The Human Stain

The human stain

Philip Roth

Published: 2001

Tags: Best 2000-2009, Best 1001

Best 2000-2009ttt Best 1001ttt

SUMMARY:

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."

The Human Stain Philip Roth

VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL VINTAGE BOOKS

A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC.

NEW YORK

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 2001

Copyright © 2000 by Philip Roth

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, in 2000. This edition published by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The quotation from Oedipus the King is from the David Grene translation (Three Greek Tragedies in Translation, University of Chicago Press, 1942). The dictionary definitions on pp. 84 and 85 are from The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1973, p.1375). The author wishes to acknowledge as a primary source Gouldtown, a Very Remarkable Settlement of Ancient Date, by William Steward and Theophilus G. Steward (I. B. Lippincott Co., 1913).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Roth, Philip. The human stain / Philip Roth. p. cm.

ISBN: 0-375-72634-9

PS3568.O855 H8 2001

813'.54—dc21

00-063391 www.vintagebooks.com

Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

For R. M.

OEDIPUS: What is the rite of purification? How shall it be done?

CREON:

By banishing a man, or expiation of blood by blood...

—Sophocles, Oedipus the King

1 Everyone Knows

IT WAS in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk-who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of faculty—confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college. Twice a week she also cleaned the rural post office, a small gray clapboard shack that looked as if it might have sheltered an Okie family from the winds of the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s and that, sitting alone and forlorn across from the gas station and the general store, flies its American flag at the junction of the two roads that mark the commercial center of this mountainside town.

Coleman had first seen the woman mopping the post office floor when he went around late one day, a few minutes before closing time, to get his mail—a thin, tall, angular woman with graying blond hair yanked back into a ponytail and the kind of severely sculpted features customarily associated with the church-ruled, hardworking good wives who suffered through New England's harsh beginnings, stern colonial women locked up within the reigning morality and obedient to it. Her name was Faunia Farley, and whatever miseries she endured she kept concealed behind one of those inexpressive bone faces that hide nothing and bespeak an immense loneliness. Faunia lived in a room at a local dairy farm where she helped with the milking in order to pay her rent. She'd had two years of high school education.