Coleman Silk Research Articles

Reading Philip Roth: Primacy Effect, Authorial Intentions, and the Writer's Extended Mind

Reading Philip RothPrimacy Effect, Authorial Intentions, and the Writer's Extended Mind Pia Masiero (bio) Reflecting on my first encounter with philip roth is a tricky matter. We all know that there is no such thing as remembering things as they indeed were because memories serve different functional purposes and are, thus, inevitably, the result of narrativizing moves. The problem concerns the possibility of returning to the moment of previousness, to the first eventful crossing of the threshold of the first book. The context of that first reading emerges against the context of my writing this piece now. This latter erodes and problematizes the founding necessity of the former because it has narrativized it to look like a sort of prologue of my story as Roth's reader. The prologue, thus, bears the signs containing the seeds of future development, which happens to be the very core of the narrative that makes the retrieval impossible. In this disheartening circularity, there might be one way to retrace the phenomenology of that eventful first encounter. What I set out to explore in the following pages may be condensed into one question: what kind of reader did Roth's books allow me to be? This question touches upon the most obvious of facts: I have met Roth as a reader. Yes, I was privileged enough to be present at his eightieth birthday in Newark in March 2013, to shake his hand and have my two-minute glorious exchange. Still, Roth is essentially, quintessentially, I should say, the man behind the words I can read and reread on the pages of his books. His words, thus, and only his words, are the tangible presence I can deal with; when speaking about novels, words are the phenomenon, as Martin Heidegger put it, the showing-itself, "that which does the announcing, that which in its showing-itself indicates something which does not show itself" (53). This is the field of phenomena, the world, that my readerly consciousness discloses, or rather, following Edmund Husserl, "the corresponding subjective experiences in which we become conscious of [the world or the things], in which (in the broadest sense) they 'appear'" (qtd. in Gallagher 1). The words on the page disclose—and [End Page 111] continue to disclose every time I read—the world that Roth is, which does not show itself but is both contained and evoked in the words he chooses for every sentence in his thirty-one novels. Back to my first encounter, then, keeping this frame in mind. I read my first Roth novel—The Human Stain (2000)—during the Louisville Summer Institute on Contemporary American Literature in 2005. The third installment of Roth's American trilogy was meant to contribute to drawing a literary map of the Contemporary American literary landscape. Coleman Silk's ode to the "raw-I" (805) and his destruction at the hands of forces greater than his pioneering individuality was part of a heterogeneous syllabus that included, among others, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Guillermo Gómez Peña. This is—in itself—worth pondering: on the one hand, Roth reached me with his twenty-second book, well past the conflicting relationships with his Jewish community and into his major phase; on the other, he crossed my path together with a melting pot of writers and not through a genealogy of Jewish American authors, as the junior to two formidable elders, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud. Be as it may, The Human Stain was my first encounter with a Roth novel: a Zuckerman book presenting both the apotheosis of Roth's immersion in American history and his obsession with narrative matters. I was far from knowing and understanding the underpinnings of Roth's masking practices; nonetheless, it was clear to me that this was a book about a writer's handling of his materials at least as much as it was a book about memorable, intrinsically opaque, characters trying to find a usable sense of themselves against an overpowering, larger than life, American history. The opacity of the so-called other minds came to me as the singular predicament of Nathan Zuckerman, a writer who tackles it...

The Fragmented Mark: Zuckerman’s Characters as Self-Making in The Human Stain

Abstract: Much of the discourse surrounding Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) either deals with the novel as about America and American self-making or as about Coleman Silk. Little scholarship, however, deals with Zuckerman, the narrator, as a character central to the story; this essay seeks to show that Zuckerman not only invents the personal lives of his characters, but he invents himself, and he does so through his semi-imagined versions of each of the characters. Coleman is who he wishes himself to be, Farley is Zuckerman’s model of how not to live, Delphine is the warning about the very book he writes—the version of himself that lies about who he is—and Faunia acts as his moral compass and guide, perhaps the most important of his creations given how his narrative decisions reflect her sensibilities. Zuckerman’s characterizations of the key players and his suppositions about their interiority, then, result in Zuckerman’s own characterization.

