There is too much to discuss and too little time to do so. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. At first, I thought there were disparate story lines, but after reflection and some rereading, the pieces began to form a pattern. Here are some thoughts about what I discovered and liked about the book. There is much more to think about, but that would occupy another lifetime.
Coleman wanted to be a boxer, a poet, a play-write, to live in Greenwich Village. Instead he studies the classics (he is good at it, but not passionate for it) and graduates Phi Beta Kappa. He is co-opted by his academic prowess and voila he is harnessed to the institution of "higher" learning; he becomes a professor. The cage slams shut.
He (like Prince the crow) is unable to communicate beyond mimicking his immediate surroundings (academic talk) The university is his cage. Faunia is attracted to both Coleman and Prince, Coleman for his blackness (not his status as a Classics professor, which she finds laughable). Ironically, Faunia too is masking her past. She was born into a well-to-do family, left because of an abusive step father and then took on a wholly new persona. She feigned to be illiterate, and became a janitor. Coleman and Faunia are mirror images of one another.
Upon first reading, the book's characters appear to be cliches. But, then I realized that the underlying theme of the book is the struggle to break free of expectations that confine and bind. Some characters face a steeper challenge (Coleman and Delphine Roux), while others are comfortable in their skin (Ernestine, Walter, Coleman's mother). Delphine gets the nod as the book's most pathetic character. She is so pathetic that simply composing a four line note for a matchmaking ad stumps her. She ends up cutting and cutting until only the word SEEKING is left. She is stuck in America, cut off from her roots (familial and country), and pursuing an occupation that is depersonalizing and isolating. Don't just trust me on this latter point. Here is what Coleman has to say on the subject.
"In my parents' day and age, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it's the discipline. Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it's the classics that are to blame. Today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege. I can't learn it, so there is something wrong with it. And there is something especially wrong with the bad teacher who wants to teach it. There are no more criteria, Mr. Zuckerman, only opinions.”
Here is his take on the students.
They fix on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end—every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious, must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliché. Any kid who says ‘closure’ I flunk. They want closure, there’s their closure” (Aside -- Is it a statement to the reader as well?)
I have to report that this is what the cage of academe has come to. In some ways it is worse now than when Roth wrote the Human Stain. Some Apes wanted to know why the faculty didn't come to Coleman's defense. The answer is that the university is now an institution and political correctness is but one casualty of being "institutionalized" (or, fossilized). Sorry to say, but logic and reason no longer play a dominant role in university life. The faculty know full well that petty yet vicious squabbles result from the fact that there is so little to fight over (office space, travel support, tenure decisions, ...). No wonder Coleman quit. I can feel Roth's disdain for the institution.
Other than these observations, I was sympathetic to his take on American culture. It reminded me of a line from Yellow Birds, something like -- America has become one large shopping mall with a country attached. Roth can match that. "The ecstasy of sanctimony" is Roth's view of the Lewinsky fiasco. That sums it up for me. It's clear that Roth abhors cliches and banalities. Examples -- The traveling Vietnam War Memorial was a bit underwhelming. It is shrunken, made of aluminum, has tiny engravings, and is supported by wooden two by fours. That's not quite the same a the granite sunken monument I have seen in DC. Here is another -- Coleman Silk is "excommunicated by the saved, the elect, the ever-present evangelists of the mores of the moment." Lastly for me, but not for the book, here is a quote that summarizes his take on banalization of experience.
“Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows… How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows. 'Everyone knows' is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All the we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.” (Didn't Rumsfeld see the uncertainty along these lines? Roth is leagues ahead of Rumsfeld, but they saw eye to eye on this point.)
One final thought about the book. Few writers can paint a character as succinctly and thoughtfully as Roth. Here is his one sentence description of Faunia. It is one looooong sentence, but it does the trick.
“The kid, whose existence became a hallucination at seven, and a catastrophe at fourteen, and a disaster after that, whose vocation is to be neither a waitress nor a hooker nor a farmer nor a janitor, but forever the stepdaughter to a lascivious stepfather and the undefended offspring of a self-obsessed mother, the kid, who mistrusts everyone, sees the con in everyone and yet is protected against nothing, whose capacity to hold on unintimidated is enormous, and yet whose purchase on life is minute, misfortune's favorite embattled child, the kid to whom everything loathsome that can happen has happened and whose luck shows no sign of changing and yet who excites and arouses him like nobody since Steena, not the most but morally speaking the least repellant person he knows, the one to whom he feels drawn because of having been aimed for so long in the opposite direction, because of all he has missed by going in the opposite direction, and because the underlying feeling of rightness that controlled him formerly is exactly what is propelling him now, the unlikely intimate with whom he shares no less a spiritual than a physical union, who is anything but a plaything, upon whom he flings his body twice a week in order to sustain his animal nature, who is more to him like a comrade in arms than anyone else on earth.”
