Unlike many survivor's accounts, Weil's novel (which I assume from the biographical material prefacing this work is probably quite autobiographical) does not deal with any aftermath to the Holocaust. The book breaks off just as the narrator chooses to hide and therefore conitnue his fight against the never-named but omnipresent "them."

The rapacity and cunning of "them" remind you of Art Speigelman's "Maus," and I wonder if he read this novel earlier. The picture of daily life outside the camps is told with details which constantly circle back to the narrator's lost (married) lover, and understandably, these obsessions only fade gradually, as the transports impinge more directly upon the Jews.

The metaphor of the circus, in which the only animals are people, is sustained admirably in this section of the novel, and the translation conveys well the bare irony of the minimalist style. Almost childlike in its observations, the tone of the novel may be off-putting to some readers wanting more elaborated insight. It took me about sixty or seventy pages to get used to the rhythm, and only in the halfway point did it fully compel me. But I read it in one sitting.

Why? By its steady momentum, you are carried into the horror even as it does not overwhelm you. Through the control of the protagonist, you too gain control over the situation, and resolve to resist the temptation to give in to complacency.

The characters remain in your memory: Roubitschek and his onion, the narrator's almost comic aunt and uncle who blame the whole Nazi invasion it seems on their nephew, Ruzema's memory, and most of all, Tomas the cat. Rarely has a pet assumed such an evocative place in such a story. The daily task of finding food when you can buy so little. The scene of the names being called for transport in the synagogue, the depictions of the grave digging detail, the narrator's shattered home, and the growing despair that battles against the realization that the slow advance of the Allies means that people "out there" are actually fighting to save the narrator: all these add up subtly to a powerful testimony.

The narrator must wear a star that shines only at day, that gives no warmth, that is pinned over one's own heart, but over the course of the novel, he realizes that his status as the "other" frees him (almost like a Camus character) to live.
Worthy of comparison to Imre Kertesz' "Fateless," and Primo Levi's memoirs, this overlooked novel deserves much wider attention. Read it and see why.

Weil takes his character Josef Rubicek through budding romance, poverty on the outskirts, danger, demeaning treatment, and the daily effort to survive, in Prague during the Holocaust. Rubicek is slow to understand what is happening around him, but eventually realizes the significance of the regulations that get announced daily, the restrictions that are put on his world, and the anguish of those he encounters. It's a very moving book throughout, even when Rubicek is lost in reveries over a romantic liaison which has been ended by the authorities.

I read 'Night' by Elie Wiesel, and although I sensed the horror of the Holocaust, I didn't actually feel it. Some time later I read 'Life with a Star', and finally felt it, deep inside. This book is an incredible description of a Jew's life outside the camps during the war. I highly recommend it.

Closer to three-and-a-half stars. "Zuckerman Unbound" is a solid addition to Roth's oeuvre; the story of Nathan Zuckerman's meteoric rise to fame following publication of "Carnovsky" (a novel reminiscent of "Portnoy's Complaint") is amusing, especially if one considers it at least partly based on Roth's own literary notoriety. The novel is not as uniformly great as its predecessor, "The Ghost Writer," yet it possesses a quiet charm all its own, alternately funny and heartbreaking. The novel's solemn (indeed, grim) ending illustrates the real-world impact of an author's vocation in fiction. There's much to enjoy about this book, whether or not one is a fan of Roth in general.

What's to say when I'm talking to a bunch of people who've already read the book? Can I talk anybody into reading this novel, this author? Well, we can celebrate him anyway. Roth's genius, his daimon (excuse me) is in the final shape his talk-talk-talking-mind carves. He is not a miniaturist, a poet (by title) or a songmaker - he is a garrulous detailer who knows by instinct the important bumps and curves of whatever psychic "thing" he is trying to talk to, reach. Hence, his insight is not PRIMARILY philosophical or psychological - but beautifully AESTHETIC. Aesthetic not by strong distillation, but by long breaths - width informed by depth (as opposed to, of course, depth informed by width - the poet, songmaker) His talent is his talent - his genius, (and thus his very uncomfortableness,) is in his knowing when to stop. Which gives rise to this book and its dark shape, told comically. Presumably he felt that its unsettled and unresolved shape needed the overarching redress of additional books - - but it really does not. Each book of "the trilogy" is its own separate animal, and can be enjoyed without yoking them together - - though Roth's doing so seemed to be necessary for his peace of mind. But anyway, enjoy - and go off and write your own.