Athenian Logomachy in The Human Stain and Philip Roth’s Fight for the Word

Abstract: In The Human Stain (2000), Philip Roth develops a concern that animates his canon: the potentials and dangers of our most human trait—our capacity to fire back and forth words and letters. For Coleman Silk, in the world of Athena College—just as in ancient Athens—the battle of words in the forum becomes as dangerous as the battle of swords on the Homeric battlefield, and a mission of Roth in this novel, as in other works, is to turn logomachy into self-reflective art about the violence and corruption of the word in the American city-state.

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer Soon after news broke of the scandal of blake bailey, philip roth's official biographer, we were inundated with many versions of the same question: Will Philip Roth be "canceled"? The question seemed to be motivated by a concern that Bailey's scandals with women—grooming and sexual assault, to name a few—would be connected to the scandals of Roth himself. It is, if not ironic, then at least telling, that Roth famously wrote about "cancel culture" before it entered our lexicon. His 2000 novel, The Human Stain, for example, features a protagonist, Coleman Silk, who is canceled (to use the language of the twenty-first century) for misusing the word "spooks" when describing three prodigal students he never met. Twenty years later, readers, academics, journalists, and fans started to wonder whether the same was true for Philip Roth regarding his poor choice in biographer that, some said, reflected his attitudes toward women. This fallout occurred shortly after the Newark Public Library launched its unparalleled Philip Roth Personal Library—featuring volumes from Roth's home libraries—and leaders in the city of Newark began planning a Philip Roth Festival to commemorate what would have been Roth's ninetieth birthday. In response to these questions about the future of Roth's legacy, we gave a resounding answer: No. Of course, Roth will not be "canceled." There was no way we could imagine one of the most important writers of his generation going away any time soon, and surely not in response to scandalous books, or scandals surrounding books. Then again, of course we can never be sure. History, and literary legacy, are equal measures fickle and unpredictable. But we think it is safe to say, at least by the printing of this issue, that Roth remains more relevant than ever. As a powerful indication of how Roth has not lost value in the academy, in 2020, the Philip Roth Society decided to present the Siegel/McDaniel Award for graduate research to two candidates because of the high quality of the papers in the competition. Both Siegel/McDaniel winners printed in this issue submitted outstanding essays concerned with how Roth's work is in conversation with a younger generation of writers and important new fields in cultural studies, such as food and affect. A close reading of all of the essays in this issue not only shows that Roth is not canceled, but also why and how that must be so. The essays, while not comprising a special issue or planned to take such a unifying approach, all address versions of the same themes: Roth's perpetual questioning of the status quo, his infamous bristling at rules and conventions, his keen awareness of the link between thought and [End Page 1] embodiment, his celebration of critical thinking, and his worries about the effects of accepting bad policy and misreadings of our founding documents as truth. These themes, of course, made Roth famous in the 1960s, when the US and the world were on the verge of social and political upheavals. A generation later, we seem on the precipice of another significant turning point, when we still need thinkers and activists to take to the streets and the page. Roth knew this better than anyone. In the wake of scandals all over the world, not least of which have been televised in the United States as the country attempts to grapple with the 2021 coup at the Capitol and the conservative backlash at the Supreme Court, the scholars published in the pages of this journal continue to find value in Roth's uncanny ability to showcase the best of us, even when writing about the worst. We hope you take heart in reading the essays in this issue, essays that at once recognize the significance of the written word and the literary language of revolt. In this way, we will have done our own small part to help reposition Roth as an indispensable voice, not only in 1959 or in 1969 or in 1995 or in 2010, but right here, today, when we once again seem to be on the verge of transformational change...

