by PhilipRoth (Author)
It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town an ageing classics professor, Coleman Silk is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real ruth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unravelled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, 'magnificently' interwoven with 'the larger public history of modern America'.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 384
Edition: 1
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 05 Apr 2001
ISBN 10: 0099282194
ISBN 13: 9780099282198
Book Overview: 'The work of a genius at full throttle' Sunday Telegraph
Prizes: Winner of WH Smith Literary Prize 2001 and WH Smith Annual Literary Award 2001. Shortlisted for Irish Times Literary Prize,International Fiction 2001.