Roth's prose, as usual, isn't exactly easy reading, but after one of his books, you somehow see the world from a different angle. Often funny, with occasional bitterness, Roth writes another work of art.

David Kepesh, the aforementioned professor, towards the end of "Professor of Desire," contemplates the introductory lecture he is to deliver to his class on comparative literature:

"Indiscreet, unprofessional, unsavory as portions of these disclosures will surely strike some of you, I nonetheless would like, with your permission, to go ahead now and give an open account to you of the life I formerly led as a human being. I am devoted to fiction, and I assure you that in time I will tell you whatever I may know about it, but in truth nothing lives in me like my life."

This passage may as well be an introduction to this book, one of Roth's most potent and stirring novels from his earlier days. Through the chronicles of David Kepesh's early life, Roth examines the paradoxes of love and desire, the bridges between literature and life, and our nearly-lunatic search for identity.

In this book, we follow Roth's familiar character David Kepesh from his childhood in the Catskills hotel owned by his parents, to a post-college year of sexual freedom in Scandinavia, to a tempestuous/disastrous marriage to Helen Baird, followed by a winter of despair, and concluding with his relationship with Claire Ovington, marked by a love that is blemished by waning desire.

In the end, although more questions are posed than can ever be answered, Roth's novel can resonate with anyone who has ever grappled with the mysteries of love and self-discovery - namely, everyone. And along the way, the reader can revel in the wit, wry humor, and intellect adored by every Roth fan.

David Kepesh, the aforementioned professor, towards the end of "Professor of Desire," contemplates the introductory lecture he is to deliver to his class on comparative literature:

"Indiscreet, unprofessional, unsavory as portions of these disclosures will surely strike some of you, I nonetheless would like, with your permission, to go ahead now and give an open account to you of the life I formerly led as a human being. I am devoted to fiction, and I assure you that in time I will tell you whatever I may know about it, but in truth nothing lives in me like my life."

This passage may as well be an introduction to this book, one of Roth's most potent and stirring novels from his earlier days. Through the chronicles of David Kepesh's early life, Roth examines the paradoxes of love and desire, the bridges between literature and life, and our nearly-lunatic search for identity.

In this book, we follow Roth's familiar character David Kepesh from his childhood in the Catskills hotel owned by his parents, to a post-college year of sexual freedom in Scandinavia, to a tempestuous/disastrous marriage to Helen Baird, followed by a winter of despair, and concluding with his relationship with Claire Ovington, marked by a love that is blemished by waning desire.

In the end, although more questions are posed than can ever be answered, Roth's novel can resonate with anyone who has ever grappled with the mysteries of love and self-discovery - namely, everyone. And along the way, the reader can revel in the wit, wry humor, and intellect adored by every Roth fan.

Philip Roth's 1972 novella, "The Breast", a take-off on Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis", introduced us to David Kepesh, a professor of Literature, who one morning wakes to find himself transformed into an enormous mammary. David Kepesh reappears as the title character of Roth's 1979 novel, "The Professor of Desire". Besides borrowing characters from the earlier story, Roth works in lots of references to Kafka, includes a long episode describing Kepesh's pilgrimage to Kafka's grave in Prague, and at one point compares Kepesh's relation to his body to K.'s relation to the authorities of "The Castle":

". . . I can only compare the body's single-mindedness, its cold indifference and absolute contempt for the well-being of the spirit, to some unyielding, authoritarian regime. And you can petition it all you like, offer up the most heartfelt and dignified and logical sort of appeal - and get no response at all. If anything, a kind of laugh is what you get."