La passion du secret dans The Human Stain de Philip Roth

The Human Stain is a novel of secrets: the novel of a man’s secret—the secret of a literature professor, Coleman Silk. The secret which the narrative inquires about and discloses is not a mere, nor a unique reality, but an always already duplicated and complex one. Zuckerman’s novel, embedded in Roth’s, is the narrative of a passion that is not unrelated to what Jacques Derrida calls “the secret without secret” of literature. Nathan is a homodiegetic narrator whose witnessing and connection to the character of Coleman eventually takes on an unexpected and growing place in the narrative.

Coleman Silk : A Tragic Hero in a Contrived Myth: An Interpretation of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

世界科学出版社（World Science Publishing-WSP）立足国际，积极配合中国“走出去”出版战略，大力推进版权输出与引进，并不断拓展国际间的交流与合作，取得显著成绩。WSP国际图书出版项目力倡中国科研人员出版英文图书，出版社具有丰富的国际传播资源与雄厚的编辑、翻译、出版力量，拥有一批著名的中外翻译专家、出版专家，及一支精通国际出版的编辑、翻译和国际营销队伍。探索“科学进步”与“社会进步”是人类永恒主题，WSP推崇以科学信仰引领学术方向，遵循各国法律和地方法规，能够协助您优质、快捷、低

Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby

Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of <i>The Great Gatsby</i>

Retracing the Tragic Hero in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Philip Roth's The Human Stain: تتبع البطل المأساوي في سوفوكليس الملك أوديب وفيليب روث وصمة عار الإنسان

This paper reevaluates the fundamental status of Coleman Silk in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex by testing their characters against Aristotelian tragic hero's elements. In spite of the verifiable comparisons to Oedipus, Coleman is not a neglected figure, but a subverted one that underpins Roth's proposal of "the different nature" of inconceivable postmodern American tragedy. In Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, the protagonist Coleman Silk is implicitly linked to Sophocles' classical figure Oedipus in Oedipus Rex. The plot is interwoven with allusions to Greek tragedies, but in The Human Stain Coleman lacks the stature and the real character of Oedipus. In addition, Coleman lacks, to some extent, the real elements of a tragic hero that constitute the Catharsis: the process of releasing and providing relief; a conflict which raises the question; is Coleman really a tragic hero? According to Aristotle, the tragic hero should experience a dilemma and a massive transformation from valuable standards to lower depth, and this person should suffer particularly after committing a mistake, or even thinking about his past deeds. The tragic hero should be relatively a commendable person whose comeuppance is brought about by his own fallacies which he did not commit out of defect or wickedness, but out of his own serendipity. Following the ancient Greek concept which asserts that fluke is associated with actions, Coleman is a fortuitous man at first, unlike Oedipus, despite being born as a black man. Because of this unlucky fact, he is capable of changing his identity and rising up to the level of preeminence.

Discoursal Formation of Identity in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) simply tells the story of a New England classics professor, Coleman Silk, who is forced to quit his job for alleged racism. The charge is a lie, but the truth about Silk is more shocking because it turns out that for his entire adult life, Silk has been covering up the fact that he is neither Jewish nor white although he is actually a very light-skinned man. The stain given in the title of this novel stands for both a mark on the skin and the mark of our experienced-based stories and which, consequently construct our identities. This paper, therefore, analyzes how the idea of ‘stain’ is ironically inscribed both socially and individually into our identities.

Rethinking Political Correctness in the Age of #MeToo: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

In January 2018, Philip Roth said about the #MeToo movement in an interview with The New York Times, “none of the more extreme conduct I have been reading about in the newspapers lately has astonished me” (McGrath). At the height of the #MeToo movement, which had indicted media and business tycoons, as well as political leaders, Roth said that his lifelong novelistic concern in “depicting these men each as he is, each as he behaves, aroused, stimulated, hungry in the grip of carnal fervor” had meant that he had confronted the “hard facts” of such male lustful drives (McGrath). This paper rereads The Human Stain, in which Roth criticizes the effects of political correctness in the enclosed institution of academia, to comment on the perspective of human existence as “inevitably stained” (Roth 242). In rereading the tragic dimensions of the novel, this paper seeks to grapple with the effects of political correctness and the limitations of public opinion (represented through the academic institution, including the flawed feminist scholar Delphine Roux) on the lives of characters like Coleman Silk and Faunia Farley.

