This book describes so succinctly the turmoil and oppositional forces going on inside a preson's head at any given time, and as it is doing so it reveals the characters themselves so completely and aggressively it leaves the reader reeling.
The idea here is that, could we see inside each others skulls, the intense, sometimes profane, insane mixture of unconscious thought is not pretty, logical, remotely politically correct, or even believable and we all gaurd secrets.
To some of my fellow reviewers:
Roth's book is all about the consequences of trying to hold secrets - you cannot hide from what you are, because in doing so it still defines what you are. If people know about it they will shape their impressions around it. If you hide it, you will shape your life around hiding it. Its still there whether to try to escape, ingnore, or embrace it, and the way the characters deal with thier secrets is not a political, racial, or righteous statement by roth - or the characters, it merely shows how confused we all are.
Clinton, Coleman, Faunia, Delphine some reviewers here have said they are "un-believable" characters. How do you define believable when most of the book is a stream of consciousness, how can you be so presumptuos as to say what should or should not an issue for a character and in the process ruin the careful crafting of nueroligical turmoil within these people?
And as for Roth advocating white superiority, as one reviewer suggested, what is wrong with you? This character (Coleman) shapes his own life - its about his decisions, his motives, and his own choice. If coleman sees being white as superior then we can either love him, hate him, be apathetic or whatever. He made his being black an issue for himself that became eventually became a stain on his own mind because HE thought he was wrong in not telling people, It is all the internal workings of this one man, Coleman Silk. The author never passes judgement, he leaves it to us to judge Coleman's decisions and way of looking at the world.
From the early 90's everything you say or do has more than its simple meaning. There is always a hidden agenda, even if you don't mean that --or even if you haven't considered that. People started using terms such as `afro-Americans', but they didn't care about the afro-American rights, as long as they use the `right' term. Surrounded by this hysterical blindness the protagonist of this novel, a professor named Coleman Silk, is forced to look back to his past and assume things he supposed to be long forgotten.
His downfall spiral began when he referred to a couple of absent students using the term `spooks' that in his context meant ghosts, but, as he finds out later, it is also a pejorative term to Afro-Americans. He's forced to retire and his wife dies in consequence of all this trouble.
Silkman reaches Nathan Zuckerman asking to writer the professor's memoirs. The writer doesn't accept, but the professor ends up doing it himself. In this process of rediscovery we learn a lot of his past and how much he had to reinvent himself in order to survive. We also find out about his love affair with a young and problematic janitor, whose ex-husband brings them a lot of problems.
In this novel all about finding out who you were and what was made you --i.e. who you are now-- the master Roth is able to go deep into the wound of correctness and the need of lying and faking who you are so that you can be accepted. As Silkman finds out, people didn't like or admire who he was, but who they thought he was.
With his analytic vein, the author shows the American dream going bad, proving that the end of the century --and this new one-- is damned with a disease of people being fake most of the time.
Using his razor sharp style, Philip Roth has delivered another winner, a novel full of undertones and truth that may make people feel sick. The reading can go a bit slow, but it is not a problem, because in the end one gets more than he/she expected. Not recommended to everyone, but to those who like literary novels.