I wasn't able to buy all this Kafka business. To me it seemed pasted-on and extrinsic to the spirit of the rest of the novel. But this is quibbling. "The Professor of Desire" is a delightful story, in which Philip Roth exuberantly displays his many quite un-Kafkaesque gifts. First among them is a magical gift for characterization; it seems that every character in this novel, and there are many, springs effortlessly to life as a complete individual, from Herbie Bratasky on the first page to Mr. Barbatnik on the last.And then there's Roth's eerie gift for dialogue. His characters' words seem always to flow from their own personalities, not the author's, and their speeches are often masterpieces of comic invention.

Though perhaps it falls short of Roth's best, this is a wonderful book. I heartily recommend it.

I have the utmost respect for Wallace Stegner as a writer, but this collection of essays takes provincialism to far greater lengths than even his great works of local fiction. Stegner's definition of the West is based on an almost arbitrary measurement of rainfall--less than 20 inches per year. Any area that gets more than that (like Seattle) isn't the West. And that's not all. Cities don't count either, for the cities are just the East brought west in the form of middle-class America. So, the West for this author is the unspoiled, unsettled arid West, which dramatically excludes huge portions of the region that properly belong to it. If Spokane isn't the West, what is it?

I love the region, so I appreciate this author's attempts to capture its essence. But I can't get passed the overly romantic and exceptionally patronizing attitiude of the writer. It's as if he's saying: I understand the West. You don't, so I'm going to tell you. I'm a Westerner. You're not, so quit pretending. I live in the West. You don't, so stay the hell out. The whole thing comes off as reverent, but also xenophobic.

"Easterners are constantly being surprised and somehow offended that California's summer hills are gold, not green. We are creatures shaped by our experiences; we like what we know, more than we know what we like. ... Sagebrush is an acquired taste."
Stegner taught writing at the University of Wisconsin and at Harvard, but he had a strong sense of place and his place was the West. He accepted a position at Stanford University where he spent many years, and became, what many consider to be, 'the dean of Western writing' (by which we do not mean that he wrote "Westerns"). In this volume, Stegner sacks the Hollywood myths, and addresses the far more fascinating realities of the West. Featured here is a studied and caring investigation of what lies between the 98th meridian and the Pacific Ocean; of the land's great beauty and vulnerability to human foolishness. The compilation of essays also includes the author's reflections on his own life and work in the West, and examines critically the work of several significant literary "witnesses" of the American West. He reminds the reader of what criticism is: "A critic ... is not a synthesizer but an analyzer. He picks apart, he lifts a few cells onto a slide and puts a coverglass over them... His is a useful function and done well, ... may even give the reader the illusion of understanding both the product and the process. But ... whatever they can analyze has to be dead before it can be dissected ... critical analysis explains everything but the mystery of literary creation."
If you enjoy the works of John Steinbeck or Norman Maclean, or the powerful but fragile beauty of western lands, the essays collected in the Lemonade Springs are highly recommended.

Stegner has a way with words, and this collection of excerpts and essays shows them off. In fact, reading Stegner in these discrete chunks may be the best way to appreciate him - especially if you read it out loud, letting the cadences of his writing drive the tempo. This is true for the fiction, non-fiction, and even the literary analyses he includes here. This was the book that got me excited about reading Stegner.

