Movies - The Human Stain

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	Movies - The Human Stain

The Human Stain (2000) is a novel by Philip Roth. The Human Stain was made into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman in 2003.

Plot summary

The Human Stain takes place in the late 1990s in rural New England. The first person narrator is 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, a character in previous Roth novels, including The Ghost Writer (1979) and Zuckerman Bound (1981). He is largely an observer rather than the protagonist of the novel. He had prostate cancer and, consequently, was operated on, an operation that has left him both impotent and incontinent. Now he has embarked on the final part of his life and lives as a recluse in the Berkshires in New England. His neighbor is Coleman Silk, but the two men do not know each other until Silk's life is turned upside down and he asks Zuckerman to help him. The name Coleman Silk is a play on many archetypal colors. Cole (like coal) is black. The word man is placed between that and silk, a soft, white substance known for its delicacy. The man, Coleman Silk is literally a man in balance between black and white.

In April 1996, at 69, Coleman Silk is still professor of classical literature at Athena College, Athena being a small town in the area. He is presented to the reader as an assimilated Jew who has a wife, Iris, and four grown-up children: two sons, both college professors of science on the west coast, married with children, and the twins, Mark — who has become an Orthodox Jew writing religious poetry and hating his father — and Lisa, a burned-out teacher in New York. Silk is accused of having made a racist remark about two African-American students who were absent from his class and whom he had never seen before (This part of the novel is reminiscent of David Mamet's play Oleanna). He called them "spooks" &mdash, suggesting they were ghosts, but not considering that spooks is also an old-fashioned epithet for blacks. In the ensuing upheaval, several of his colleagues turn against Silk and support the African-American students. Silk feels monstrously wronged, and though he could have gone on teaching, he decides to resign, which again is misinterpreted by many people and also the local press. Suddenly, at the height of his trouble, his vigorous wife Iris dies of a stroke. Silk is devastated and accuses those who have been persecuting him as murderers. It takes him about two years to calm down and adapt to the new situation: being retired and single. He wants Zuckerman, who is a professional author, to write a book about the whole affair, but the latter refuses. So Silk spends several months writing an account he calls Spooks, but when he has finished he realizes that it is not really intended for publication. Nevertheless the two men become friends.

Gradually, we learn about Coleman Silk´s past. As a young man, even during the first years of his marriage to Iris, he was a womanizer. Now, as a widower, his old yearning for women flares up once again, and, at 71, he starts an affair with Faunia Farley, a 34-year-old cleaning woman from the college who also works on a dairy farm. To increase his potency, he starts taking Viagra. Faunia, who enjoys their relationship as much as he does, has been victimized all her life: She grew up rich but was sexually molested by her stepfather. She escaped his clutches, married Lester Farley, a Vietnam War veteran ("a trained killer thanks to the government of the United States"), and had two children with him. As a dairy farmer, Farley has not been successful, mainly due to his never having coped with what he saw and did in the war and, as a result, his drinking problem. As a husband, he seems to be hopeless. In a terrible accident their two children — eight year-old Rawley, a girl, and five year-old Les Junior — die: Their house catches fire while Faunia is out having an affair. Farley, who has been stalking them, sees the fire but is too late: The two children are asphyxiated. Years later, when she meets Coleman Silk, Faunia, at 34, is seemingly an illiterate who hardly has any worldly possessions except her kids' ashes, which she keeps under her bed.

Now that Farley realizes that his wife is having an affair with a "kike" twice her age ("Who else has a wife sucks off an old Jew? Who else!"), he starts stalking them, too. Time and again Silk sees a grey pickup truck near his home but each time he is unable to identify the make or the driver. Eventually, Farley attacks the lovers.

Other things go wrong as well for Coleman Silk. He realizes that he is losing touch with his children. When he phones his favorite child, 38-year-old Lisa, she sounds detached and for the first time answers her father's question with a "Nothing", which upsets and hurts him. Also, he gets an anonymous, handwritten letter from one of his former colleagues, Delphine Roux, accusing him of sexually exploiting an underprivileged. Silk believes his privacy has been invaded, and is almost as enraged as during the "spooks" affair.

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