The Guardian has a series in which, ‘[a]s a service to reading groups, John Mullan analyses a notable novel available in paperback’. This month he’ll be discussing Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. I don’t belong to a reading group, but it’s a fortuitous choice from my point of view, since I’ve recently read the novel, was greatly impressed by it and am looking forward to seeing the movie, which opens soon. The book has a truly remarkable plot development that it’s obviously best not to know before you read it, and I’m not therefore going to say any more about this other than to suggest that, if you want to do the both, try to read the novel and then see the movie rather than the other way round. But not having read Philip Roth for many years, since I tried Portnoy’s Complaint and gave up on about page 50, I was struck by the sweep of his prose and the acuity of his insight into the human drama – our complexity, troubles, weaknesses and the rest.
Today, Mullan homes in on an oddity, if it really is one, that I also noticed. Roth tells the story of the central protagonist (Coleman Silk) through the voice of a narrator who is also present in, and so contemporary with, the story. However, this man (Nathan Zuckerman) narrates things which he cannot possibly know about through direct experience, research or anything else. What takes place, in fact, is a kind of backwards and forwards slide between this notional narrator’s voice and the voice of the all-seeing author. As Mullan puts it:
So the frame that Roth has made for himself is sometimes a convenience to be forgotten. This is why it is important that Nathan is so clearly Roth’s representative. The very flouting of the framing convention catches the author’s own passionate, lucid exercise of his imagination.
Does it matter that the convention of Nathan as the narrator requires, as Mullan says, ‘peculiar suspensions of disbelief’? Search me. I’m not the literary theorist. I just thought, ‘Oh, well’, and read on.
(Amended at 8.20 PM.)