It's difficult to argue unequivocally either for or against reading an author's series of books in order: the implication of doing so is that you 'get' the whole story, are able to contextualise and approach a fuller appreciation of the characters, and can maybe even fulfil an inner emotional imperative to form attachment to characters through being able to read them through the course of their lives. Certainly, familiarity with a character across each instalment of a trilogy triggers precisely the safe yet somehow real depersonalisation between reader and read that a lot of book lovers thrive upon. The trilogy is the equivalent of the unwieldy 600 page plus novel that is some readers' idea of heaven.
If you don't come to The Human Stain with knowledge of its predecessors - or indeed of Roth's writing - however, the loss of context and character familiarisation are minor things to bear compared with the richness of writing and Roth's unflinching determination to scratch away at issues of identity in modern America. Set against the rise in public consciousness about race and ethnicity which have dominated the rights and identity politics agenda since the waning years of European colonialism, Roth gives us Professor Coleman Silk - a man whose identity is shaped and determined through the activity of the self, as embodied in the American dream.
In Coleman Silk we have a black man who 'passes' (for white), who abjures his racial identity in order to avail himself of the fruits of the American dream. It is a simple enough literary premise that discourses cuttingly on the existential self versus groupism and that retains an almost uncomfortable focus on how pivotal are secrets to sustaining the fiction of the self. Should Professor Silk have been 'true' to the cause of Blacks in America? Or was he right to shed those aspects of identity that would have hindered the attainment of his own goals?
The irony of a black man who has successfully passed as white for the last six decades of his life referring to a couple of absent (and never seen) students - black students it turns out - as 'spooks' and being labelled racist as a result won't help make up your mind one way or the other.. you will already have done that. What such irony does help elucidate is how crucial are secrets in the ongoing creation of the fiction of self.
If you don't come to The Human Stain with knowledge of its predecessors - or indeed of Roth's writing - however, the loss of context and character familiarisation are minor things to bear compared with the richness of writing and Roth's unflinching determination to scratch away at issues of identity in modern America. Set against the rise in public consciousness about race and ethnicity which have dominated the rights and identity politics agenda since the waning years of European colonialism, Roth gives us Professor Coleman Silk - a man whose identity is shaped and determined through the activity of the self, as embodied in the American dream.
In Coleman Silk we have a black man who 'passes' (for white), who abjures his racial identity in order to avail himself of the fruits of the American dream. It is a simple enough literary premise that discourses cuttingly on the existential self versus groupism and that retains an almost uncomfortable focus on how pivotal are secrets to sustaining the fiction of the self. Should Professor Silk have been 'true' to the cause of Blacks in America? Or was he right to shed those aspects of identity that would have hindered the attainment of his own goals?
The irony of a black man who has successfully passed as white for the last six decades of his life referring to a couple of absent (and never seen) students - black students it turns out - as 'spooks' and being labelled racist as a result won't help make up your mind one way or the other.. you will already have done that. What such irony does help elucidate is how crucial are secrets in the ongoing creation of the fiction of self.
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