It has been several years since I read this hilariously filthy book, but it still remains in my extensive personal library. I've read it a few times, and always found it highly amusing................Alexander Portnoy is a nice Jewish boy, who somewhere between barmitzvah instruction, and young adulthood, becomes mentally and sexually warped. The book unfolds as Portnoy confesses all to his psychiatrist. The accounts of childhood experiences locked in the bathroom with his "Dumb as a pudding" sister Hannah's brassiere as a sex toy, to his adult sexual obsession with "Shikses" (yiddish word for non-jewish female) are fall off your reading chair hilarious. Portnoy raves on about sex, his parents, and anything else he can blame for his perversity. Roth gives you a very good handle on just who Alex Portnoy is, and as with any great story, whether it be film or written, fact or fiction...you care about the characters. ................Although I've read "Goodbye Columbus" and "When She Was Good" among other Roth titles, this one remains my favorite by this famous author. I was always curious to see the movie version of "Portnoys Complaint", I understand Karen Black is one of the stars, and have read negative feedback about the film in general. Unfortunately, I've yet to see it for myself, as I never go by other opinions if I am curious enough to check something out. ............."Goodbye Columbus" I liked in it's film version. That was a hit in it's time, while the Portnoy film is an obscurity. Frankly, I can't imagine a movie of this book. Then again, the absurdly humorous Jewish mother/sex farce "Where's Poppa" by Robert Klane, was pretty good as a George Segal/Ruth Gordon outing. ............If you want to read a funny, entertaining book with some off-beat bedroom humor thrown into the mix, here's a classic novel by a classic author that will delight and possibly disgust you at times, but Roth surely won't bore you for a second.

I had heard that Roth's prose often reminds readers of JD Salinger, and that Portnoy is merely a Jewish version of Catcher in the Rye. Well...yes and no. In Portnoy, Roth explores the similar themes of adolescenct alienation, self-doubt and loathing, and social displacement which Salinger also regards. Yet Roth does so much more in this ranting and irrefutably hysterical portrait of the American Jew as a young man. Lewd, crude, and achingly funny, this book demonstrates what Jewishness, and the Jewish experience, is like for so many boomer generation males in this country. Portnoy's struggles with his demanding family ("Why can't you stop being so selfish and give us some grandchildren" - remarks his mother), his self-loathing resulting from being unable to derive satisfaction from anything other than emotionless sex, and his overpowering anger at being helpless to change any aspect of his life as it barrels forward, are what makes this novel a must read.

After reading PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, I find myself scrambling to recall whether I have ever read another American novel anywhere near as hysterically funny. Maybe Tom Robbins's SKINNY LEGS AND ALL is in the same ballpark (and I've yet to read CATCH-22) but Roth simply had my head spinning while I read this book. My jaw is still on the floor, in fact.

Esoterically, this book is one long rant about the joys and (more heavily) the anguishes of growing up Jewish in America in the forties and fifties. It's 1966 and successful civil servant Alexander Portnoy is on the psychiatrist's couch trying to get out all his Oedipal, inferiority, and sexual fetish complexes.

That infamous masturbation scene in the movie AMERICAN PIE? A direct descendent of Mrs. Portnoy's piece of liver!

More deeply, if you can stand it, this book seriously examines the struggle of growing up with smothering parents: Alex's both put him on a pedestal and criticize everything he does. He's unmarried at thirty-three in part because of all the neuroses his parents have bestowed in him--so why doesn't he get married and have children already? Alex lets us know in pornographic detail why. Speaking of pornographic detail, Alex spends plenty of time on his ultimately doomed affairs with (mostly Protestant) women. Most of his anger at growing up Jewish in a Christian-dominated society he takes out on these "shikses"--variously called Pumpkin, the Pilgrim and the Monkey--this is not a politically correct book from the feminist perspective. It does, however, raise serious questions about what it means to be a human being, as opposed to just a hyphenated-American.

PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT is brash, profane and wonderful. It is certainly not for the faint-hearted or those with what were once considered "polite sensibilities." But it is a very moral book in it's own way. Portnoy knows he's no hero, and Roth doesn't portray him as such--in some ways the book is one big joke. Every effective joke has its kernel of truth; Roth's have the whole can of corn.

I never expected a novel that is one long rant to inspire a review that is one long rave, but there it is.

Though definitely not his best work, _Goodbye, Columbus_ is an impressive first effort from one of the best authors of the second half of this century. Throughout the book one can sense the style Roth was creating for himself, and though this book doesn't exhibit that breathless virtuosity of prose, that mastery of the English language, of his later books, it's still a nice read.

