This section contains 818 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: Wilhelmus, Tom. “Communities Perhaps.” Hudson Review 53, no. 4 (winter 2001): 696-97.
In the following excerpt, Wilhelmus describes The Human Stain as a well-knit novel that explores controversial racial and ethnic dilemmas.
Two recent novels deal with the problems of community and morality more in terms of their failures than in terms of their possible accommodations. The first is Philip Roth's bitter analysis of racial and ethnic dilemmas in The Human Stain, third in a trilogy of novels in which the author analyzes America's cultural decline during the 1950s through the 1990s. All three novels, narrated by doppelganger Nathan Zuckerman, focus on loss of personal and sexual identity in a culture seemingly organized to assure their defeat. The previous two—American Pastoral, 1997 (which won the Pulitzer Prize), and I Married a Communist, 1998—dealt with effects of the Vietnam War and the McCarthy era. The Human Stain deals especially with political...
This section contains 818 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) |