ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses Roth’s novel as a remarkably even-handed dissection of the heated debates over a complex set of issues labelled as “identity politics,” “political correctness” and “cancel culture” but also over questions of historical commemoration. The conflicts over these issues have, along mostly congruent fault lines, coalesced into an aggregate conflict. In contrast to a widespread reading of The Human Stain as an ultimately conservative critique of “political correctness” in the early 2000s and, implicitly, of its alleged evolution into what has been described as 2020s “cancel culture,” the chapter argues that Roth’s critique is far more balanced with regard to these issues. Where the novel seems problematically dated, from a post-#MeToo point of view, is in its apparent blindness to questions of status and power differences in sexual relationships. However, in its representation of how originally leftist arguments about the relativity of knowledge lend themselves to appropriation by the right – the “post-truth” debate, in shorthand – it is remarkably prescient in pointing to far more recent debates. Here, too, attention to literary form and to questions of perspective, rather than being an escapist exercise in dodging central thematic issues, is crucial to understanding how the novel illuminates the debate.
