There’s a lot to say about Philip Roth—and a lot of people more qualified to say it than I am—but it’s worth pointing out, if nothing else, how prescient the great novelist, who died on Tuesday, was.
No, I’m not referring to The Plot Against America, which was an absolutely brilliant work of pure imagination; an alternate history in which Charles Lindbergh is elected president of the United States in 1940. Rather, it is the 2000 opus The Human Stain that foresaw the present moment so acutely. Indeed, despite its copyright, The Human Stain feels so fresh and urgent that it may as well have been written in 2018.
The Human Stain has it all: Rachael Dolezal-ism; homonym racism; and #metoo. The book begins with a simple misunderstanding on a small college campus that is blown up, disingenuously, in to a racist hate crime. Professor Coleman Silk, a classicist, refers to two absentee students as “spooks” in class. He means the term in the sense of “ghosts,” but it just so happens that the missing students are (unbeknownst to Silk) black. His remarks are uncharitably interpreted, in today’s quasi-Stalinist mode, as a racist slur. And the subsequent outrage leads to Silk’s ouster from the college. The only thing missing is Silk’s subsequent move to the “intellectual dark web.”
As the novel develops, Roth depicts other moments that feel eerily familiar to the current reader. It later emerges that Silk has performed an act of reverse Rachael Dolezalism—born black, he has passed as Jewish for the past half century. Later, Silk embarks on a romantic relationship with an illiterate janitor who works at his former college. The relationship spurs wide reproach. Silk’s borderline-exploitative behavior, and the controversy it causes in his small town, anticipated the #metoo movement’s focus on power and status differences in romantic relations.
It feels unfair to cast Roth as a mere chronicler of current events—a lowbrow hack; a, gasp, journalist. But in addition to his prodigious powers as a stylist, and his philosophical depth, and his unparalleled understanding of American Jewish life, it’s worth noting that Philip Roth had Nostradamus-like skills at prognostication.
