The book, however, didn’t do Roth any favors that day. “I think we need to make an important distinction,” said a not-so-diffident student named Lauren, “that we don’t want to arrest you and put you on trial.” Another young woman returned to the “question of roundness”: “I think that it’s important to maybe understand that for people our age, for women . . . most of the literature that we’re exposed to and read growing up is about men.” “I grew up in an extremely Jewish environment,” Roth countered. “And when I read English literature there were no Jews in it—except in T. S. Eliot there were Jews to make fun of. . . . Do I have to read books with just Jews in them? What would I have read? Sholem Aleichem until the cows come home?” Amid a nervous ripple of laughter, Roth pressed on: flatness versus roundness, he said, is “a very elementary distinction,” and perhaps now they could finally move on to what is present in his work rather than what may or may not be (“Isn’t it boring after a while?”).

  But the class ended before other topics could be broached, and for the most part everyone seemed relieved. As for Roth, he’d maintained an air of good-humored civility throughout, but brooded and brooded afterward and seemed to grow increasingly bitter about things. Chatting with Bellow a couple weeks later, he said that young people’s “aesthetic antennae have been cut” so that they only recognize the “political uses” of literature. Indeed he blamed the man-hating faculty “harpies” who corrupted such students, especially female students, and especially with respect to the work of Philip Roth, who wasn’t about to lie down for these detractors. When he heard, in 2002, that Smith College had withdrawn permission for producers of The Human Stain to shoot on campus, allegedly because some of the dialogue was deemed offensive, Roth fired off a letter to President Carol Christ, wondering whether his novel (whence much of the dialogue was derived) had also been banned at Smith: “It’s hard for me to believe that would be so, but I would appreciate it if you’d be kind enough to let me know if it is.” And such matters continued to rankle twelve years later, when a teacher at St. Paul’s Girls’ School, in London, wrote Roth a friendly letter informing him that her students (“eight sharp and witty feminist critics”) were reading American Pastoral in terms of “ideology, myth, intertextuality, gender and ambivalence.” “I regret to tell you,” Roth replied, “that the words ‘ideology, myth, intertextuality, gender and ambivalence’ make my flesh crawl.”

  BY 2004, Roth’s work appeared in thirty-one languages, and he informed a writer from Time that he was “not involved in the process of translation” except a little with his French translator, Josée Kamoun. Roth was “not involved” insofar as he spoke no language other than English; otherwise he was involved to the utmost degree. In the early days, to be sure, Roth had been remiss enough to allow his Italian publisher (then Bompiani) to translate his first book as La ragazza di Tony—i.e., Tony’s Girl, which omitted the five short stories and renamed Neil Klugman in accordance with the revamped title. By 1981, Roth had a keener sense of his place in world literature, and when he learned at the last minute (from Kundera) that his French translator had misunderstood a Tolstoy reference at the end of The Ghost Writer (“It’s like being married to Tolstoy,” says Lonoff, about to pursue his fleeing wife), Roth wrote an irate letter to his august publisher, Claude Gallimard: “I now understand that this same translator is working on Zuckerman Unbound!”—and that wasn’t the half of it: Only two of his books (Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy) were available in French paperback editions, and if Gallimard would not agree to reprint most of Roth’s backlist to coincide with his forthcoming Zuckerman Trilogy, he would have no choice but to seek another publisher. Gallimard replied that his translator, Henri Robillot, had been much acclaimed for his work on Portnoy et son complexe and other Roth titles: “I wish I could convince you, dear Philip Roth, that we feel a deep attachment to your books. According to me, publishing the Grand Roman Americain [The Great American Novel] should have been a living proof of that; because, in spite of its obvious qualities, the French public had a difficult approach to that book.” Roth stayed with Gallimard.§

  In due course Roth put a system in place whereby his translators passed along their work (via Wylie’s office) to handpicked authorities in various languages—including trusted friends such as Jacquie Rogers (French) and Aaron Asher’s daughter Abigail (Italian)—who would make corrections and suggestions which Roth himself would then consider before preparing his own copious remarks. With Kamoun he had particular rapport, and for The Dying Animal he read the book aloud to her so she could get a better sense of the cadence and idioms of his first-person narrator. He also worked closely with his Swedish translator, Nancy Westman, who queried him as to a synonym for “base” apropos of Sabbath’s remark, “I love your base qualities.” After reviewing the manifold nuances of “base” according to The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (pressed on all his translators), Roth came to the point: “Sabbath is being playful with Nikki when he says he likes her base qualities, since she is almost singularly without any. Lighten up, sweetheart.”

