2024 the best novels of the 21st century review

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ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

The American psyche is channeled into the gripping story of one man. This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Philip Roth at his very best.

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 his most virulent accuser.

Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with Faunia Farley, a woman half his age with a savagely wrecked past--a part-time farmhand and a janitor at the college where, until recently, he was the powerful dean of faculty. And it's not the secret of Coleman's alleged racism, which provoked the college witch-hunt that cost him his job and, to his mind, killed his wife. Nor is it the secret of misogyny, despite the best efforts of his ambitious young colleague, Professor Delphine Roux, to expose him as a fiend. Coleman's secret has been kept for fifty years: from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understand how this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, had fabricated his identity and how that cannily controlled life came unraveled.

Set in 1990s America, where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciation and rituals of purification, The Human Stain concludes Philip Roth's eloquent trilogy of postwar American lives that are as tragically determined by the nation's fate as by the "human stain" that so ineradicably marks human nature. This harrowing, deeply compassionate, and completely absorbing novel is a magnificent successor to his Vietnam-era novel, American Pastoral, and his McCarthy-era novel, I Married a Communist.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003JFJHP2
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books (May 10, 2000)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 10, 2000
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 756 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 379 pages
Reviewer: Just_a_Guy
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Interesting Read
Review: I found this story intriguing and creative. Sadly, one needs to step into the past to find books not totally governed by the gatekeepers of today's politically correct standards. Philip Roth is a great writer and taxes my vocabulary. Beautiful sentences, and takes one deep into the scene allowing the reader to visualize the story. I doubt that even Philio Roth would get this book published in today's environment.

Reviewer: Melissa Galligan
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Roth's Best Work...
Review: I will say this first: I want desperately to write. But when I read authors like David Foster Wallace, John Irving, Johnathan Franzen and most of all, Philip Roth, I feel so inadequate and untalented. Philip Roth does best what Wallace and Franzen do (did) brilliantly: describe with such intensity the human condition. Where Wallace failed (in my opinion) was to see the forest amidst the trees; his brilliance was mired in the details and somehow got lost in those same details...he seemed, as many creative geniuses are, simply broken by his gifts--by the personal, impossible-to-attain expectations those gifts cost him. Roth was bestowed with both literary genius and groundedness; he was blessed, in a manner of speaking, by fate or a good upbringing. 'The Human Stain' is simply a marvel...a novel of the human condition where there are no heroes nor villians, only human beings who are stained by life and the circumstances in which they find themselves, and behave and seek what they believe, sometimes erroneously, what will fulfill them. In the end, Roth shows what we all should realize: we are all the same. I named my son for this novel's protagonist, "Cole," because I want him to know he is not defined by society's labels, but by the limits he sets for himself. This is my second reading of 'The Human Stain,' and I will read it again...when time wears away my memory of the spectacular and haunting memories of the characters Roth brought to vivid life the first and second time I read it. This novel is truly amazing in its portrayal of the human condition--the Human Stain--and there exists not a soul on Earth who can put an English sentence together quite like Philip Roth. He is the voice of all of our voices, made manifest in his poetic, horrific, brave, humble, narcissistic, enraged-and-enraging characters' voices. Yet...they are real. They are who we are.

Reviewer: Bruce J. Wasser
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: somber, searing "Stain" illuminates impact of moral anguish
Review: Philip Roth's serious indictment of late twentieth-century America, "The Human Stain," is much more than a novel. On one level, Roth examines the devastating impact of a false accusation on an exemplary man's character; in this regard, "Stain" is little less than brilliant. Serious and compassionate, angry and vituperative, despondent and triumphant, the novel traces the shattered remnants of the life of an intellectual whose existence disintegrated as the result of a malicious and spurious charge. Professor Coleman Silk emerges as a fully developed protagonist, and his sufferings are genuine and wrenching. Yet, Roth spends considerable time weighing in on other compelling issues of this era: race, Vietnam, feminism, sexual expression and identity. When the author treats these issues, "The Human Stain" reads less like a novel and more like a series of extended essays on the condition of American culture at the turn of the twenty-first century. Therein lies the sole weakness of an otherwise essential, absorbing and necessary novel.I can attest from the depthless sadness of my own heart that Roth's descriptions of what happens when a good man's reputation is trashed as a result of a patently bogus accusation is not only accurate, but unflinchingly profound. When Roth asserts that "there is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person," he wisely acknowledges its "insidious" nature. So profound is the sense of outrage, guilt, anger, frustration and spiritual isolation on the victim, "its raw realism is like nothing else."As I know from personal experience, once an accusation sticks, the truthfulness of the charge becomes irrelevant. Its stench and stigma invade and consume your life. We'd like to believe that our friends and colleagues have learned the horrific lessons of McCarthyism; the reality is that victimizers and perpetrators have only refined the techniques of guilt by accusation. Friends abandon you and link hands with foes in an alliance of expedience, indifference and feigned innocence and ignorance. Silk is "humiliated and humbled and destroyed...over an issue everyone knew was [expletive deleted]." Yearning for a voice of solidarity, hoping for a link with an ally, wishing for someone to take a stand with him -- Silk instead is left "to nurse the crushing sense of abandonment that festered into the wound" that would come to absorb his life.Philip Roth chooses, however, a more ambitious goal than a mere character study, and his novel suffers for that decision. Roth sacrifices narrative drive for extended soliloquies; in some instances single paragraphs consume four pages of print. Despite the enormous intellectual integrity and emotional impact of his novel, Roth's prose can leave the reader's eyes glazed with his seeminly interminable disquisitions on race, feminism, Vietnam or identity."The Human Stain" is brutally painful, profoundly disquieting and intellectually challenging. It is also frustratingly unfocused and excessive in verbiage and length. Ignore the weaknesses of this novel. It is one of the few novels I consider to be absolutely essential to undertand what we have become as a people. Roth's chastening lessons will provide little comfort, but they must be heard and understood.

Reviewer: Arthur
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: J’ai adoré ce livre qui fait parti d’une collection que je vais acheter entièrement

Reviewer: Sahilheera
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Delivery to time

Reviewer: Ylenia Vinci
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Libro eccezionale e vagamente cerebrale come tutti i romanzi di Roth. Sono innamorata.

Reviewer: Nancy E. Gilbert
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: In the "Human Stain" Coleman Silk's successful but complicated life unravels as we learn more about his secrets. Roth's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, shows us the costs of those secrets. His righteous anger on being called racist becomes his burden as we learn that he has "passed" as white for years. We watch him grow up and can understand how his fierce desire for success separates him from his family origin. We see him entangle himself with disapproval from all directions -- his family, his career, and his colleagues. Yet, on another level, we suffer with him as he struggles with his growing anger and sorrow.

Reviewer: Horatio
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Philip Roth is a creative genius... Every page opens up into a mini novel of characters, events, histories, backstories and so on. Unlike anything I've read in a long time. No wonder it was a prizewinner