Learning to Hate Objectively Good Books

 The Human Stain by Phillip Roth

There is this joke comedian Kurt Metsger makes where he references the movie Precious. He notes that Precious as a character is fake, entirely fiction, the character is not a real person, and that the creators just made her that way and did those things to her for no reason. It may be a trashy or distasteful joke, but it has always sort of stuck with me as an interesting way to think about fiction.

Authors often make their characters suffer, sometimes psychologically and sometimes physically, many times both. There is generally a purpose served, especially by the more profound suffering a character may undergo. Characters in Tony Morrison novels suffer as a reminder of the dehumanizing and brutal nature of racism (this is the sense I get from the movie Precious, though if I recall correctly it wasn't done very well). Others may be less concrete, the young boy protagonists in Cormac McCarthy novels suffer as a dark twist on the coming-of-age tradition. 

The question of why any given character is given to suffering was consistently in the back of my mind as I read the Human Stain by Phillip Roth. 

By all accounts, the Human Stain is a good book. Its profile of the last months of Professor Coleman Silk and his lover Fawnia Farley is of course magnificently written and fascinatingly complex in its layered story telling. I did enjoy it as a literary form, as though I could love it from afar, but in the intimacy of actually reading it I found it, many times, to be unnecessarily and nauseatingly cruel. 

There is a lot I could theoretically spoil here, some I already have. You find out relatively early on in the novel that Professor Coleman Silk has retired in scandal from his university over false allegations that he is a racist, that he has taken a lover named Fawnia Farley half his age (her 34, him 70), and that he has died. You also learn that the entire novel is written by Roth's novelist alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, whom he has deployed in other novels; American Pastoral and I Married a Communist. 

Roth, as Nathan, is giving an account of Silk's life, bracketed by its present end, with the sort of beautiful narrative flair that the best literary masters of the universe deploy. Nathan is an impossibly unreliable narrator with the Melville/Ishmail-like oscillation between a fully present character in the narrative doing things like interviewing Silk's family and befriending Silk himself, attending Silk's funeral, and speculating on how Silk died to omniscient third-person narration as well as the first-person perceptive from inside the heads of Fawnia, her former husband Les, Silk's university enemy professor Roux, and Silk himself. 

This latter exercise is different than the way I've seen this method deployed by greats like Faulkner or Melville. It is not so much an embodiment of the perspective but an invasion of the subject, a pure manipulation and an ultimate display of their suffering that left me sort of sick and confused as to why it was needed, artful though it may be. 

The Vietnam trauma and what Les goes through both as a soldier and veteran is heartbreakingly well written. Stomach-churning. Also entirely confusing. Why is he doing this? Is it to justify Les' cruelty and racism? Is it to cast him as a bad man with reason? Maybe I'm too dumb to ascertain it, but if I'm dumb let the record show I was struck so by the inclusion of some of the most gut-wrenching passages of wanton mental suffering I have probably ever read. This is great writing to be sure, but again, in service of what?

Then of course there are the women. I know there is a lot of eye-rolling speculation on the great modern writers like Foster-Wallace and Franzen as it pertains to their depiction of women, some of it valid, some of it a bit wrought. Roth is sometimes added to this list. I'll leave to you to determine how valid it is, but Roth doesn't treat any of the women in the Human Stain kindly. At best, the women in the Human Stain are props; Silk's sister, daughter, or wife for example are all in service of plot progression. Coleman Silk's university rival Professor Roux is lived in breifly only to profess her love and envy for Professor Silk and her self-hatred because of it. Again, why are we doing this? Hopefully it's not to make a point of ambitious women. 

Then there is Fawnia, one of the more tragic characters I have encountered. The 34-year-old illiterate lover of the old-ass Coleman Silk. Roth details with horrible explicitness her sexual abuse as a child at the hands of her step-father, her physical abuse and constant murder attempts by Les, the death of her small children in an apartment fire while she performs fellatio on a boyfriend in a car outside, she is possibly illiterate - Nathan doesn't think she is - although Roth leaves it a mystery for god knows why, because I guess it's fun to chin-stroke over whether Silk was taking advantage of her or not. What fun!  Nathan inhabits her head narrating in and out of relevant drama but sometimes just ruminating on the horrors visited her by the past. It's disturbing and doesn't accomplish the literary heights that Roth wields when he's inside the head of someone like Les (which I have to say again, is always gripping, some truly amazing writing here). 

Maybe this is all Roth's point. This is why he uses the insufferable novelist character to tell the story in a presumptive, misleading, and entirely misogynistic way.  With a title like "the Human Stain" it's fun to speculate what the human stain actually is. Is it a reference, as Fawnia (the only character to mention the title) says, to the disgusting human race that stains our planet? No, too simple. Is it a point about race? Our racial identity and the misfortunate or fortunate that follows is a stain on our skin and our lives? The novel has a core racialized theme in it, so this would be an interesting read. I believe that Roth thinks the novelist is putting the human stain on the page; a stain is gross, it's unwanted, and it's a depiction for anyone to guess the story behind what was once a messy accident. Everything that describes the way that Nathan - who of course is just a stand-in for Roth - writes Silk's story. It's possible that Roth is embodying the very best of the novelist only to communicate his disdain for the craft. 

But who the fuck knows. 

Here is the Metzger joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMMhjtVWpwg