The Human Stain - Philip Roth

I have been known to argue that Roth is the world's greatest living writer. this is hardly an idiosyncratic assertion, but The Human Stain only partially supports this theory.

On his most familiar ground - academia, the individual in history, the ironies of America, how we define ourselves - he is brilliant and savagely ironic. The technique of gradual revelation layered through a narrative lasagne of points of view allows the story to unfold with great power and page-turning excitement. It's also very funny - one passage about Clinton's mistake with Lewinsky had me making embarrassing snorting noises on the train.

The clunkiness that limits this to the second tier of Roth's oeuvre lies in his depiction of his less highbrow characters - a cleaning lady and her Vietnam vet ex. I wasn't convinced by either of these important characters, but don't let that put you off. This is a novel that implicitly compares itself with Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Dos Passos' U.S.A. and it doesn't come off badly at all.