Philip Roth
La macchia umana

The novel begins with the young illiterate fiancée of the elderly professor protagonist being introduced to Nathan Zuckerman, a friend of the professor (the academic), while she conscientiously milks a cow… and ends with Nathan Zuckerman driving along a remote mountain road, when he notices the pick-up truck of the professor's fiancée's ex-husband, parked along the roadside. The man (the ex-husband) has stopped to fish in a frozen lake...

“The Human Stain” published in 2000, and in Italy in 2001 with the title “La macchia umana” is (I believe) the seventeenth novel by Philip Roth and is also the title of the film starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, and Gary Sinise, released in 2003 (which I have yet to have the pleasure of enjoying, but I am persistent and sooner or later I'll catch it, unless death arrives and we touch wood here…), directed by Robert Douglas Benton, a winner of 2 Academy Awards for the film “Kramer vs. Kramer”.

An interesting fact Benton is almost the same age as Roth being born on September 29, 1932, while Roth was born on March 19, 1933, and is still alive and kicking while our PR unfortunately left us orphaned just a year ago rip.

For a single word “spooks” which in American slang pejoratively labels people of color, attributed to two absent students (without knowing they were truly “negros,” as they are also called here when one wants to offend them) the reputation of the esteemed and highly regarded academic professor (here the protagonist of the story) close to retirement, shatters due to rampant moralism and the negativity generated by a poorly applied “political correctness,” reopening a mystery he kept hidden from everyone, including family, a mystery also linked to racial, social, and military issues…

Journalist Michiko Kakutani said that in this book, PR "explores issues of identity and invention in that America he had already extensively explored in previous works" and interprets it thus: “The favorite themes of PR like identity and rebellion, generational conflicts, and reforms are not the only ones in this book that exposes the fissures and discontinuities of twentieth-century life... Stripped of its racial nuances, the book echoes a story he told one novel after another. Indeed, it's only the story of Nathan Zuckerman here in the role of an elderly writer protagonist also in “American Pastoral” and the subsequent “I Married a Communist” which with this “The Human Stain” form a sort of trilogy, he himself (Nathan Zuckerman) is like PR another bourgeois from New Jersey who rebelled against his family and found himself exiled, "unbound by his roots" but while Zuckerman acts largely as an observer, the professor protagonist (words of PR) chooses to take the future into his own hands rather than leave it to an unenlightened society, to determine his own destiny.

Without spoiling, it is revealed in the various reflections of Zuckerman whom Professor Silk turns to for supportive assistance, that he (the professor) is an African American who "passed" as a Jew during his Navy period and after completing his studies, married a white woman with whom he had four children, never telling his wife and children about his African American descent… and um, the rest you will find in its captivating pages.

Finally, as Wikipedia succinctly warns us (eeh nowadays, no wiki no party): “The central theme, which stands behind all three novels, is once again the fiction and hypocrisy which social conventions force upon us.” and I confirm.