Remembering Roth: The Sharp Mustard Flavor of &lt;em&gt;The Human Stain&lt;/em&gt;

Remembering RothThe Sharp Mustard Flavor of The Human Stain Ann Basu (bio) Philip Roth intrigued, provoked, amused, and absorbed his readers for more than fifty years. Challenging and delighting us, his novels have generated an intellectual response from writers and scholars that has created one of the most vibrant literary fields in modern literary criticism. Roth declared that he would write no more fiction after Nemesis, published in 2010. Now he is gone, and we can only await his official biography written by Blake Bailey and continue to speak amongst ourselves about his great literary legacy. Roth was an American to his core. His Jewish family and upbringing shaped his vision of a nation whose culture he never stopped exploring and whose flaws he dissected in ever more powerful ways. The nature of Roth's contribution to his national culture is perhaps best expressed in Roth's conversation with Primo Levi in 1986, when Roth asks Levi to explain "the tension between your rootedness and your impurity" as a Jew and an Italian. Levi returns: I see no contradiction between "rootedness" and being (or feeling) "a grain of mustard." To feel oneself a catalyst, a spur to one's cultural environment [. . .] it is an advantage to belong to a (not necessarily racial) minority [. . .] don't you feel yourself, you, Philip Roth, "rooted" in your country and at the same time "a mustard grain"? In your books I perceive a sharp mustard flavor (Shop 13). There is much truth in Levi's observation. Roth's novels are sharp and pungent granules within American culture at the same time as being thoroughly within the grain of that culture; they are incisive, provocative, and sometimes outrageous. His scrutiny of his country and its culture will be desperately missed. My love for Roth's fiction began with The Human Stain (2000), the third novel of his American trilogy published after American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998). Before this novel cropped up on my English [End Page 33] Literature masters reading list, the only contact I had had with Roth's work was his first short story collection, Goodbye Columbus, and his notorious Portnoy's Complaint that I didn't know how to make sense of in the lurid light of its celebrity. I was little-prepared for the mature, sweeping, masterly accomplishment that was The Human Stain. I became immersed in the story of the racially-passing Coleman Silk and of Coleman Silk's America, to a depth that I have rarely experienced. The fascination with The Human Stain that drew me to Roth's work began with the shock of finding out that its "Jewish" and "white" protagonist, Coleman Silk, was a light-skinned black man who, in his youth, had made a fateful decision to pass as white, using Jewishness as a cover identity to explain features like his curly hair. Crucially, Roth hides the fundamental fact about Coleman's "passing" for the novel's first eighty-five pages. The revelation about Coleman's race highlights the truth that when we read we complete the meanings of the text from our own imaginations—an activity that Roth continually problematizes. His work, to a greater degree than many writers', induces an imbalance or oscillation in readers' minds as we establish predictive patterns from the text but are nevertheless made jarringly aware of other temporarily excluded meanings, like Coleman's "alien" blackness. We are thus continually brought to test our own judgments about Roth's novels. My own reaction to Coleman's blackness startled me. I was disoriented by the revelation. The knowledge of Coleman's secret brought me right up against my preconceptions about the character, reconfiguring my category of "what-is-Coleman." I was knocked off-balance, compelled to revisit scenes from the book in the light of my new knowledge. This act of re-reading also made me reflect long, deeply, and uncomfortably on my understanding of race and racial categories. Philip Roth challenged me to do some real work on his text and on myself and hooked me on his writing. The Human Stain's exploration of American identity under pressure boils down to the word...

