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The thrill of gossip become literature hovers over "The Human Stain": There's no way Roth could have tackled this subject without thinking of Anatole Broyard, the late literary critic who passed as white for many years. But Coleman Silk is a singularly conceived and realized character, and his hidden racial past is a trap Roth has laid for his readers -- a temptation to fall into the judgmental mind-set, "so rich with contempt for every human problem you've never had to face," that is the book's primary target.

Coleman's light skin is what makes his deception possible, but what makes it necessary -- for him -- is his profound desire to be an individual. Following the wishes of the father "who had been making up Coleman's story for him," the young Coleman had left his home in East Orange, N.J., for Howard University, where he found himself in a velvet-lined version of the invisibility Ralph Ellison famously described:

The Human Stain By Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin, 361 pages Fiction Also This Week Spring Fiction Fever Salon celebrates a season of exceptional books with a weeklong series. By the critics and editors of Salon Books Salon recommends The pick of recent fiction, from the critics and editors of Salon Books.

He discovered at Howard that he was a Negro as well. A Howard Negro at that. Overnight the raw I was part of a we with all of the we's overbearing solidity, and he didn't want anything to do with it or with the next oppressive we that came along either. You finally leave home, the Ur of we, and you find another we? Another place that's just like that, the substitute for that? Growing up in East Orange, he was of course a Negro, very much of their small community of five thousand or so, but boxing, running, studying, at everything he did concentrating and succeeding ... he was, without thinking about it, everything else as well. He was Coleman, the greatest of the great pioneersof the I.

What, you can imagine Roth's critics asking, would a Jew know about this? A lot. The comedy of Roth's early work, which another set of detractors has long used to peg him as a self-loathing Jew, came from the tension between background and aspiration, the desire to propel oneself out of everything provincial and stultifying in one's upbringing. "The Human Stain" offers Roth's most ruthless (and least comic) example of this will to separate. In order to be who he wants to be, Coleman is willing to tell his widowed mother that he has decided to live as a white man, that he will never see her again and that she will never see her grandchildren, will never even know if she has any.

Roth's rendering of Coleman's resolve is a brilliant example of what can happen when a writer sets out to understand experience rather than to judge it:

Did he get, from his decision, the adventure he was after, or was the decision in itself the adventure? Was it the misleading that provided his pleasure, the carrying off of the stunt that he liked best, the traveling through life incognito, or had he simply been closing the door to a past, to people, to a whole race that he wanted nothing intimate or official to do with? Was it the social obstruction that he wished to sidestep? Was he merely being another American and, in the great frontier tradition, accepting the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness? Or was it more than that? Or was it less? How petty were his motives? How pathological? And suppose they were both -- what of it? And suppose they weren't -- what of that?

That Roth should pose those questions toward the end of the book, where most writers would begin summing up, is evidence of his determination that literature amplify rather than reduce. But he never lets us forget that the present is a distorting mirror in which Coleman's decision to be separate finds reflections he could never have anticipated. The biggest of these distortions, for Roth, is the one between the good intentions of midcentury liberalism and the blight that has been its outcome.

In the closing scenes, novelist Nathan Zuckerman -- who functions in this book, once again, as Roth's narrator and mouthpiece -- talks to Coleman's sister, Ernestine, the one family member who, through surreptitious phone calls on the occasions of births and deaths and marriages, has kept in touch with her brother. Ernestine is a schoolteacher who has remained in East Orange -- she still lives in the house she grew up in -- and felt the familiar galling paradox of becoming more empowered with rights while simultaneously seeing the middle- and working-class neighborhood she grew up in destroyed by the blinkered good intentions of urban renewal. If you grew up in the suburbs, as I did, listening to a parent who had grown up in the city talk about what it was like, you can hear in Ernestine's voice the unsentimental nostalgia of bitterness fighting it out with melancholy:

I used to be able to do all my Christmas shopping on Main Street. You know what we've got today? We've got a ShopRite. And we've got a Dunkin' Donuts. And there was a Domino's Pizza, but they closed. Now they've got another food place. And there's a cleaners. But you can't compare quality. It's not the same.

Yet that physical desecration seems puny next to the intellectual desecration she describes to Zuckerman:

Youngsters were coming to me the year I retired, telling me that for Black History Month they would only read a biography of a black by a black. What difference, I would ask them, if it's a black author or it's a white author? I'm impatient with Black History Month altogether. I liken having a Black History Month in February and concentrating study on that to milk that's just about to go sour. You can drink it, but it doesn't taste right.

Those words are something like a death knell for the liberalism Roth thought he knew. It's as if E.M. Forster's great dictum "Only connect," which had seemed so romantic and noble when young people rediscovered him in the '60s, had been replaced by a new generation of inner-city youth with "Only separate."

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