It is said of contemporary Hollywood that it is "revenge of the geeks" - the nerds, palely loitering while the real world gets on with life and with getting the girl (or the boy), exact their revenge by later telling, and recasting, the story. But surely this is much more applicable to writers, endlessly sifting over the disappointments and frustrations of the past and punishing those who crossed them? For Philip Roth, all experience is grist for the analytical mill; his family, his ethnicity, and even, in a very personal way, his ex-wife, Claire Bloom, who felt compelled to publish her own account.
At his best, Roth raises his personal preoccupations to a provocative, often searing examination of contemporary life; but often, as with this book, it rings a bit hollow, not a spirited assault on the great themes of the day, as he might have wished, but a predictable rehash of familiar topics like academic intrigue and mature sexual bitterness.
The Human Stain comes (if that is the word) with an exciting concept; President Clinton's tryst with Monica Lewinsky and the subsequent political hysteria and confrontation, but there is little of that extraordinary controversy in this book. Indeed, other than a half page of overheard dialogue, mostly abusive of "bigmouth" Lewinsky ("She's part of that dopey culture. Yap, yap, yap. Part of this generation that is proud of its shallowness") the saga is barely referred to. Instead, there is some kind of loose association suggested with the culture of denunciation and public embarrassment.
Basically, a college professor, Coleman Silk, accidentally uses the word "spooks" (an old racist epithet for blacks) in a lecture and, in a mixture of Political Correctness and his own self-destructive defiance, he loses everything - his job, his public standing, and even his wife, who dies from the strain. But then he is partially revived by a scandalous affair with a much younger woman, a college cleaning lady. Interesting, how traditional these personal re-discoveries are for Roth's generation; always the bitter old guy saved by a fling with a predictably insatiable, hot young thing. But the incessant sexual references, archly explicit and seeking for some kind of shocking staccato, seem sort of jaded. Like Updike, they have that ageing hipster's desperate desire to show he can still swing.
Roth aspires to the intellectual sweep of a Saul Bellow or Don DeLillo, but he doesn't have enough of their grandeur and mystery, not to mention their humanity. Nor is his writing saved by any stylistic nuances or surprises. This book feels not like a many-sided, organic thing but a treatise, flat and streamlined and eager to make its big and bitter points. It has a shrill quality, which makes it a disappointing successor to his better and more transcendent American Pastoral and I Married A Communist, the earlier parts of his 1990s trilogy.
In a central twist to the plot, the allegedly Jewish Silk, proves to have had a much more confusing ethnic origin, and, in the exploration of this, Roth is on surer, New Jersey ground. Like J. M. Coetzee's recent Disgrace, the book is brave in tackling some of the current absurd sensitivities about sex and race. In this, it most resembles The Dean's December by Saul Bellow, which also concerns a PC-beleagured professor, but without having that novel's deep sense of understanding and complexity.
ROTH does, however, have a wonderfully poignant assessment of ageing and the inevitability of death, possibly his best themes. Describing an outdoor concert attended by interested elders, with their canes and blankets, the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, (Roth, himself, of course) muses that, as "an entity of sensate flesh and warm red blood", they were "separated from oblivion by the thinnest, most fragile layer of life".
Probably the most unpleasant aspect of Roth's writing is its obvious misogyny, not redeemed by the novel's "addressing" of the topic, usually with a cutting dismissal. (Interesting that he has been defended of this offence by our own Edna O'Brien, about whom, with her voracious, scheming heroines, the same charge has been made). At one stage, Delphine Roux, a literary theorist and Coleman Silk's adversary in his campus dispute, is conceded a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal - with a writer as omnipotent and controlling as Roth, "conceded" is the only way to describe it. Roux is depicted, heroically fighting her high-culture French background and her family, until the core of her unhappiness is identified - she needs a man. Posting a Lonely Heart ad on the internet, she realises that the man she wants is - Coleman Silk. Oh, no! There's women for you, as Albert would say, they confuse their stronger emotions. Even the clever ones.
In fairness, there are scenes of fine and affecting prose here, such as Silk's spying on his new girlfriend, Faunia Farley, hanging out at lunchtime with her janitorial colleauges, and being overcome with irrational jealousy. There is also a savage and long overdue parody of the melodramatic Vietnam veteran, unable to go into Chinese restaurants or take control of his life. "That shouldn't be Billy on the Wall," he shouts at a portable version of the Washington Memorial. "No, Billy, No! - that should be me." On this score, the novel is heralded as an attack on this sort of victim culture, but again little of such examination is apparent.
In all, The Human Stain feels a bit like a lost opportunity, given the rich material from which it draws. Perhaps, against the Starr report and Congressional hearings, fact will always be much stranger than fiction. Roth is a major figure in contemporary American literature with an impressive and prolific output; 22 books, not all of them novels. But therein may lie some of the problem. After such a prodigious output, there is a sense in which he has shot his load, as Portnoy (or the hapless Clinton) might have it, and that he has said it all already, and better.
And so what promised to be a searing, soaring indictment of contemporary mores, which might take the story beyond its obvious intellectual confines, instead turns out to be more of a one-note treatise with hardly a single sympathetic character. But this might well be its bitter conclusion. The Human Stain - the messy stuff of life - is something left behind by all of us.
Eamon Delaney is a novelist and critic