  In 2000, Roth was described as “the biggest American export since David Hasselhoff” by New York magazine, which noted no fewer than three recent documentaries about the novelist in France, England, and Germany. Nowhere would Roth be more embraced than in France, thanks in part to critics such as Le Monde’s Josyane Savigneau, who insisted Roth was more than just the bawdy comic who’d written Portnoy. “This is only a guess,” said Roth, when asked about his fame in France, “but I think they think that reading my books they’re finding out something about America that they don’t know and that they want to know.” American Pastoral had established Roth as a major writer in France, and if anything The Human Stain would prove an even bigger success—a definitive indictment of the curious (to the French) puritanism that had led to the impeachment of a popular and admirable president. Even the hip left-wing magazine Les Inrocks¶ was clamoring for an interview, which Roth had refused at first (“I seem to have entered the post-interrogation period of my life”), until he was won over by its young literary editor, Marc Weitzmann, who began their interview in typically Gallic fashion. “My questions were very systematics [sic] and theoretic,” he remembered, “until he stopped me and said ‘I do not think that way’—to which I answered, ‘Actually, neither do I’—I threw away my notes and started to ask the first thing I could think of and things got smoother.”

  Roth had a chance to bask in the adoration of the French en masse in October 1999, when he became only the third writer in nineteen years to be honored as the sole subject of the Book Festival of Aix-en-Provence, attended by more than twenty thousand people—another occasion he’d been inclined to forgo, until his Francophile friend Judith Thurman talked him into it. She acted as translator when Roth met with the festival director, Annie Terrier, to work out a format for the four-day program. Roth was especially eager to ameliorate what he considered French cultural condescension (“this stupid bullshit about ‘McDonald’s America’ ”) and made sure the festival was as much about twentieth-century American art as it was about him and his work. Dan Talbot of Manhattan’s Lincoln Plaza Cinema suggested five essential documentaries to screen (e.g., Frederick Wiseman’s Welfare), and Leon Botstein helped arrange an American chamber music concert featuring the work of Barber, Copland, and others. Roth was especially pleased with the contribution of his librarian friend, Charles Cummings—a “first-class” photographic and historical exhibition of Newark—but Roth himself was the mastermind of it all, overseeing every detail and even providing a rather immodest but not inaccurate title: “The Roth Explosion.”

  He insisted on a quick flight aboard the Concorde because of his bad back, and his main companion and moral support, Julia Golier, remembered the rock-star greeting he received from a “gaggle of girls” in Aix (“FEEL-up ROTH . . . FEEL-up ROTH”), where the lampposts were festooned with enormous red banners bearing his likeness. “Now I know what it’s like to be Chairman Mao,” he said to the opening night audience. Roth’s main duty was to preside over master classes about his work. While capacity crowds watched and listened, a portly gray-haired woman sat onstage taking notes for a few minutes at a time, then translating at lucid length whatever a panel of fifteen graduate students had said to Roth and vice versa. Roth would later describe his interlocutors as “young men and women educated to a crisp in the great French fryer of Continental literary education, with its bubbling Derridian rhetoric and dubious wordplay.” Not unlike Norman Podhoretz, they’d concluded Roth was on the side of “tradition” because Levov (meaning “Love”? Or “Lion” for Lev?) was a glove maker and gloves equaled tradition—etc. Roth spoke as carefully as he listened, with a kind of modest detachment toward his own work, as if he were just another (very) perceptive reader; decorously he suggested they think less about symbolic niceties and more about “the costs of a revolutionary period in American life . . . the inability to explain random events and catastrophes in a good man’s life.”

  AFTER THE ORDEAL of I Married a Communist, Roth expected even worse gossip mongering to taint the publication of The Human Stain. He’d been tempted to title his novel Spooks, but was dissuaded, he said, by the prospect of being reviewed in the Sunday New York Times by the Reverend Al Sharpton. “What’s the most stupid possible reaction?” he wondered in his notes. “A big picture of Anatole Broyard in the NY Times ‘Arts’ section, next to a picture of PR. Roth steals AB’s biography. That’s the scoop on this book. He can never make anything up. Why did he want to put Anatole down? . . . Because Anatole gave him bad reviews. Roth is settling a score with Anatole.” By then the former Times critic (who’d died in 1990) had become best known as a black man who’d ruthlessly cut ties with his family and “passed” as a white man with a white family in Connecticut. “I always suspected [him] of being a macaroon (one-eighth Jewish),” Roth wrote Updike, remembering his first meeting with Broyard on an Amagansett beach in 1959; in those days Broyard was considered a promising fiction writer, and Roth had admired an early story of his, “What the Cystoscope Said”; in hindsight, though, he decided Broyard’s real talent had been “for elaborate mischief and deception.” And cocksmanship: after Broyard had derided Portnoy, in The New Republic, as the kind of thing one hears “in midtown bars,” Roth affected to concede that it was “probably true. . . . I guess one of the differences between [Broyard] and myself is that after all those nights in those great midtown bars I went home and wrote it down, while he, alas, went off to fuck another girl.”

  Publication of The Human Stain was heralded by a feature article—“Philip Roth Blows Up”—in New York, which respectfully proclaimed that “the unthinkable has occurred: Portnoy is a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize.” Roth had refused to comment for the piece because he was “still irk[ed]” by the magazine’s 1996 cover story, captioned “A Hell of a Marriage,” but Harold Bloom and Bellow gladly attested to the greatness of his work in recent years. “It’s almost a Shakespearean outburst of creativity,” said Bloom, while Bellow professed an all but speechless awe: “I wish I understood it. I’m very impressed.” Given the “very optimistic” first printing of 100,000, “the normally press-shy Roth” had agreed to cooperate with friendlier outlets, submitting to a long New Yorker profile and even the odd TV appearance.

