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The Human Stain By Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin, 361 pages Fiction Also This Week Spring Fiction Fever Salon celebrates a season of exceptional books with a weeklong series. By the critics and editors of Salon Books Salon recommends The pick of recent fiction, from the critics and editors of Salon Books.

Coleman Silk is a respected if tactless classics professor at Athena College, a small school in the Berkshires. Roth sets the scene of his hero's destruction ominously:

It was about midway into his second semester back as a full-time professor that Coleman spoke the self-incriminating word that would cause him to voluntarily sever all ties to the college -- the single self-incriminating word of the many millions spoken aloud in his years of teaching and administering at Athena, and the word that, as Coleman understood things, directly led to his wife's death.

That's a hell of a setup. It puts all of your "And then what happened?" instincts on high alert: You might be coming to a Dumas-style cliffhanger or to an instance of hubris straight out of Greek tragedy. What Roth gives us instead is farce. Noticing that two students have yet to appear in class five weeks into the semester, Coleman asks, "Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?" It turns out that the missing students are black, and when they hear about Coleman's question, they file a complaint charging him with racism. Coleman explains, of course, that he was using "spooks" not as a racist epithet but simply as a synonym for "phantoms."

But his astonishment at having to offer this obvious, elementary defense is matched by his contempt. Like a lot of intelligent people in recent years, Coleman finds himself in the position of having to do something akin to explaining that water is wet; it's the type of explanation no rational person should have to make and no rational person would demand. Coleman finds no defenders among his faculty colleagues and more than a few of them ready to take revenge for the exacting standards he maintained when he was dean. He resigns in a huff, and a few months later his wife is dead -- killed, he is sure, by the vicious charges against him.

Still, his persecution isn't over. The 71-year-old widower begins an affair with an illiterate 34-year-old college cleaning woman named Faunia Farley. For both of them it's a retreat into the pleasures of uncomplicated sex. Coleman is working to lay aside the rage that has consumed him since his resignation. Faunia is trying to forget the accident that left her two children dead and for which her ex-husband, a psychotic Vietnam vet, blames her and is still stalking her. But this is a country where private acts are now open to public scrutiny, and so the affair holds no solace at all. Having already been "proved" a racist in the college community, Coleman -- like the president who is being hounded by Congress and the press -- is now ripe to fill the role of the powerful man "sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age," as an anonymous letter writer puts it.

The revelation about the corruption of language at the heart of the book (and if you want to preserve the surprise for yourself, you should stop reading right here) comes, fittingly, in a precisely chosen word. "What burns away the camouflage and the covering and the concealment?" Roth asks. "This, the right word uttered spontaneously, without one's even having to think." For Coleman, the right word comes in a conversation he's having with the young attorney he has consulted after being harassed by Faunia's ex. Instead of the legal action the old man expects, he finds himself on the receiving end of a presumptuous and condescending lecture, the gist of which is that he should end his affair with Faunia. With the cloud of racism hovering over Coleman's reputation, the lawyer tells him, he is courting scandal by being "involved with this woman." Coleman hears out the harangue, and then he replies, "I never again want to hear that self-admiring voice of yours or see your smug fucking lily-white face." And though the young lawyer is perplexed ("Why 'lily-white'?"), Coleman knows he has burned away "the camouflage and the covering and the concealment" from the truth he has hidden for years: the fact that he's black.

Next page | The real-life model for Coleman Silk