Philip Roth and the Literature of Gossip By Jeet Heer National Post (May 20, 2000). Review of The Human Stain by Philip Roth According to the gossip columnists, Mia Farrow, after her famous falling out with Woody Allen, briefly ended up in the arms of Philip Roth. This seems entirely fitting, since the two men have long lived parallel lives. Either Allen is the film-making Philip Roth or Roth is the Woody Allen of the American novel. Both were born to secular Jewish immigrant households, Roth in New Jersey in 1933, Allen in New York in 1935. Coming of age in the 1950s, the very height of Freud's influence on America, Roth and Allen became comedians with a psychoanalytical tinge. Their characteristic tone is American wise-guy slang played off of Vienna jargon, the exquisite timing of Groucho Marx mixed with the angst of Kafka. In their early work, Roth and Allen focused on intelligent but nerdy young men beset by over-bearing Jewish mothers and neurotic art chicks. Naturally, these young heroes clock a lot of time, comically and ineffectually, on the psychiatrist's couch. For this reason, critics have complained that Allen and Roth are excessively autobiographical, almost to the point of narcissism. Both men enjoyed (and have suffered from) early popular success. Roth lives in the shadow of his best-selling Portnoy's Complaint, published in 1969 and still the greatest novel of uncontrollable teenage masturbation — admittedly a small field. Similarly, there are still those who yearn for the early sweet and funny Woody Allen of Annie Hall (1977). Contributing to their loss of popularity is their woman problem, which is both personal and ideological. Both Roth and Allen have gone through well-publicized divorces, with their ex-wives writing tell-all memoirs. (Their own films and novels are often seen as attempts at settling scores.) More importantly, the rise of feminism has led to sharper criticism of their work. Books and movies that were once seen as sexually liberating are now re-interpreted as sexist, perhaps even misogynist. In the midst of personal crises and ideological criticism, the two men have continued to be prolific. Rarely does a year go by without a new Allen movie or two years without a fresh Roth novel. Unfortunately, their recent work tends to be viewed through the prism of tabloid gossip. For Allen, this is a sad situation since he continues to be a clever and entertaining filmmaker. Roth has a more serious problem. In the last decade he's been writing the best books of his life, arguably the best books of any living American writer. Yet his readership remains middling and his reputation mired in tabloid muck. The critical consensus on Roth is that he's a very talented minor writer, gifted at capturing the struggles between assimilated Jewish-Americans and their immigrant parents. He's accused of being too narrowly focused on his own experiences. Yet, starting with Patrimony (1991), a deeply-felt memoir of the death of his father, Roth stopped being a narrow writer. He used the formidable skills he honed as an autobiographical writer to start describing the larger world of history and politics. After Patrimony came Operation Shylock (1993), which brilliantly captures the Israel-Palestinian struggle through the eyes of the American Jewish diaspora. This was followed by Sabbath's Theater (1995). Perhaps Roth's finest work, it is a dark and maniacal reflection on the last half-century of the sex wars, on the journey from the nuclear family to sexual liberation to political correctness. Roth's most recent books form a loose trilogy that examines the personal costs of social upheaval, with emphasis on how politically manufactured scandals can wreak havoc on the best-ordered lives. Narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's long-time alter-ego, these books focus on recent American cultural conflicts. American Pastoral (1997) was set during the Vietnam War, while I Married a Communist (1998) dealt with McCarthyism. Roth's new book, The Human Stain, uses the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal as background for a study of race and sex in modern America. Roth's alchemy takes the dross of tabloid gossip and spins it into fictional gold. Coleman Silk, the tragic hero of The Human Stain, is a Classics professor whose life and reputation are destroyed by a series of false accusations, first of racism, then of misogyny. As an anonymous letter sent to him says, "everybody knows" what his sins are. Yet as Nathan Zuckerman unravels the life of his late friend Silk, he discovers that what "everybody knows" is wrong. Not only is Silk innocent of the crimes he's accused of, but he has a secret much more serious, which nobody knows anything about. Coleman Silk was born and raised as the light-skinned son of an African-American family in New Jersey. When his domineering father dies during the Second World War, the young Silk decides to re-make himself, by cutting ties with his family and passing as white. After time in the navy, Silk lets everyone think he's Jewish and enjoys the bonanza of post-war America: a successful academic career and a large white family. Yet at the end of his life, because everyone now thinks he's white, he is unable to defend himself against charges of racism when he makes a statement interpreted as a racial slur. Silk's remarkable story carries echoes of such American classics as The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby and Invisible Man, yet it is not merely a literary construction. Silk is so firmly rooted in a particular time and place that his life becomes entirely convincing. The long section dealing with his upbringing is the strongest part of the novel and its emotional core. Forty years of fiction writing have given Roth a mastery of his art. Consider how confidently and fluidly he conjures up a minor character, a young lawyer named Nelson Primus. "In a New England college town like Athena, where most all the professionals were... outfitted for work by L.L. Bean, this sleekly good-looking, raven-haired young man, tall, trim, athletically flexible, appeared at his office every morning in crisply tailored suits, gleaming black shoes, and starched white shirts discreetly monogrammed, attire that bespoke not only a sweeping self-confidence and sense of personal significance but a loathing for slovenliness of any kind — and that suggested as well that Nelson Primus was hungry for something more than an office above the Talbots shop across frrom the green. His wife was teaching here, so for now he was here. But not for long. A young panther in cufflinks and a pinstriped suit — a panther ready to pounce." In this passage we have a miniature version of the novel. A man is first described in social terms with his clothes. Underneath the clothes is the personal man, seen in terms of his attitudes and ambitions. Finally, the man is stripped to his core animal self. On a much larger scale, the same process is repeated on Coleman Silk. The process of stripping down a strongly social man to his core hidden self makes for a superb novel. The Human Stain does have its flaws. A few of the minor characters (a deranged Vietnam vet, a trendy French academic) are unconvincing. Roth is also a bit too polemical when he goes after trends he does not like, such as political correctness and therapeutic culture -- targets he has skewered far more effectively in other books. For this reason, the book is a slight notch lower than Sabbbath's Theater or Patrimony as a work of art. The strength of the novel is in Roth's convincing portrayal of Silk's relationships with those around him -- his black family, his white family, and his lovers. As a man with a hidden self, Silk behaves differently to each of these groups and is perceived differently by them. Great novels are the ones worth arguing about. There are already arguments about Coleman Silk being conducted in Slate magazine and in The New York Times. Some readers see Silk as a great American individualist who reinvents himself, in the tradition of Gatsby. As Zuckerman says, "All he'd ever wanted, from earliest childhood on, was to be free: not black, not even white -- just on his own and free." Other readers will want to echo the sentiments of Silk's sister, who labels him a "traitor to his race." Reading Roth reminds us that arguing about literature is more interesting and more important than scurrilous gossip.