The novella _Goodbye, Columbus_ is a love story and a quiet meditation on a different type of "class struggle," and a better example of Roth's style -- not to mention a better story -- than his next two books, _Letting Go_ and _When She Was Good_. The first of the five stories, "The Conversion of the Jews," is a bit sick, but entertaining for that very reason. The middle three stories are a bit lackluster, but the book ends in high style, with "Eli, the Fanatic," a story that manages to be both a moving story about conflicting loyalties (the goyim or the Jews) and a hilarious portrait of a nervous breakdown.

I would not recommend this book to those just starting to read Philip Roth (try the Zuckerman Bound trilogy instead), but for anyone wondering where Roth's career started, it's an excellent book.

My favorite Roth book. There's a yearning here in a young man who loves a girl he really has nothing in common with. Roth captures the summer romance of youth. During the day, hanging out at her parents house and eating their food without feeling they have to pay for anything. And at night, he steals into her bed, sneaking into movies that are half over. It has a real fifties-early sixties feel, and I highly recommended the film (When I first saw it as a teenager it stunned me because I never saw a romance in films that didn;t work out because of differences--I mean it's Hollywood right, doesn;t everything end happily and people see the error of their ways through love. Well no.) I think the book is an excellent way for anyone to remember their own summer loves. It's plaintive, irritating, and awkward feel--really, the way I recall those moments too. Being in love but trying to find yourself as life comes between you and your youth. I re-read this book every year, and my only complaint is the male character isn't fleshed out enough, but then I think that is the way of being young and self-conscious, the adult world shifts by you, you feel detached and an observor. But passion is passion and it's there. And rueful but appreciated memories.

Philip Roth is a great writer. Yeah, we've all heard this at one point or another (at least those of you taking and wasting time to read a review of one of his books). This was Mr. Roth's first published work, a short novel and five short stories that forced us to realize this man had arrived violently on the scene as a powerful literary force. Let's talk about the stories in this collection:

"Goodbye, Columbus" is, honestly, without the standard hyperbole so many people slab into reviews such as this, one of the best novels I have ever read. It was written by a twenty-five year old man who was only going to get better (as his work from the mid-1980s to the present firmly establishes) yet here we have the wisdom of our great American gods. It is a beautiful story, funny and painful and filled with truths anyone in those recent post-college, still-not-finding-one's self perspective could learn and grow from. I love this story, and it is filled with agonizing self-analytical material that shows who it is we are dealing with, the intellect and the passion, the savagry and the wit. There are not too many single stories of American authors I could recommend more highly than this book, in particular the five page sequence from which this story gets its title. It is haunting and true, one of the rare glories of English in narrative form. If for nothing else, get this book to read this lovely novella. It is, profoundly, a masterpiece (not a term I use lightly either, being the bitter cynic I am--check out other reviews I've written--I can get rather mean)>

Among the other stories, the most celebrated is "Conversion of the Jews", and for good reason. This is another gorgeously written tale about self-discovery and the agony of those questions all beginning with 'Why?' Here is a story questioning faith, questioning the idea of God or a higher power that has been transformed into such a makeshift mythology by all the varying faiths, why bother, it asks, what is the point and is it real and who are we and why are we here and why why why why why? This is a great story.

Sadly, this collection is begun with the two tales I have so widely praised. The remaining stories are good--very good, in fact, but following up "Goodbye, Columbus" and "Conversion of the Jews", something is lost as they are unable (quite understandably--what 25 year old author is going to maintain such sustained greatness? It took Roth 27 years to return to this passion in "The Counterlife", and then he expanded from there, getting better and better progressively, and never looking back)to keep up the fascination. Now this is not to say there is anything wrong with these other stories. Had they been all there was in this collection I would have looked back with nodding approval and said, "Hey, this guy is going somewhere." But they are not the first two stories and are almost awkwardly placed as an aftermath of a developing great author. Get this book urgently, and read them all. Just don't allow yourself to be soured by the slightly lesser material following the first two masterworks.

