Truth And Consequences

Late in Philip Roth's marvelous new novel "The Human Stain," his literary stunt double, novelist Nathan Zuckerman, chats up a murderer, though he knows he'd better get away. "This was not... fiction writing," Zuckerman tells us. "This was the thing itself." It's a trick at least as old as "David Copperfield": a fictive novelist, teasingly like the real novelist, claiming the novel we're reading isn't a novel. Zuckerman admits he's made up some of what he tells us about classics professor Coleman Silk, Silk's lover and her husband. But when he says he's making the true story of Silk's life and death into a novel called "The Human Stain," set during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal--that's nonfiction.

With the National Book Award-winning "Sabbath's Theater" (1995) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "American Pastoral" (1997), Roth's been having a magnificent Indian summer--and a second honeymoon with the critics. In "The Human Stain," widely and justly praised, he stretches his imaginative sympathies to embrace such un-Rothian characters as a black man passing for Jewish, an abused charwoman and--hold on to your hats, ladies--a feisty, likable feminist literary scholar. With Zuckerman's reminders that he's inventing their rich inner lives, he and his inventor dare you to resist the force of novelistic imagination. Mostly you can't, though you may draw the line when Roth (or is it Zuckerman?) puts anti-P.C. boilerplate into the mouth of an elderly black schoolteacher.

As in Dickens, such ventriloquizing comes from an overflow of passion about real-world outrages: illiterate children, traumatized Vietnam vets, racism, abuses of the intellect. Roth exalts the individual above the group, lust above propriety, the fallible Bill Clinton above his rectitudinous enemies and human complexity above all. The "stain" of the title is no mere DNA sample on a blue dress; it spreads even beyond conventional notions of good and evil: "We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen--there's no other way to be here."

Such hot, preacherly language seems at odds with metafictional narrative trickery, which the late novelist and teacher John Gardner considered symptomatic of writerly "frigidity." But Roth has it both ways. Every other page of "The Human Stain" seems to have some Bartlett's-ready bit of truth-telling; on the pages in between, we hear that we'll never know the truth: "You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know." Roth's two main characters, we learn, both hide crucial information about themselves; they reinvent themselves to deceive even those closest to them. Especially those closest to them. Meanwhile Zuckerman, holed up in his cabin in the Berkshires, invents their most intimate moments. "Now that they're dead, nobody can know... I can only do what everyone does who thinks that they know. I imagine. I am forced to imagine. It happens to be what I do for a living." And a bit to the south, in northwestern Connecticut, sits Roth, inventing it all; what's more human than to imagine ourselves somehow outside humanity, watching the stain spread, in dread and wonder?