First book of '08

I finished my first book of the year yesterday, "The Human Stain" by Philip Roth. Do you know what is ridiculous? I just realized that I saw the movie adaptation of this book years ago and had absolutely no recollection of it the entire time I was reading the book. Ha! Not exactly an endorsement for the movie.

Anyway, the book is a decent 3 out of 5. I am fairly new to Philip Roth. I read Portnoy's Complaint in Mexico last year and loved it! I did not love "The Human Stain" but it was not a waste of time either. The guy has an absolutely enviable command of the English language, and he is a total show-off about it. Sometimes, the narrative suffered because the vocabulary was too painstaking. It's as though he went out of his way to be overly intellectual and high-brow. "Portnoy's Complaint" had a much better flow than this book.

The themes have been done before, and better, and this book will probably be forgotten in time. The narrator is a writer who is telling us the story of a disgraced classics professor/former dean at a small New England college, with whom he had a brief friendship. The gist of his downfall is that he has been accused of racism after making a benign comment about some students he has never laid eyes upon. There's some pretty astute commentary about the damaging effect of politics on the educational system. Turns out he's been hiding a pretty big secret about his own racial history. His disgrace is also heightened by an affair he is having with a woman 40 years younger than him. So sexual politics are at the forefront too. Roth parallels the main character's pitfall with Bill Clinton's scandal with Monica Lewinsky (book was written in 1998). All of the characters are well developed, although there's at least one I believe the book could do without entirely, and when the truth comes out about the big secret the professor has been hiding his whole life, the pathos of the human condition is just laid right out before you on a big, sad table.

Not the most uplifting book to start out the new year, but a good read for anyone who loves books that explore race theories, human imperfections, and that age-old question: how much do we control our own fate?

Next up: "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides. I've decided to give it a go, despite Oprah's big obnoxious seal of approval on the cover. *Shudder*