The Human Stain

Now a major motion picture starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman and Ed Harris.

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, it is the last year of the life of the forcibly retired, disgraced, widowed professor Coleman Silk, whose own tragic exposure is played out against the background of the Clinton revelations.

Coleman's secret has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out- after Coleman's suspicious death in a car crash with his mistress- to understand how his eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, had fabricated his identity and how that cannily controlled life came unravelled.

Set in 1990s America where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciation and rituals of purification, 'The Human Stain' concludes Philip Roth's eloquent trilogy of post- war, American lives that are as tragically determined by the nation's fate as by the 'human stain' that so ineradicably marks human nature.