I felt the novel to be boring, a simple rehash of Mr. Roth's earlier work, and sloppily written at that. This is too bad, for Roth, at his best, is nothing less than a genius: his novella THE BENNY PODA YEARS was, for me, his finest work since SHYLOCK. But the present novel fails to achieve Roth's previous level of innovation.

It's useful to think of "The Dying Animal" as a coda to Roth's magnificent trilogy of books on post-war America--"American Pastoral", "I Married a Communist", and "The Human Stain." It functions much the same way as "The Prague Orgy" did as that novella summed up his earlier "Zuckerman Bound" trilogy. The themes of the earlier books are cast in unexpected new ways that show even more light. The protagonist of this new book is Kepesh, not Zuckerman, but the preoccupations of this book are the same as the American trilogy--how do you reinvent yourself like a good American who can supposedly just shuck off the past; what is the price you pay for that spiritual reformation (or deformation.) This David Kepesh's history is somewhat altered from the Kepesh of "The Breast" and "The Professor of Desire"; he now has a middle-aged son who hates him and one somewhat shadowy ex-wife who he abandoned during the sexual upheaval of the 60's. Otherwise he remains the same; a hedonistic moralist intoxicated by female beauty (especially breasts: he loves a voluptuary Modigliani painting of a female nude that appears on the jacket of this novel.) In his sixties he begins an affair with Consuela, a decorous young Cuban-American woman who presses all the right buttons for the aging professor. Intertwined with the story is a marvelous debate on the meaning of the cultural revolution of the '60's and '70's. Kepesh is predictably king-hell for freedom, but his son is a constant unwelcome reminder of the damage done. One again as in "Operation Shylock" and the American trilogy Roth brilliantly shows a man tearing himself in two trying to "break on through to the other side", to a life without history and consequences. Once again Roth shows us that he can write an English sentence better than anyone else. Again we get his excruciating, tragic, comic self-indictment. For at the end it turns out that Consuela needs Kepesh in a most desparate, life-or-death sense and Kepesh is forced to confront the fact of her not as just a breast, not as his somewhat dim little girlfriend (as he thoughtlessly sees her) but as a human being in terrible trouble. The final pages as as harrowing as anything Roth has written. This book, by the greatest living American writer, is required reading for lovers of American fiction.

Philip Roth has created brilliant bitter comedy in this extended monologue delivered by the aging, inordinately self-conscious culture critic and anti-hero, David Kepesh. Particularly witty is Roth's perception that Kepesh is just the sort of comic monster that our society must necessarily produce. Our founding documents, with their imbalance in favor of the individual pursuing happiness, reduced in the 60's to a distortion in favor of the solitary soul pursuing pleasure for its own sake, give us Kepesh, here rounding out his years. As amusing as painful is Kepesh's blindness, despite his clever self-consciousness, to the reality that the path he follows is absurdly narrow given the facts of his own experience. Not only is the sexual urge, for instance, an upsetter of his orderly, metronome-like human plans, but so is death, which occurs when it will, striking at times the young and beautiful , not just the old. Kepesh's 60's ideology is amusingly and movingly revealed as too simple to fit his own life's experiences within space, time, and inevitable decay. The comedy here is that Kepesh,for all his consistent emphasis on individual pleasure apart from thought, is actually choking to death from too much thought, while intellectually remaining, because of his principles, essentially clueless. The central experiences he relates, are ones of which he, if not his readers, appears to miss the meaning.

The Human Stain is not the best of recent Roth (but then there are few contemporary novels from whatever country as impressive as Sabbath's Theater or American Pastoral). However, it is confirmation that Roth is one of the most necessary of contemporary writers.

This concludes a trilogy of loosely related novels taking a personal examination of important events from post WWII American history. Each is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman (Roth's altar ego), and again Zuckerman is present, but - generally - not intrusive.

Set against the backdrop of the Lewinsky affair, Coleman's own fall from his position as Professor of Classics and dean of a department for a "racist" remark is a tragedy, and filled with anger, on behalf of his friend, Zuckerman traces Silk's life, and his final days (including an affair with a cleaner at the University).

