Miss Lapin's Complaint

When my father died, I inherited his library. It was filled with the books he had accumulated over a lifetime Huxley, Sartre, Grasse. Some books I already had copies of ( Voltaire's Candide, Huxley's Brave New World, the works of Shakespeare) but I kept them anyway. Even the one's that are falling part, the ones without covers, the ones with pages missing, the ones without any marginalia. Reading was one of the ways I was close to my father when he was alive. Reading is the way I keep my relationship with him alive.

The first book I read after my father's death from his library was Portnoy's Complaint. I had heard about the book, but nothign specific. I knew there was something racy and forbidden about it, but a vague sense of literary taboo was all I had.

Reading Portnoy's Complaint became one of the most formative experiences fo my life. After reading the book, I had a whole new understanding of my father. My feeling after reading was "Why didn't he give this to me before?" The book so seemed to capture my father's attraction to the goyim and the simulatenous self loathing that attraction enduced. It captured the secret fetishizing ( I know that isn't a word-shut up) of blonde haired, blue eyed strictly forbidden shiskas. It also captured the psychological disintegration that my father endured.

Roth would become one of my favorite writers. For me, the term good writer has one basic requirement, you must make me want to read more. And Roth did. Not just his own work. From him I discovered Kafka, Gogol, and Grasse ( including one of my all time favorite novels the Tin Drum).

I cherish my copies of Roth. I have actually rationed my reading of Roth, understanding that he will probably stop writing at some point ( or die) so that I will be able to continue to look forward to reading books of his in the future.

So you can imagine the crushing disappointment I experienced when I read the Human Stain. I purchased the book impulsively from Barnes and Nobles in hard cover. I was too excited to wait for soft cover, and being Roth I was fairly sure it would be a book that I would want to keep into old age.

Not that Roth hasn't made mistakes before. Although he has written some stunning novels ( So I Married a Communist, Portnoy's Complaint, Sabbath's Theater), he has also written so ho-hum books (When She Was Good, Our Gang, My Life as a Man). Roth has used politics to his great advantage in some of his books (So I Married a Communist), but he has also been undone by them in others ( Our Gang). Generally, when Roth gets caught up in contemporary politics, he seems to lose his talent. He goes for the pot shot, he goes for the dated reference, and misses the mark of creating something that can exist outside of that moment in politics. (Think Dante's Inferno-certainly there are dated references, but clearly Dante captured something universal in his writings about Italians in Hell.)

The Human Stain falls into the category of a failed attempted. I actually sold my copy on half.com immediately after finishing it. I wish now I hadn't. Not because I have come to a new appreciation of the text, but mainly so I could point to specific areas in the text to illustrate my claim. ( I know, I know, I'm such a scholar.)

The Human Stain ties to two politic events, one specific and one more of a trend. The first is that the novel makes continued references to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. In particular a professor has an affair with a seemingly illiterate woman (after her death he will discover she is perfectly literate). The professor is persecuted by a young female professor, who discovers she is attracted to her target. Sound familiar? ( Lewinsky as the illiterate, Tripp as the attracted persecutor, Clinton as the hero.)

Of course, the book is an exploration of seeming truths and power struggles. Is the literate professor really more powerful than his working class mistress? Is she his victim? Hve women turned victimization into such a powerul tool that MEN have no hope of defending themselves from accusations of sexual dominance?

Unfortunately Roth fails to make the relationship particularly intriguing or provocative to make answering those questions important. The relationship seems to be purely sexual and when she dies the revelation of her literacy fails to provoke much reconsideration of her character.

As for the lust provoke revenger, how cliched is that? And Roth doesn't do much to make her into more of character, she isn't even a particularly engaging villian. She isn't someone you love to hate, or even love to watch. Her behavior is so cliched and predictable ( uptight young female english professor using political correctness to persecute the unobtainable object of her lust) as to leave the reader as bored as being in one of her classes.

One of the only intriguing ideas in the novel is that the professor is being persecuted for making a supposedly racist comment during a lecture. The comment, which could be perceived as a slur against blacks, puts the hero in an interesting predicament. Our hero is, in fact, black, but has been passing himself off as jewish for decades ( even his wife didn't know). So the hero is in this predictament-admit to the lies of a lifetime and prove he is innocent or continue with the subterfuge and lose his life's work.

But even that premise is highly flawed. Roth's idea that simply by admitting he is black, the hero somehow absolves himself of being racist is false. As Roth should surely know from his own experiences (he refuses to speak in public after a particularly disastrous panel discussion at Adelphi University where he spent the afternoon being accused of being a self hating Jew) to be a member of a minority group is not to exclude oneself from being "racist" or making racist slurs against it.

So why out of all the books that Roth has written Hollywood would choose this one to make into film escapes me entirely. The short novel "Good-bye Columbus" was made into a film and was not tremendously successful. After that no films, to my knowledge, have been based on his work ( of course in order to make a film based on his work you would ahve to have a VERY liberal director and cast or at the very least a group of porn stars who are probably not up to the challenge of bringing Roth's prose to life).

I am not going to criticize the film yet because I havent' seen it. But I do have to say casting Anthony Hopkins as a black man pretending to be a Jew is more than a minor stretch. But let's just say I am going to be waiting for this film to come out on cable no matter what the reviewers say.

OK so now that I've totally bored you beyond belief I am going to leave you to wonder how fabulously well my life is going.

Because it is.