SOURCE: Leonard, John. “A Child of the Age.” New York Review of Books 47, no. 10 (15 June 2000): 6-9.

In the following review, Leonard views character Nathan Zuckerman as a reflection of Roth and traces Zuckerman's development throughout The Human Stain.

1.

Like Portnoy in the Holy Land, Zuckerman in the Berkshires can't get it up [in The Human Stain]. 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...