Roth's writing has a passion. His prose may not be smooth and elegant, but there is real emotion underpinning it. Anger at the nature of modern society, the dumbing down, the compartmentalising of people.

Roth's characters are more rounded than in the first Zuckerman trilogy. His subjects now seem real. His writing about a writer, and his problems writing seems to be behind him.

This is a book about learning, about ignorance, about dignity, about shame.

It can be contrasted with the cool prose of JM Coetzee's Disgrace, winner of the Booker Prize in the UK. This novel looks at the fall of an academic after an affair with a student. It is a well written but cold novel. No-one can accuse Roth/Zuckerman of writing cold fiction.

The novel is uneven, but there is much that is poetic in the midst of the righteous anger. Also, in Les Farley, and Ernestine Silk Roth has created two of his most memorable characters.

Many years ago Roth wrote a hilarious baseball novel, The Great American Novel. Roth's recent work (beginning I feel with Deception) has been of an extremely high quality. And it is with this body of work, rather than in that thirty year old fiction, that Roth has finally caught that mythical beast. The cumulative work of the new Zuckerman trilogy and Sabbath's Theater truly are Great American Novels.

Coleman Silk, ("Silky Silk") a humanities professor at Athena College, resigns from his job in disgrace because of a supposedly racist remark he has made about two black students. The ensuing brouhaha leads to the death of his wife. Silk then begins an affair with Faunia Farley, (surely one of the most engaging, earthy seductresses in modern fiction) the school janitor, who is thirty-four years his junior.
Silk's relationship with Farley, who is being stalked by her ex-husband and his confessions to Rothian alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, fuel the narrative for this novel.
But what is absolutely brilliant in this novel is the unraveling of the metaphoric strands of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in which Silk finds himself enmeshed in the web of contradictions of contemporary America and its past.
The novel also goes beyond the facile reading of race. This novel questions and see the political construct of race and asks, Are we ONLY products of our past? What is the price we pay for the personal and collective fictions we construct to become ourselves? What do we really know about anything or anyone? Does self-actualization mean killing one's past and by extension one's biological parents? Can a successful identity be built on a lie? What does it mean to live an authentic life given the constraints of race, gender, etc.? If an authentic life is built on the contradictions of a society, does this diminish the validity of all subsequent lives that are built on the original fiction?
Roth probes the question of identity deliberately and provocatively, and the structure of the novel is fascinating because of the multiple perspectives on events-visited and revisited by Silk, Zuckerman and Faunia.
And those sentences! Wow!
The Human Stain is a brilliant work of a modern master.

Philip Roth has done it again ' made a novel of the time that will speak to many generations. The Human Stain is a novel about America pre-9/11. It deals with the major forces that shape that world ' sex, race, politics and angst. It is a world dominated by people who demand perfection in others, yet cannot see themselves for what they really are.
The opening pages are probably the best summary of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal written by an American. The self-righteous feeling that dominates the landscape is more than just a temporary storm; it is a national warming of fevers that will come to destroy the body politic.
Roth captures the dizzying contradictions of the times in the person of Coleman Silk, a college professor and former Dean whose fall from power and prestige is as maddening as any in all literature. Coleman turns out to be less and more than he seems ' unfairly accused of making a racial remark, in fact, he turns out to be the worst kind of racist.
This novel owes much to Faulkner's Light in August. In both, the author deals with the effect of racism on society and the American dream of transforming oneself into another person merely by force of will. Moving on into another part of the country ' physically or socially ' an American can make him or herself into anyone. The re-birth is painful and the new person has just as many problems as the old.
Read this book and discover what you have been thinking for the past few years about our society, but have not been able to put into the right words. Roth has the right words.

