The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Philip Roth · a novel in five parts · Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2000 · scored on Roth’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Tragic social novel in a witness’s voice; the novel of passing, the campus satire and the novel of a national scandal in one frame
Mythos
Oedipus, ruined by the secret of his own origin, and a city purified by banishing a man; the quarrel over a captive girl that opens the Iliad; the crow that cannot live with crows; the self-made American man, built to his tragic end
Phase
The summer of 1998 to the following winter, and a past running back through East Orange in the 1940s, the Navy and a long career at Athena College
Presentation
Fiction; a novel in five parts under an epigraph from Sophocles, narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, who imagines from within the minds of persons he could not have known
Register
The long argumentative sentence, built in qualifications and rising to its point, beside a furious professor’s voice, a wrecked veteran’s interior speech and Ernestine’s measured talk
Scale
One man’s life across fifty years, a family of three generations, a small town and its college, against a nation’s year of scandal
Governing Proposition
In the summer of a president’s impeachment, Coleman Silk, a professor at Athena College who teaches the Iliad, is driven from his post for a word he used of two students who never came to class, and takes up with Faunia Farley, a cleaner at the college; Nathan Zuckerman, telling the story after his death, learns that he was born a Black man in East Orange, New Jersey, and lived fifty years as a Jew. The wager of the novel is that the American promise of self-making, taken literally, is paid for by those the self-made man leaves, and that a community’s wish to be clean of impurity is itself the cruelty.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Coleman Silk teaches at Athena College, a small college, and two students on his roll have never come to class. He asks whether they exist or are “spooks”. He means ghosts. The students are Black, the word is heard as a slur, and the college, which he has served for many years, turns on him. He is charged with racism, and he leaves his post in fury. Everything the book does turns on that word: a man destroyed for a racism he could not have meant, by an institution that does not know what he is.
It is the summer of 1998, the summer of the Clinton impeachment, and the nation is absorbed in a president’s sexual conduct. The narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, sets Coleman’s ruin inside that summer, and argues at length with what he sees as a persecuting spirit abroad in the land, a hunger for purity that finds its occasions everywhere. Coleman takes up with Faunia Farley, a woman who cleans at the college and works on a dairy farm, and who says she cannot read. An anonymous note reaches him about her. The town’s virtue has found a second occasion.
Zuckerman tells the story in the first person, and for long passages he enters, in a close third person, minds he could not have known: Coleman’s, Faunia’s, Les Farley’s, Delphine Roux’s. He says so. The book was published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, in 2000, the third book of the trilogy begun with American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), and it stands as a book of its own. Over it stands an epigraph from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, on the rite by which a city purifies itself, and the banishing of a man.
Movement II
The secret is held back until the second part. Coleman Silk was born in East Orange, New Jersey, into a Black family, light-skinned enough to be taken for white. The reader who has judged him by the evidence of the first part, as Athena did, now learns what that evidence left out; every judgment made before is turned over. The withholding is the form’s first knowledge. We convicted him wrongly too, of a racism he could not have meant and from a position we did not know he held.
As a boy in the 1940s he boxes. His coach tells him not to mention that he is coloured, and he wins the fight. The lesson is small and exact: a fact about himself that no one has asked for can be left unsaid, and the world will take him as it finds him. The boxing chapters are among the most exact in the book, and in them the plan of a life is laid down by a boy who has found out that he can be weighed on his performance alone.
He enlists in the Navy as white. From there he goes on to make a life as a Jew, and lives it for fifty years: a career at Athena, a marriage, children. America had promised him that he might make himself, and he took the promise literally. The novel of passing was an old American form, from James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen to Faulkner’s Joe Christmas. Roth’s turn is the mask Coleman chooses: he passes as a Jew, so that the Jewish-American life Roth had written for forty years appears as one identity among those a man may put on.
Movement III
Coleman brings Steena Paulsson, a white girl he loves, home to the Silk family table in East Orange. The family receives her. She sees what the house is, and afterward she leaves him. The scene reaches its height by a small road: a meal, a girl, a parting, and in it the young man’s understanding that the life he wants cannot hold the people he comes from. Nothing is argued. The decision the boxing taught is made a second time.
