Coleman Silk is a black man with skin so light he decides to simply pass himself off as white. Leaving his entire family behind him, he reinvents himself as a Jew and a distinguished classicist. However, a casual slip of the tongue in one of his lectures and Silk finds himself denounced as a racist and forced to resign.
Part of a loose trilogy that began with 'American Pastoral' and 'I Married A Communist', 'The Human Stain' is the most powerful of Roth's novels yet, with a deep emotional intensity and vividness.