Coleman Silk and the Collective Trauma of America: Philip Roth's &lt;em&gt;The Human Stain&lt;/em&gt;

Coleman Silk and the Collective Trauma of America: Philip Roth's &lt;em&gt;The Human Stain&lt;/em&gt;

Roth Memorial

Roth Memorial Patrick O'Donnell (bio) Arguably the most compelling final paragraph of an American novel, perhaps only second to that of The Great Gatsby, occurs in Philip Roth's The Human Stain, published on the cusp of the new millennium: I turned from the shore, once I was safely there, to look back and see if he was going to follow me into the woods after all and to do me in before I ever got my chance to enter Coleman Silk's boyhood house and, like Steena Palsson before me, to sit with his East Orange family as the white guest at Sunday dinner. Just facing him, I could feel the terror of the auger—even with him already seated back on his bucket: the icy white of the lake encircling a tiny spot that was a man, the only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate's signature on a sheet of paper. There it was, if not the whole story, the whole picture. Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that's constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America. (Stain 360-61) "The only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate's signature": thus Roth's ironic acceptance of the unreadability—the sheer opacity—of the human and the possibility of ever relating "the whole story." Yet Roth's life-project was a prolific and relentlessly provocative attempt to do so, or at least to fill in as many of the blanks as he could, in the time that he had, through all of those flawed and stained narrators and protagonists who inhabit his novels, blind and blind-sided here, illuminated by visions pure and peaceful there. No American novelist I know of, with the exception of Hawthorne, understood how deeply riven with contradiction the "nature" of "human nature" can be. In charting its excesses and its limitations, especially in the realm of self-understanding, Roth lost a lot of friends and made a lot of enemies, members of either party unwilling to accept his scorn for familiar categories; a novelist of filiation, he had no time for affiliation. His satirical proclivities, his attraction to the scandalous, his comic [End Page 111] outrageousness—qualities that both vie and correspond with the philosophical seriousness and the probative cultural and historical density of his fiction—have confused some and irritated others. At century's end, he captures perfectly in The Human Stain the antinomies of our growing intolerance of our own deep imperfection, paired with our growing lassitude in the face of human corruption and violence. In this novel, Roth implicitly protests against reductionism in all of its forms; he is an adversary of the binary, the all-too-easy separability of guilt from innocence and pure from impure that seems to have invaded every aspect of our contemporary Manichean existence in the difficult new century he anticipates, via Nathan Zuckerman, as he takes a last look at a Vietnam veteran alone, ice-fishing on a lake "that's constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America." Nature, or the paradoxical snapshot of impermanent, ever-changing nature captured in this "whole picture," may offer a vision of purity against which the illegibility of the human can be marked, but the unreadability of the human stain viewed not as DNA but as "X," a cross-out or cipher, signifies for Roth our impenetrability and excess beyond any mappings offered by science, law, politics, or religion. In a designation that he would have immediately recognized and embraced, he was the most secular American writer of his time. Roth was not interested in life as a singularity, but in lives as pluralities, alterities. Most Roth protagonists live at least two lives, and though we sometimes have Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh to try to sort things out, they almost inevitably fall back on a recognition that the story they can tell is only half the...

Secret Sins, Honest Hypocrites, and Secular Sermons: Hawthorne's Human Stain in Philip Roth's Twice-Told Tale

In Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), narrator Nathan Zuckerman learns about Coleman Silk’s life, including his passing as a white man, from Silk’s sister Ernestine at Coleman’s funeral. In Zuckerman’s retelling of Silk’s story, intertextual allusions regenerate Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literary tropes about the human stain that imbues every person’s soul. Hawthorne and Roth both emphasize (1) how secret sins afflict all of humankind, (2) how even good people are guilty of self-delusions, hypocrisy, and self-righteousness, and (3) how secular sermons in the texts of both authors call forth their mutual commandment: thou shalt not judge others, lest ye also be judged.

The Motif of Betrayal in Philip Roth’s “American Trilogy”

Philip Roth displays numerous cases of betrayal in his “American trilogy”: Seymour’s betrayal to his father; the mutual betrayal between Seymour and his wife; the daughter’s betrayal to Seymour and his wife; Coleman Silk’s betrayal to his mother and his wife; the mutual betrayal between Ira Ringold and Eve Frame; the betrayal of a paramour, friends and former neighbours to Ira Ringold, etc. Meanwhile, Roth reveals the causes and effects of the betrayal in the trilogy. Through the stage of betrayal, Roth shows a clear picture of American social life.