Then he goes to his mother and tells her he is leaving her. He will marry white and live as white, and she will never see her grandchildren. She understands what he means. The scene is the book’s emotional summit, and it is given without commentary: a son renouncing his mother so that he may be what he chooses, and a mother who sees the whole of it. The decision is made a third time, and now its price is named in a person.
His brother Walter bars him from the house. The book has shown who pays for a freedom taken literally: not the man who takes it but those he leaves, the mother and the brother, and the grandchildren who will not know them. It gives that cost in full. Coleman’s own children, and their anger at him in the present, belong to the same account. The man who escaped the we of race will be brought down, fifty years later, by the we of virtue.
Movement IV
Faunia Farley keeps company with a crow, a bird raised by people that cannot live with crows. It is the book’s emblem of the one who has left the flock, and it belongs to Coleman as much as to her. Faunia has lost her children. She dances in Coleman’s bedroom, and the old man’s late passion is given a strange tenderness; so, earlier, is a night when he and Zuckerman dance together to the radio. After her death a diary is found, and it unsettles the old man’s version of her: whether she could not read, or chose to seem so, the book leaves open.
Les Farley is a Vietnam veteran whose war has not ended, a mind wrecked by it and entered by the narrator from within. His breakdown in a Chinese restaurant is a set piece of terror. Delphine Roux, of the college, is entered from within too, and given a logic of her own; she is also drawn with less patience than anyone else in the book, a satirical type, and the passages in her mind are where the novel’s argument outruns its scene.
Coleman and Faunia die together in a car crash. Whether the crash was murder the book never proves. Coleman teaches the opening of the Iliad, the quarrel of two men over a captive girl, as the founding scene of the West, and in his own life he has repeated it. Around these lives the book sets its long arias on the impeachment and the persecuting spirit of the year, the argument of a narrator with his age; they are the book’s frame, and at moments they run past what the frame needs.
Movement V
At the funeral Zuckerman meets Ernestine, from the family Coleman left, and from her measured talk he learns what Coleman never told him: where he was born, and what he gave up. The novel’s narrator has been imagining a man from outside all along, and here the record arrives late, from the family that was left. The truest telling of a man’s life is still an invention, and the book does not hide that its own telling is one.
Then the close. In winter Zuckerman goes out to a frozen lake in the Berkshires and finds Les Farley fishing through the ice, an auger beside him. They talk. Around them the field is white, and in it one small dark figure; the menace is never spoken, and the book ends there, with the narrator face to face with what may have killed his friend. The stain is in everyone, and every effort to be clean of it, by a man, a college or a nation, ends in cruelty: the boy told not to mention his colour and the veteran drilling the ice obey one law.
The book won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2001 and was filmed by Robert Benton in 2003. In 2012 Roth said in an open letter that its occasion was an incident involving his friend Melvin Tumin at Princeton, not the life of Anatole Broyard. Since Roth’s death in 2018 it has become the novel to which arguments about cancellation and the campus are referred. Its impeachment has dated and already needs annotation; the persecuting spirit it describes has not.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is required at every joint. The word “spooks” must come first, because the book turns on a man destroyed for a racism he could not have meant, by a college that does not know what he is. The secret must be withheld until the second part, so that the reader convicts him wrongly too. The boxing, Steena Paulsson and the visit to his mother must all stand, since they are one decision seen three times, and the close on the ice must stand, since it puts the narrator face to face with what killed him. What could go is the surplus around that spine: the long arias on the impeachment and the persecuting spirit of 1998, the department satire around Delphine Roux, and stretches of Les Farley’s interior that restate his war after it has been shown. Perhaps a tenth of the book is permitted rather than compelled, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds. America promises a man that he may make himself, and Coleman Silk takes the promise literally: a light-skinned Black boy from East Orange enlists in the Navy as white and lives fifty years as a Jew. The book shows who pays for that freedom: his mother, told that she will never see her grandchildren, and his brother Walter, who bars him from the house. And it shows that the community which destroys him does so for a purity it cannot sustain, so that the man who escaped the we of race is brought down by the we of virtue. The title names the second finding: impurity is the human condition, and the wish to cleanse it is the cruelty. Held below the higher reaches because the case against the age’s sanctimony