Roth as Nostradamus

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.