janitor half his age; but even this last stab at happiness cannot be condoned in puritanical America, for Coleman receives a threatening letter: "Everyone knows you're sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age." A greater threat comes from Faunia's ex-husband, Les, a Vietnam Vet who blames her for the death of their children.” The Human Stain

Though Silk is the hero of the piece, in many regards there's not much to acclaim him. Here's the scene just after Silk coolly tell his mother of his plans to marry a white woman and break off from his skin, his family and his past. He was in a sense ruining her thoughts. At bottom this is as much a novel about outcomes as it is a study of human intricacy. Silk made his decision to become a white man and in doing so he cut himself off from his family and cut his children off from their legacy, a decision that he made by himself for himself has, like any decision, consequences that could not be predicted. Though Roth's prose is rejuvenated by rage and at times tainted by self-righteousness, ‘The Human Stain’ is not a enraged book. Though Roth point daggers at moralists and therefore at himself, he neither self-justifying nor self-abnegating. The Human Stain is a quagmire of big contradictory ideas that facade one very small idea that we are redeemed by our compassion and our humanity because if we are not then nothing redeems us.

Conclusion:

The conclusion in Philip Roth's acknowledged American trilogy, The Human Stain looks into the misleading boundaries between truth and falsehood, past and present, perception and reality, and offers a moving reflection on the limits of what we can really know about each other.

“What is "the human stain" of the book's title? An obvious candidate is the racism that compromises public and private morality in America. But racism is only one example of the overall problem of evil. In his work here as elsewhere, Roth tells us that evil originates in the human quest for purity. When people commit themselves to becoming pure--e.g. by which Roth means better, more noble or sincere than the next person--whether it is through political correctness, racism, anti-Semitism, religious fanaticism, utopianism, or even restrictive sexual morality, they sow seeds of evil. There is no question that "purity" in this sense is the archfiend that stalks Roth's moral world.
 

Roth is a terrific stylist. His language is complex, expansive, mellifluous, literate, and remarkably impure. As is the case with Saul Bellow, Roth's sentences are a world of their own, a joy to read. However, despite the wit and beauty of his writing, I often find Roth's novels difficult to take. While Roth might consider fanaticism the root of evil, his persona (in the voice of Zuckerman or otherwise) is anything but moderate.” [Commentary, The Human Stain]