is argued in the narrator’s voice more than found in the action, and Delphine Roux is drawn to lose it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Height comes often, and its best register is the dreadful. The scene in which Coleman tells his mother he is leaving her, and she understands what he means, is the book’s emotional summit, and it is given without commentary. Steena at the Silk family table, and her leaving afterward, reaches the same height by a smaller road. Les Farley’s breakdown in a Chinese restaurant is a set piece of terror. Faunia dancing in Coleman’s bedroom, and two men dancing to the radio early in the book, reach a strange late tenderness. The close is the height: Zuckerman on the frozen lake with Les and his auger, the white field around one small dark figure, a menace never spoken. Held off the top because the arias on the national scandal flatten the middle, and the heights are spaced among long stretches of argument.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing. The Sophoclean frame is structural: a man of authority whose ruin comes from the secret of his own origin, which he alone knows and the city does not, under an epigraph from Oedipus the King on the rite of purification and the banishing of a man. The opening of the Iliad, which Coleman teaches, is set in the action: a quarrel between two men over a captive girl, which he reads as the founding scene of the West and repeats in his own life with Faunia. Faunia’s crow, raised by people and unable to live with crows, is the book’s emblem of the one who has left the flock. Over it stands the American myth of the self-made man, Gatsby’s, built here to its tragic end. Held a step below the top because the names and the classical apparatus are sometimes pointed to by the narrator rather than left to work.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the American novel of passing, from James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Nella Larsen’s Passing to Faulkner’s Joe Christmas; the campus satire; and Roth’s own manner, the Zuckerman frame and the long argumentative period. The turn is in the choice of mask: a Black man who passes not as a white man in general but as a Jew, so that the Jewish-American novel Roth had written for forty years is shown to be one of the identities a man may put on. That was a real stake, for a writer charged all his life over his treatment of his own people, to write a Black life from inside and make its secret the centre. Held below the gate because the instrument is the one Roth had already made in American Pastoral, the witness who imagines another man’s life, and the swerve lies in the matter.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The narrator imagines Coleman’s life from outside and says so, and the form enacts the book’s subject: a man’s identity is a story told by others, and the truest telling is still an invention. The withholding of the secret until the second part puts the reader inside the college’s error: we judge Coleman on the evidence offered, as Athena does, and are then shown what we did not know. The movement into the minds of Les Farley and Delphine Roux gives each persecutor a logic from within. The five parts close on a funeral and a frozen lake, the shape of a tragedy. Held off the top because much of the novel is a container for argument, and the passages in Delphine’s mind and the impeachment arias could be cut or moved without the form losing its knowledge.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and twenty-six years supply some. The questions stay open: whether the crash that kills Coleman and Faunia was murder, which the book never proves; how far Zuckerman’s reconstruction is to be trusted, since he invents what he could not have known; whether Faunia’s illiteracy is real or a disguise, as the diary found after her death suggests; whether Coleman’s passing is a heroism of self-invention or a betrayal, and whether the book’s sympathy lies with him or with his mother. It has been read in the long argument over racial passing and in the later argument over campus purges, where it is cited more now than when it appeared. Held below the higher reaches because part of its yield is the argument it states, which a return finds where it left it, and because two and a half decades are a short test.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is American fiction at the turn of the century. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book joined the social novel of race to the novel of the academy and to the political scandal of its year, and brought a writer known for his self-regard to the full public novel, in which America’s history of race is the hidden ground of a Jewish-American life. It reorganised what Roth’s own novel could hold more than what the novel could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the PEN/Faulkner Award of 2001; Robert Benton’s film of 2003; translation and teaching; and, since Roth’s death in 2018, its standing as the novel to which arguments about cancellation and the campus are referred. It redirected a conversation more than a form, and few novelists took up its means.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Survival is shown over twenty-six years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout, in English and in translation. Presence is continuous and wide: the book is taught, read in the debates it anticipated, and more cited now than at its publication. