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jessby 's review for:
The Human Stain
by Philip Roth
There's no doubt that Roth can pen a good sentence and he knows a lot of words. He is confident with metaphors and all that fancy stuff. Unfortunately the plot was just too boring.
A stubborn, old, argumentative professor gets fired for an alleged racist slur from which he refuses to back down. His big secret, which the reader discovers quite early on, is that he is a black man himself masquerading as a white man. And with his termination from college begins the downward spiral of his life. He begins an affair with a much younger woman, who ticks all the boxes for vulnerability (eg illiterate, battered) and obviously this does little to endear him to the reader. The most interesting subject in this novel for me was the ex-husband of Prof's mistress, an Vietnam vet with PTSD.
Roth has some interesting thoughts on the watering down of education and the absurd lengths people go to appear politically correct, but mostly it just feels like your dad is ranting at you. For pages and pages.
A stubborn, old, argumentative professor gets fired for an alleged racist slur from which he refuses to back down. His big secret, which the reader discovers quite early on, is that he is a black man himself masquerading as a white man. And with his termination from college begins the downward spiral of his life. He begins an affair with a much younger woman, who ticks all the boxes for vulnerability (eg illiterate, battered) and obviously this does little to endear him to the reader. The most interesting subject in this novel for me was the ex-husband of Prof's mistress, an Vietnam vet with PTSD.
Roth has some interesting thoughts on the watering down of education and the absurd lengths people go to appear politically correct, but mostly it just feels like your dad is ranting at you. For pages and pages.