Some writers have a karezza career. Karezza is the Tantric sexual practice focused on riding the wave of pleasure just short of orgasm for as long as possible, the theory being that the orgasm that finally comes (so to speak) is thereby immeasurably intensified.

With The Human Stain near the end of a long career, Roth may have pulled off (so to speak) just such a polymorphous trick. While it may well be the case that novels no longer matter, that does not necessarily mean that they no longer have the potential to matter. The problem may be that our writers just haven’t been able to get a proper handle on the times.

Coleman Silk, the unlikely, vividly conceived central character of The Human Stain, provides Roth with such a handle, giving him entrée deep into not just the American soul (God help us all), as many reviewers realized, but into the human soul. Silk, a figure of wrenching ambition and rich ambiguity, joins Hester Prynne, Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield, Myra Breckinridge, and Billy Pilgrim in the defining pantheon of American literary figures.

Born brilliant into a brilliantly nurturing black family in East Orange, New Jersey, Coleman Silk follows an outrageous but wholly believable path which leads him straight out of the ghetto into a successful life, passing as a white Jewish classics professor. Life is good for Coleman until one day in class he offhandedly wonders if a couple of absent students really exist or if they are only "spooks."

The P.C. police, writhing happily in what Roth calls "the ecstasy of sanctimony," come down hard on him when it turns out the two students are in fact African American. His career and his life collapse under the relentless absurdity of the charge of racism.

We get Silk’s story through the eyes of Roth’s old standby fictional doppelgänger, Nathan Zuckerman, who befriends Silk after his downfall and who eventually uncovers his secret.

To summarize the plot like that is to give nothing away, because the power of the book lies in the piling on of telling detail—Silk’s Jersey upbringing, his triumphant march through academe, the Berkshire microcosm where he winds up—and an assemblage of unforgettable characters—Silk himself, his parents, his siblings, his lovers, his wife, his fellow faculty members, and a small-town Vietnam veteran who plays a pivotal role in the tragedy by bringing not "closure" (a word that Silk detests; he declares that he automatically gives an F to any student who uses the word) but an almost miraculous opening out at the end of the novel.

Rooted deep in Roth’s decades of observation of the human comedy, the people of Athena, both the college and the town where Silk winds up, leap off the page into that full life which maybe we’ve forgotten is possible. With an easy bravura that few writers achieve, Roth takes us inside the skin (so to speak) of a whole series of unlikely souls: Faunia, his late-in-life mistress, "Voluptas" he calls her, a janitor from the college who understands and accepts him as no one else has; Delphine Roux, super-structuralist French professor and Coleman's faculty nemesis, whose vicious pettiness is far more common in academe than your alma mater's alumni clubs ever let on; Les Farley, the Vietnam vet and one of the most unlikable characters you’ll ever encounter, but who is painted with a rich depth such as one encounters in only the darkest Rembrandt’s and the most troubling Carravaggio’s.

Right at the end, as you’re wondering how in the world he’s going to find, well, closure for his tangled story, Roth, absolute master of the craft of fiction, brings in a new character, Silk’s sister, Ernestine, whom we’d hardly glimpsed early in the book, and in a few pages Ernestine puts everything—the betrayals, the hypocrisy, the senseless deaths—in a new light, enabling Zuckerman—and us—to see, if not a way out, at least a possible way forward.