The Wrath of Roth

PHILIP ROTH'S LATEST, THE HUMAN STAIN, IS FULL OF SECRETS, POLITICS, AND RAGE

The title of Philip Roth's latest provocation. The Human Slain (Houghton Mifllin), was inspired by the sticky discharge preserved on Monica Lewinsky's blue dress—Bill Ginton's presidential seal. "The moment he came, he was finished," says a campus philosopher at Roth's mythical Athena College. "She had the goods. The smoking come." Where Nixon's Watergate had Deep Throat, the Ginton scandal emerged from the bottomless pit of Monica's Big Mouth. "She's part of that dopey culture. Yap, yap, yap. Part of this generation that is proud of its shallowness. The sincere performance is everything. Sincere and empty, totally empty. It's a con these kids have going. The hypendramatization of the pettiest emotions."

Roth's hilarious Monica rifT provides the topspin in a novel where everybody is hyperdramatizing, inflating their opinions into moral indictments. It's the summer of 1998, and the body politic vibrates to the beating tongues of "righteous grandstanding creeps." Caught in a vise is Coleman "Silky" Silk, an Athena professor once accused of uttering a racial slur against blacks. What his adversaries don't know is that Silk himself is a black man who has passed for white since he left the military after WW. II and landed in Greenwich Village, bird-dogging the girls in their summer dresses. (Any resemblance to Anatole Broyard is strictly Kismet.) Silk is bedeviled by a French filly named Delphine Roux, who, in one of Roth's sneaky comic set pieces, accidentally E-mails her New York Review of Books personal ad to every faculty member of her department. (D'oh!) Although Roth pounds the feathers out of the platitudes of our therapeutic culture—all those invocations of "appropriate behavior" and "closure"— The Human Stain is too roiling for satire or social criticism. The boiler room of Roth's imagination can't contain its furious overflow. This is social history written in a white heat. (Rating: ★★★)

JAMES WOLCOTT