The phantom in American Arcadia: Rethinking race in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

The article explores the problem of race and racial ambiguity in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000). Referring to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and her assumptions concerning “the Africanist presence,” the paper discusses how the character’s repressed African-American past returns to haunt not only the protagonist but also the reader. As biracial Coleman Silk succeeds in passing for a Jew, his body becomes a signifier whose signified turns out to be problematic. While Roth’s narrative argues that the ideal of a self-made man that the protagonist represents is always already haunted by the ghost of racial uncertainty, it also demonstrates that the issue of race functions in contemporary writing primarily as a metaphor, or “a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological ‘race’ ever was.” Finally, the paper explores the way in which Roth’s novel addresses the long familiar fear that racial boundaries do not exist and the coherent white American self is an illusion.

Reconsidering the Tragic Status of Coleman Silk in The Human Stain

Reconsidering the Tragic Status of Coleman Silk in The Human Stain

“They been full (w)roth(e) al day, as men may see”; or, Contiguous Roth

“They been full (w)roth(e) al day, as men may see”; or, <i>Contiguous Roth</i>

Editor's Column

Editor's Column Derek Parker Royal In the editor's column of the last issue of Philip Roth Studies, I speculated on the relative popularity of various Roth texts in the classroom and in reading groups, pointing out that if the scholarship was any indication, most current readers and instructors are probably privileging the novelist's most recent works. In fact, a cursory survey of the essays published in this journal since its inaugural issue in 2005 illustrates this tendency. Roughly 66% of Roth's fiction that has been discussed in Philip Roth Studies concerns works published since the early 1990s. What is more, 63% of those articles—and 42% of the entire six-volume run so far—has focused on The Human Stain (2000), The Plot Against America (2004), and American Pastoral (1997), and in that order. (In a curious anomaly, the novel that many critics consider to be Roth's masterpiece, Sabbath's Theater [1995], has been the subject of only one essay.) As I suggested in the previous issue, there is a need for someone to conduct a thorough survey of educators in order to learn what Roth novels they are using in the classroom. Such a study would surely give us a revealing snapshot of the current pedagogy surrounding Roth studies. But if the scholarship tells us anything, it is perhaps safe to assume that most readers are focusing on the recent historically framed novels. Indeed, the essays in the current issue could stand as vivid illustration of this development. They revolve around two of Roth's most discussed novels, The Plot Against America and The Human Stain. In the first contribution to this issue, Christopher Vials reads The Plot Against America alongside Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here (1935), and he does so by arguing that both texts articulate what he calls "dissonant antifascism." This, according to the author, is a critique of the exclusionary and nationalistic rhetoric that has come to define conservative politics, both in Lewis's time and in our own. As Vials argues, both Roth's and Lewis's novels are significant because they are written from liberal, and not from strictly leftist, perspectives, both highlighting the right-wing nature of fascist ideology. In this way, Vials's analysis furthers the discussion over Roth's alternate history as an inherently political text, complementing [End Page 5] the works of earlier critics such as Martin J. Jacobi, Dan Shiffman, Steven G. Kellman, and Gurumurthy Neelakantan (all of whose essays have been published in these pages). In his treatment of The Plot Against America, James Duban takes an entirely different approach. Instead of focusing on the political resonance in Roth's book, he investigates its autobiographical import. Specifically, he reads the novel within the context of Meyer Levin's first autobiography, In Search (1950), seeing in the latter an inspirational blueprint for Roth's handling of Judaism and his relationship with it. Duban's contribution picks up from his earlier work on The Plot Against America, published in our Fall 2010 issue, where he contextualized the novel as a Melvillian/Ahabian response to Jewish self-doubt and anti-Semitism. Yael Maurer, too, resists a strictly political reading of The Plot Against America and instead undergoes a more psychological investigation. Using Freud's concept of the uncanny as a springboard, she explores the tropes of dreams and hallucinations and reads Roth's alternate history as a sophisticated and ongoing mental engagement with "the Jewish condition." The final two essays of this issue shift our attention to the earlier novel. Larry Schwartz approaches The Human Stain in light of its racial import, yet he argues that race is not really what the novel is about. Instead, he reads Coleman Silk's story—filtered through the artist figure, Nathan Zuckerman—as one of creation. Similar to the ways that Zuckerman conjures his fictional worlds, Coleman Silk constructs a life that is entirely his own and attempts to control the ways in which it is interpreted by others. In this way, Zuckerman's framing of the outraged classics professor says more about the act of creative invention than it does about racial politics. And in...

