1 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
as numerous international awards. He is widely considered to be one of the most
influential authors writing in America after World War II. Portnoy’s Complaint
is notorious for its sexual themes and humor, and when the novel made Roth
a household name, the popular assumption was that in order to write such an
indecent book, Roth would necessarily have had to participate in such indecent
behavior. In response to that contention, Roth asserted the difference between
fiction and reality: and to prove his point, he created Nathan Zuckerman, nar-
rator of nine Roth novels. Zuckerman is often referred to as Roth’s “alter-ego,”
because the two have striking biographical similarities that challenge readers to
find differences between the two (and between fiction and reality). But, as in
The Human Stain, Zuckerman’s narration also illustrates how fictional stories are
constructed. Many of Zuckerman’s actions involve creating fictional stories, and
watching him work can often show a reader the differences between fiction and
reality and why it is important not to conflate the two. These issues play a major
role in Roth’s later fiction, and some of his most celebrated works come from the
years after Portnoy’s Complaint, years in which Roth’s novels became more epic in
both scale and theme.
Roth’s 2000 novel, The Human Stain, is the final part of the “American Tril-
ogy,” a group of works that details the promises and failures of American life in
the second half of the twentieth century. The Human Stain is set in the summer
of 1998 amidst the sex scandals of the Clinton White House, when “a president’s
penis was on everyone’s mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again
confounded America.” Nathan Zuckerman narrates the story of his neighbor,
Coleman Silk, and his affair with an illiterate janitor half his age, Faunia Farley.
Faunia is an uneducated woman with two dead children and an abusive Vietnam
veteran husband, Lester. Coleman, on the other hand, is the dean of faculty at
Athena College and professor of classics, but his career ends abruptly. In the fifth
week of the semester Coleman still has not seen two of the students enrolled
in his class, prompting him to ask, “Do they exist or are they spooks?” The two
absent students are African American, and Coleman’s question about “spooks” is
interpreted as a racial slur. Coleman subsequently leaves the college in disgrace
and anger.
After the death of his wife and months of obsessive planning of a book on
the “spooks” incident, Coleman begins to change his life. When picking up his
mail at the post office one day, Coleman notices Faunia mopping the floors, and
the two begin an affair. Thanks to Viagra, the seventy-one-year-old Coleman
is able to maintain his affair with the thirty-four-year-old janitor, and the two
seem happy enough together. But one of Coleman’s former Athena colleagues,
Delphine Roux, confronts him in an anonymous note: “Everyone knows you’re
sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age.” This confrontation
is indicative of the disapproval that surrounds the Coleman-Faunia affair, for the
two are gossiped about but never publicly confronted for their behavior. The affair
lasts only four months, and it ends as abruptly as it began: the two die in a car
wreck, and very few attend Coleman’s funeral.
In the midst of this plot, Zuckerman also reveals Coleman Silk’s biggest
secret, one that Coleman has kept for the past fifty years. Coleman, who has