The Human Stain

The Human Stain
by Philip Roth
read: circa 2006
Guardian 1000 Novels

In a lecture on Philip Roth's The Human Stain, Professor Amy Hungerford said:

The very fact of a person's otherness to you means that there is always something fundamentally hidden about them.  And that arises from the simple difference between one consciousness and another.

Perhaps this is the fundamental problem of writing, and perhaps this is the fundamental challenge of being a human. We always spend infinitely more time in our own heads than we do in anyone else's, even those we are closest to. Roth gets this, and arguably the loose trilogy which The Human Stain concludes (also consisting of American Pastoral and I Married a Communist) is thematically linked by the attempt of narrator (and Roth alter-ego) Nathan Zuckerman to understand another man he admires. Professor Hungerford notes some homoerotic undertones in The Human Stain, but Zuckerman's infatuation with Coleman Silk parallels his idol worship of Swede Levov and his son-like affinity for Iron Rinn. Zuckerman is attracted to these men in a (mostly) non-sexual way, and his attraction manifests itself in his efforts to put himself in their shoes, to imagine their thoughts and feelings, to create their life stories out of his research and his imagination. Roth is exploring why literature even exists, and by employing Zuckerman as an intermediary he makes an argument for the noble futility of the craft.