Volume 47, Number 10 · June 15, 2000
A Child of the Age
By John Leonard
The Human Stain
by Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, 361 pp., $26.00
Like Portnoy in the Holy Land, Zuckerman in the Berkshires can't get it up. The problem isn't the state of Israel. The problem is absence of a prostate. All that worry in The Counterlife about quintuple bypass heart surgery turns out to have been beside the point. Cancer is the point. Philip Roth's autumnal novels are riddled with it. As if the rioting cells were Mickey Sabbaths, anarchist-provocateurs, the body itself is besieged, plundered, ridiculed, and desecrated. At least since American Pastoral (1997), Zuckerman has been impotent. In The Human Stain, he is also incontinent, with cotton pads in his plastic underpants. Why should Roth spare us the prurient details of our dying—a morphine drip, an IV pole—any more than he has ever spared us the baroque graffiti of our unobstructed id, the priapic troll and vagina dentata?
Review, 4314 words
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