Mickey Sabbath's life is one pathetic misadventure after another. An arthritic street performer, who once used his fingers as his puppets, he lives for his next sexual adventure. Any other ties to humanity, love, trust, honesty, (although he claims this value, he only uses it when it suits him) are lost amidst his pursuit of sexual gratification. Roth has deliberately created a character with no redeeming qualities, and while I admire his skill at developing such a reprehensible human being, I didn't enjoy reading about Mickey Sabbath or the lives he destroyed. No matter how many disastrous situations Roth creates for Sabbath I found myself wanting this to end; the book became a chore to read. Sabbath is a pathetic antihero, not an epic one, and hardly worth Roth's efforts on his behalf.

The main character of this book, Mickey Sabbath, envisions his own epitaph as reading: "Morris Sabbath - 'Mickey' - Beloved Whoremonger, Seducer, Sodomist, Abuser of Women, Destroyer of Morals, Ensnarer of Youth, Uxoricide, Suicide - 1929-1994." As a final self-assessment of this character's life, it is not far from the truth. Objectively speaking, there is little in Sabbath's behavior to qualify him as a role model or inspiration for others. And yet, somehow, Roth turns this seemingly despicable character into an undisputed hero. Do we love Sabbath because of his overpowering humanness? His brutal honesty? His perseverance? Is it because he celebrates in himself the dark elements of human sexuality that we, as individuals, must suppress in ourselves? Or is it because Philip Roth is the most eloquent and insightful portrayer of the human soul alive today?

It would be easy to dismiss Sabbath as an immoral pervert, a man driven by his sexual urges with little regard for societal norms or the feelings of others. And as such, it is also easy to reject the notion that he is anything like you and me. He is a man who takes pride in having slept with prostitutes on more than one continent. He is remarkably unfaithful to his wife. He engages in bizarre sex acts with his lover. He rummages through the drawers of a 19-year-old girl, the daughter of an old friend, looking for naked Polaroids, and finding none, settles for swiping a pair of her underwear. And then there is the scene at his lover's grave that is too bizarre to recount here, a scene that would be nothing short of obscene and disgusting in any other author's hands, but that Roth somehow renders as a powerful expression of love and grief. So go ahead, feel free to say that Sabbath is nothing like you, if it makes you feel better.

But when you are finished condemning him, look deeper at who he is and what he represents. Sabbath is a grieving man. He is grieving not only for the death of his free-spirited, erotic mistress, who dies a tragic death in the early pages of the novel. He is also grieving for his own lost life as he begins to accept his own mortality. And he is persistently haunted by the ghost of his mother and the memory of his brother. Yes, he is a social and sexual deviant, but he is also incredibly human. We cannot blame him for the desires and emotions that he unapologetically displays for the world to see, for they are the same desires and emotions that live in each of us. So how can we blame him for the brutal honesty with which he lives his life and faces his demons? It is because there is a little bit of Mickey Sabbath in each of us that makes this novel painful, at times, to read. But that is also what makes it so exquisite and, ultimately, so true.

A long time ago Alexander Portnoy (in an early Roth novel, Portnoy's Complaint) entreated someone, anyone, to put the id back in Yid.

Mickey Sabbath, the dirty old man who is the central character in Sabbath's Theater, does just that, and more. Sabbath acts on every instinctive urge that comes his way, never stopping to imagine consequences. And those urges push him to sexual and other behavior that is always bizarre, and often downright shocking. At times I could not believe what I was reading.

Yet at least a part of Sabbath's complicated motivation stems from his fear -- utter revulsion, really -- of death and all it entails. Death prevents Sabbath from seeing the need to ever conform to societal norms. And that blindness makes him a terribly tragic, yet very funny guy.

There are portions of this book that blew me away, like Roth's/Sabbath's (sometimes it's hard to determine who's doing the talking) observations about marriage, infidelity, sex, death, art, academia, etc.

Sabbath is ultimately a revolting character, and evokes little sympathy for his horrible plight. Yet he's one of the most fascinating characters in literature I've ever come across.

This book is incredible and very worth reading. But be warned, it's not for the squeamish. If you haven't read Roth, start with Portnoy and imagine what he might have become if everything in his life went wrong.