SOURCE: Webb, Igor. “Born Again.” Partisan Review 67, no. 4 (fall 2000): 648-52.

In the following review, Webb contends that Roth presents well-crafted prose and a complex portrayal of Nathan Zuckerman in The Human Stain.

Philip Roth's latest novel, The Human Stain, forms the third, and perhaps concluding, volume of his recent “historical” novels or chronicles (American Pastoral [1997] and I Married a Communist [1998]), while at the same time harking back to his great novella The Ghost Writer, published twenty years ago. All of these books are narrated by Nathan Zuckerman. In The Ghost Writer Zuckerman is a wide-eyed twenty-three-year-old writer, flush with his first success, on something of a pilgrimage to the New England backwoods (actually, the Berkshires) where in ascetic isolation his aesthetic father E. I. Lonoff has settled.

Now, in The Human Stain, Zuckerman has out-Lonoffed Lonoff. He has learned altogether too much about the writer's life and is...