FICTION IN REVIEW

1 6 8 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W A M Y H U N G E R F O R D Cold Fiction Imagine that Philip Roth’s Coleman Silk had su√ered the fate of Keith, the protagonist of Caryl Phillips’s new novel, In the Falling Snow. Keith’s fate is not so di√erent from Coleman’s: rather than su√ering the false accusations of racism and erotic cradle-robbing cooked up for Coleman in The Human Stain, Phillips’s man is subjected to the o≈ce-wide exposure of all ill-advised romance with a colleague. The woman, thrown over, e-mails their entire erotic correspondence to everyone at work. It is a Rothian set-up, and Roth would probably, as Phillips does with Keith, have the man lose his job, with all the personal repercussions that such an injustice entails. And Roth’s man would be raging on the page, giving us those operatic rants that neither satisfy nor fix but propel memory to the surface of narrative: we would get Roth as an angry Proust. I n t h e Fa l l i n g S n o w , by Caryl Phillips (Knopf, 320 pp. $25.95) T h e G i n C l o s e t , by Leslie Jamison (Free Press, 288 pp. $25.00) 1 6 9 R But Keith, or perhaps Phillips, is an equable man. At least, the tone of the narrator, who sees the world from Keith’s perspective, is even – a few pages in, one might say the tone is even to a fault. Soon, though, the relentless neutrality turns from baΔing to impressive . It raises the questions at the heart of this novel, or rather, questions that squat where a heart ought to be. Where is Keith’s feeling? Where is his anger? Does no one raise his voice in here? How cold is England? Cold isn’t what we expect Keith to be. He is a good man. The son of a Jamaican father who emigrated to England as a young man, Keith survived the loss of his mother and then of the woman who replaced her in his life – his father’s white girlfriend, Brenda. His father, who has su√ered bouts of mental illness and involuntary commitment, wants the boy with him when he is well enough to have him. The father’s pride overrides Keith’s attachment to Brenda; it does not matter to the father that Keith hardly knows him when, near Keith’s twelfth birthday, he is released from the mental institution and shows up to claim Keith from Brenda. Surviving this emotional rending and the racist bullying of local boys, finally earning his entrance into university, Keith finds himself fitted to work for the cause of racial equality in Britain. He falls in love with a like-minded white woman, and the two make a life, have a son, Laurie, and grope their way through her family’s disapproval , his father’s erratic presence, and the newer iterations of racial tension Laurie must face. Keith enters higher management in an o≈ce that provides social services and multicultural awareness initiatives. For reasons we do not fully understand, Keith loses his way emotionally at some point; he has a one-night stand at an o≈ce retreat, and, seeing him as a decent man, if a flawed one, we feel for him. Hearing his confession, Keith’s wife, however, decides to leave him, as if she had been waiting for just this cue. Hers is a decisive act that hints at strong feeling but finally reads like something else. What we know of her is that she, too, is decent – annoyed, tired, worried about their son, but decent. How she worked up the passion to leave Keith remains obscure. This strange absence of passion in Keith and in those around him is related to the ambitious narrative decision Phillips makes in this novel. He is committed to the present, and I mean that 1 7 0 H U N G E R F O R D...