The Human Stain

There's a lot that I appreciated in Philip Roth's The Human Stain. Moments of wonderfully competent and masterful writing, and the critique of cultural self-righteousness. And, the story was fairly interesting. I also could appreciate the academic setting and that aspect of the plot.

However, I wasn't particularly grabbed or moved by the novel. I felt like I was just kind of reading it to read it (I was reading it on plane rides). It just didn't captivate me, in spite of it's considerable strengths. Also, I thought two characters, Delphine Roux and Les Farley, were badly drawn. More like caricatures or writing exercises, very two dimensional.