This is a stunning novel. Roth is a writer with a profoundly moral conscience, who I see as very much Hawthorne's heir: their excavations of interiority; the secrets of the human heart; the lure and limitations of individualism; the lengths to which an individual will go to evade their own history and narrate their preferred version; the dangers of the need for knowledge. Stylistically too, Roth's masterful narration has many of Hawthorne's traits. This is dense material, laden with subclauses and infused with irony, the effect of which slows the reading process to a pace wherein the interiority of the narrator's narrator and the narrator's narrator's characters begins to reflect back to the reader who is irresistibly entangled in the enfolding human drama. As someone perusing the archives of three living writers, an academic practice not without its controversy, I relish The Human Stain for its shrewd exploration of the elusive nature of knowledge itself, and how the desire to attain authentic individuality often results in self-delusions of the greatest proportions.
"One's truth is known to no one, and frequently... to oneself least of all." (330).