  As for coverage in the Times, it might have been worse: sure enough Broyard was invoked in both the daily and Sunday reviews, but no one accused Roth of settling scores. “The premise seems to have been inspired by the life story of Anatole Broyard,” Kakutani wrote, adding that the basic story was a familiar one to Roth’s readers: “Indeed, it closely parallels the story of Nathan Zuckerman, himself another dutiful, middle-class boy from New Jersey who rebelled against his family and found himself exiled, ‘unbound’ as it were, from his roots.” Lorrie Moore, in the Sunday Book Review, made the debatable point that Roth (“usually fond of both sides of an argument”) was content merely to ridicule the political correctness of a place like Athena College, “where prejudice may be trickily institutional and atmospheric, causing events like the ‘spooks’ utterance to be seized hold of and overinterpreted”; she concluded nonetheless that the novel was an “often very beautiful book.”

  Roth was warned away from reading a review in The New Republic, by James Wood, who found Silk’s secret a little too easy and sentimentalizing, wishing instead Roth had let Silk be, in fact, a bigoted old Jew, or even a secret but self-hating black man: “Imagine the novelistic task of showing that an unpleasant old racist . . . had become the victim of political correctness, and was a rule-defying American individualist. Bigotry as the purest American individualism! That would be a novel to savor.” As it was, said Wood, Roth had already written such a novel—Sabbath’s Theater—“the story of an unsavory nihilist (sexist, racist, brutalist) whose battle-cry is ‘fuck the laudable ideologies.’ ”

  In a more muted way, the same battle cry may be heard in The Human Stain, given that ideologies of whatever sort tend to obscure the truth about human nature embodied by the stain on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress. “I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner,” Zuckerman reflects, “draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.” In the first two novels of his American Trilogy, Roth had examined the “fantasy of purity” as imposed by the antiwar left and the anti-Communist right, and in his final book the puritanism is general—from the “Talibanism” of campus political correctness to the larger cynicism of the right’s crusade to scapegoat Clinton and force his party out of power. Aptly, the brutalized Faunia speaks the eponymous phrase, “the human stain,” while considering her beloved crow, Prince, violently rejected by other crows because he was raised by humans—by people like us, says Faunia, speaking “without revulsion or contempt or condemnation. Not even with sadness. . . . Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience.”

  Faunia loves her fellow misfit, Prince, a “crow that doesn’t know how to be a crow”—a predicament shared by her human lover, a black man passing as a Jew. “Everyone knows you’re sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age,” writes the sanctimonious department chair, Delphine Roux, who’d earlier accused Silk of racism and whose Delphic certainty will lead to rue (as the French might say). “Because we don’t know, do we? . . . What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows, Professor Roux.” The irony of mistaken judgment applies to Silk and his accuser equally: the latter begins as a kind of cartoon academic, an easy satirical target, but later is beautifully humanized into her own brand of lonely misfit—“isolated, estranged, confused about everything essential to a life, in a desperate state of bewildered longing and surrounded on all sides by admonishing forces defining her as the enemy.” Among the things Roux fails to understand is that she herself is a bit of a racist, which suggests that her obsessive hostility toward Silk is rather the opposite of what it seems. Hence the bleak epiphany that follows her attempt to write a “subtly coded” personal ad, conveying a taste for swarthiness but not for negritude per se: “Mature man with backbone. Independent. Witty. Lively. . . . Mediterranean complexion. Green eyes preferred. . . . Graying hair acceptable, even desirable.” Coleman, in short, who incenses her (in part) by seeming to prefer an “illiterate woman” to an alluring cosmopolitan scholar such as herself.

  The title of Roth’s novel suggests another examination of the repellent, just as Coleman’s flight from his race is a reworking of Roth’s great theme going back to Goodbye, Columbus: the I against the They, a longing to live on one’s own terms, free of the smothering community, amid, too, an abiding wistfulness to belong—to be a good son, a mensch, a libertine, a nihilist—all of the above. “She was marveling at discovering being one person in secret and another everywhere else, enjoying the kick of having a multiple self who behaves various ways in numerous lives and of possessing an impressively lavish endowment of self-abandonment”: so Roth wrote of his lover Inga, and so he might have written about himself—or about Coleman Silk, whose dexterity in slipping among his multiple selves is foreshadowed by his career as a counterpunching boxer, “Silky Silk.” As a boxer he makes his first foray into passing as white, but not until his arrival at Howard University does he fully grasp what awaits him, as a black man, in the wider world—at Woolworth’s, for instance, where he and his roommate try to get a hot dog: “he was called a nigger. His first time. And they wouldn’t give him the hot dog.” Thus Silk decides to emancipate himself from both the “big they” and the “little they”: “You can’t let the big they impose its bigotry on you any more than you can let the little they become a we and impose its ethics on you. . . . The sliding relationship with everything. Not static but sliding. Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?”