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment, the summer of the Clinton impeachment, which the narrator treats at length and which already needs annotation; but the book has outlived the scandal, and is read for the persecuting spirit, not for the president. Charged: the dated surface of the impeachment arias, and a presence that owes part of itself to its author’s standing. Twenty-six years demonstrate far less than the centuries behind the summit, and the figure is the usual one for its span.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on Roth’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the long argumentative sentence, built in qualifications and rising to its point, and of voice: the narrator’s, Coleman’s furious one, Les Farley’s interior speech, a mind wrecked by a war, and Ernestine’s measured talk at the funeral. The boxing chapters are exact. The structure is managed with skill, the secret placed where it turns the book and the close held at the right length. Three charges hold it below the top: the arias on the impeachment run on, the voice’s habits of repetition and exclamation growing loud; Delphine Roux is a satirical type drawn with less patience than anyone else in the book; and the narrator’s reflections sometimes do the work the scene has already done.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law governs: the stain is in everyone, and every effort to be clean of it, by a man, a college or a nation, ends in cruelty. Take the two most distant elements, a boy boxing in a gymnasium in the 1940s, told not to mention that he is coloured, and a Vietnam veteran on a frozen lake in the Berkshires drilling a hole for fish. They obey the same law: each is a man the American order made and then disowned, and each carries what was done to him into what he does. Coleman’s secret, the president’s scandal, Faunia’s dead children and Delphine’s ambition sit under one physics, and the range is wide, from boxing to the Iliad. Charged: the satire of the college runs on a looser law of caricature than the tragedy of the Silk family, and the plot leans once or twice on coincidence.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Many orders, held in one structure. Race and its history in America, from East Orange in the 1940s to the college of 1998. The family: the Silks, a mother renounced, a brother’s ban, Coleman’s own children and their anger. Class, in Faunia’s labour on a dairy farm and as a cleaner at the college, and in Les Farley’s poverty. War, in Les and in the Navy of the 1940s. The academy and its politics. The state, in the impeachment and in the veterans’ hospital. Sexuality and age, in Coleman’s late passion. Consciousness, in five minds entered from within. The natural order, in the cows, the crow and the lake. They are integrated, not listed: each order is a place where a person is made pure or impure. Held below the top because the sacred is thin and the whole is seen from one small town.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment at 8.7, then The Archetypal Deep and The Made at 8.6. A disclosure that holds, that the American promise of self-making, taken literally, is paid for by those the self-made man leaves, and that the wish to be clean is the cruelty; a Sophoclean structure that bears weight, a hero ruined by the secret of his origin and a reader made to judge before knowing it, with the Iliad’s quarrel set in the action; and a command of the long argumentative sentence and of voices held apart, from Coleman’s fury to Les Farley’s wrecked interior and Ernestine’s measured talk.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.0, held by surplus around a spine that is required at every joint: the impeachment arias, the department satire around Delphine Roux and stretches of Les Farley’s interior, perhaps a tenth of the book. Next above it, The Swerve at 8.1: a real stake in the choice of mask, carried by the witness narrator Roth had already made, so that the turn lies in the matter; then The Bottomless Well at 8.2.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.6, The Living Form at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: The Unconcealment at 8.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5 and The Imperishable meets it exactly, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 falls two tenths short and The Swerve at 8.1 four tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.4, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, in 2000: the third book of the trilogy begun with American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), scored as its own book and not as a part of that trilogy. It is in copyright and no text of it was in hand: nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Roth’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the one word on which the book turns. The epigraph from Sophocles is paraphrased. Roth’s open letter of 2012 and Robert Benton’s film of 2003 are not part of the work and bear on its record and reach only. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length of the first edition, the titles of the five parts, the prizes given the book abroad, the editions in which it has been collected, and some particulars of the Silk family’s history, are not given. Citations are by part and episode.