内容简介
It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzyof prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small NewEngland town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forcedto retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. Thecharge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would haveastonished his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret.But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with FauniaFarley, a woman half his age with a savagely wrecked past - apart-time farmhand and a janitor at the college where, untilrecently, he was the powerful dean of faculty. And it's not thesecret of Coleman's alleged racism, which provoked the collegewitch-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 hisambitious young colleague, Professor Delphine Roux, to expose himas a fiend. Coleman's secret has been kept for fifty years: fromhis wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends,including the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understandhow this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearlyall his life, had fabricated his identity and how that cannilycontrolled life came unraveled. Set in 1990s America, whereconflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifestthrough public denunciation and rituals of purification, The HumanStain concludes Philip Roth's eloquent trilogy of postwar Americanlives that are as tragically determined by the nation's fate as bythe "human stain" that so ineradicably marks human nature. Thisharrowing, deeply compassionate, and completely absorbing novel isa magnificent successor to his Vietnam-era novel, AmericanPastoral, and his McCarthy-era novel, I MARRIED A COMMUNIST.