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illinoise 's review for:
The Human Stain
by Philip Roth
this was….. lame. i’ve got mixed feelings but overall i thought it was pretty lame.
roth is right about a lot of things. he’s also wrong about a lot of things. he’s right, for example, about american purity culture and its absurdity. but there’s so much going on in this book that i found so tiresome and pretentious and uninteresting. for such a genuinely talented novelist and prose writer, i found it to be shockingly heavy-handed about its messages, first off. the lack of subtlety is painful in some places and it becomes sooooo evident on multiple occasions that roth is using his characters as mouthpieces to preach about the current state of our world. this was especially apparent to me in ernestine’s monologue near the end, but it shows up in a lot of places and i found it embarrassing. especially because a lot of the preaching was “back in my day we didn't have to worry about 'political correctness' and these damn kids took responsibility and didn’t blame the establishment for their struggles”…. etc. okay. so much of it is just SO self indulgent and it’s painful. multiple times the author just could not resist directly spelling out what the characters and their relationships are meant to represent and symbolize. that part where ernestine talks about the man who bled to death and roth feels the need to be like “oh hey this kinda sounds like the irony in COLEMAN’S story!”…. sir, do you think i’m dumb. i know. i could have figured that out. trust your readers!
the entire storyline about false accusations of racism is just… tired. it feels dismissive and mean-spirited when there is so much racism to dissect in academia. instead, he creates a false scenario that is SO absurd just to highlight how white professors are the real victims of these new “political correctness police” going on a witch hunt. it’s silly. it’s not accurate. it’s not helping anybody. this kind of thing doesn’t happen. you know what DOES happen? countless non white students being pushed out of academia because it is such a fundamentally racist and uncomfortable atmosphere. and to that end, the elephant in the room and coleman’s secret: i don’t care what a white man has to say about race relations in america. i just do not, and for him to write this whole book trying to examine it was a choice. to me the commentary was very clearly lacking because there’s a lot he doesn’t know, COULDN’T know because this is not his lived experience. so what’s the point? it’s half baked anyway, even if he writes about it with a wince-worthy zeal and over-familiarity.
speaking of lacking commentary. Oh My God i have never read a book that fails the bechdel test quite as miserably as this one does. these female characters are beyond atrocious. every single woman in this book (w/ the exception of like, coleman’s sister and mother) either is sleeping with him or wants to sleep with him. delphine is very clearly supposed to be an angry feminist punchline. faunia is the only woman the narrative respects and it’s at the expense of every single possible trauma a woman can endure. of course she was molested. of course. there’s no other way for a woman to be traumatized. there’s no other backstory a woman can have. the endless descriptions of delphine’s short skirt and thighs and faunia’s breasts and her “unmistakably female neck” and it just goes on and on and it’s so dehumanizing and it’s boring as FUCK. yeah yeah, it’s satire. i recognize that roth was trying to satirize misogyny. i just also think he has a lot of misogyny of his own that he doesn’t even seem to be entirely aware of and it bleeds ALL over his female characters and his attempts at sexist commentary. like it is dripping blood. it’s very bad.
i give it two stars because this is a really intricate and interesting story and the writing is beautiful (whenever he isn’t talking about a woman.) i’m not about to deny that this man can write. he’s killer. i'm intrigued by it as a product of its time, a portrait of the clinton-lewinsky era america; more than i'm exactly offended, i'm inquisitive about what this book can tell us about roth, about race and gender in writing (how not to do it, I suppose), about "great american novelists," about the time it was written. maybe i got unlucky and i’d like other roth better—this was my first and i read it for a class. i don’t know if i care enough to try.
if you want to read a story about the american 1990s, read little fires everywhere. if you want to read a story about black americans who pass as white, read nella larsen. if you want to read about half decent female characters, read……. literally anything else.
roth is right about a lot of things. he’s also wrong about a lot of things. he’s right, for example, about american purity culture and its absurdity. but there’s so much going on in this book that i found so tiresome and pretentious and uninteresting. for such a genuinely talented novelist and prose writer, i found it to be shockingly heavy-handed about its messages, first off. the lack of subtlety is painful in some places and it becomes sooooo evident on multiple occasions that roth is using his characters as mouthpieces to preach about the current state of our world. this was especially apparent to me in ernestine’s monologue near the end, but it shows up in a lot of places and i found it embarrassing. especially because a lot of the preaching was “back in my day we didn't have to worry about 'political correctness' and these damn kids took responsibility and didn’t blame the establishment for their struggles”…. etc. okay. so much of it is just SO self indulgent and it’s painful. multiple times the author just could not resist directly spelling out what the characters and their relationships are meant to represent and symbolize. that part where ernestine talks about the man who bled to death and roth feels the need to be like “oh hey this kinda sounds like the irony in COLEMAN’S story!”…. sir, do you think i’m dumb. i know. i could have figured that out. trust your readers!
the entire storyline about false accusations of racism is just… tired. it feels dismissive and mean-spirited when there is so much racism to dissect in academia. instead, he creates a false scenario that is SO absurd just to highlight how white professors are the real victims of these new “political correctness police” going on a witch hunt. it’s silly. it’s not accurate. it’s not helping anybody. this kind of thing doesn’t happen. you know what DOES happen? countless non white students being pushed out of academia because it is such a fundamentally racist and uncomfortable atmosphere. and to that end, the elephant in the room and coleman’s secret: i don’t care what a white man has to say about race relations in america. i just do not, and for him to write this whole book trying to examine it was a choice. to me the commentary was very clearly lacking because there’s a lot he doesn’t know, COULDN’T know because this is not his lived experience. so what’s the point? it’s half baked anyway, even if he writes about it with a wince-worthy zeal and over-familiarity.
speaking of lacking commentary. Oh My God i have never read a book that fails the bechdel test quite as miserably as this one does. these female characters are beyond atrocious. every single woman in this book (w/ the exception of like, coleman’s sister and mother) either is sleeping with him or wants to sleep with him. delphine is very clearly supposed to be an angry feminist punchline. faunia is the only woman the narrative respects and it’s at the expense of every single possible trauma a woman can endure. of course she was molested. of course. there’s no other way for a woman to be traumatized. there’s no other backstory a woman can have. the endless descriptions of delphine’s short skirt and thighs and faunia’s breasts and her “unmistakably female neck” and it just goes on and on and it’s so dehumanizing and it’s boring as FUCK. yeah yeah, it’s satire. i recognize that roth was trying to satirize misogyny. i just also think he has a lot of misogyny of his own that he doesn’t even seem to be entirely aware of and it bleeds ALL over his female characters and his attempts at sexist commentary. like it is dripping blood. it’s very bad.
i give it two stars because this is a really intricate and interesting story and the writing is beautiful (whenever he isn’t talking about a woman.) i’m not about to deny that this man can write. he’s killer. i'm intrigued by it as a product of its time, a portrait of the clinton-lewinsky era america; more than i'm exactly offended, i'm inquisitive about what this book can tell us about roth, about race and gender in writing (how not to do it, I suppose), about "great american novelists," about the time it was written. maybe i got unlucky and i’d like other roth better—this was my first and i read it for a class. i don’t know if i care enough to try.
if you want to read a story about the american 1990s, read little fires everywhere. if you want to read a story about black americans who pass as white, read nella larsen. if you want to read about half decent female characters, read……. literally anything else.