User:JerryFriedman/Stain

Coleman Silk is a former professor and dean of the faculty at Athena College, a fictional institution in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where he still lives. The story is narrated by Roth's recurring character Nathan Zuckerman, a writer and a neighbor of Silk.

In 1996, two years before the main action of the novel, Silk is accused of racism by two African-American students after he wonders aloud whether the reason they've missed all his classes so far is that they're "spooks". Though Silk has no idea they're black, they and others at the college see the term as a racial epithet. When the uproar is about to die down, in Silk's view, he resigns. Soon afterward, his wife, Iris, dies of a stroke that Silk feels is caused by the stress of defending him.

In the summer of 1998, just after Iris dies, the 71-year-old Silk approaches Zuckerman and asks him to write a book on the incident. Ranting about it, Silk blames the widespread condemnation of him on, among other things, anti-semitism. Zuckerman is uninterested, but the two begin a brief friendship and Silk tells him his life story. Zuckerman is surprised to learn that Silk is in a relationship with Faunia Farley, a 34-year-old woman who works as a janitor at the college and who everyone including Silk believes (falsely, as it turns out) is illiterate. .

Zuckerman's version of the story starts when Coleman Silk is a light-skinned black boy in East Orange, New Jersey. Coleman becomes a straight-A student and, in defiance of his father, a quick and clever boxer. A boxing coach suggests that he pass as a Jew. During World War II he drops out of Howard University and joins the Navy, listing his race as white.

After the war he studies at New York University and lives in Greenwich Village. When he introduces a white girlfriend to his family and they realize he's "passing", his brother cuts him off from the family. Silk marries Iris, a non-religious Jewish woman, and has four children. His wife and children are unaware of his ancestry; he invents a Jewish background and tells them he's unable to get in touch with his few living relatives.

A successful academic career in classics leads to his position of dean, where he raises the faculty's standards by forcing out less academically accomplished professors. Decades later, he returns to teaching and is accused of racism as described above.

Sometime after his approach to Zuckerman, Silk loses most contact with the people other than Faunia who he's on good terms with, including his children and Zuckerman. In November, Silk and Faunia Farley are killed in a car accident, which Zuckerman suspects was caused by Farley's jealous and abusive ex-husband Lester Farley, a Vietnam War veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. At Silk's funeral, his sister Ernestine reveals his secret to Zuckerman. The novel ends with an encounter between Les Farley and Zuckerman, who is en route to New Jersey to have dinner with the Silk family.

Especially in the second half of the novel, there are scenes detailing the thoughts and feelings of other characters, notably Faunia, Les Farley, and Delphine Roux, Silk's main antagonist at Athena. Zuckerman gives his sources for some conversations he wasn't present at, but he also says, "I imagine. I am forced to imagine. [...] It is my job. It's now all I do."