SOURCE: Gardam, Jane. “Pursued by the Furies.” Spectator 284, no. 8967 (17 June 2000): 49-50.

In the following review, Gardam discusses the main thematic elements within The Human Stain.

‘What ish my nation?’ asks the drunken, disillusioned Macmorris in Henry V after Agincourt. ‘Ish a villain and a bastard and a knave and a rascal. Who talks of my nation?’

In his last two novels and now in this one [The Human Stain], Philip Roth has been examining his nation, in particular describing how an individual in the USA can be destroyed by the sweeping national mood of the moment. First we had the violence of the Sixties, then the MacCarthy years and now the puritanical hypocrisy surrounding the Clinton administration. ‘America's oldest communal passion’, he says, ‘is the ecstasy of sanctimony.’

The observer/narrator of the three novels is author Nathan Zuckerman who seems to be Roth in spirit but with...