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M is Currently Reading

M is currently reading

The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)

by Philip Roth

bookshelves: own, 2025, audiobooked, read-literary-in-quotes, re-read, currently-reading, favorites

Reading for the 4th time

read in September 2025

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M said: " Full disclosure: Coleman does not interest me that much. I understand he is the linchpin that holds the plot together, but so little of the enjoyment I get from this book that I’ve read again and again comes from his contributions. But then every for Full disclosure: Coleman does not interest me that much. I understand he is the linchpin that holds the plot together, but so little of the enjoyment I get from this book that I’ve read again and again comes from his contributions. But then every forty or so pages we get an excerpt like the following, and I’m sucked back in again to all that motivates me to write and read and take an interest in the arts as something more than the idle pleasures of video games, sports, sex, and leisure.

“As a result of surgery I had several years ago to remove my prostate-cancer surgery that, though successful, was not without the adverse aftereffects almost unavoidable in such operations because of nerve damage and internal scarring—I've been left incontinent, and so, the first thing I did when I got home from Coleman's was to dispose of the absorbent cotton pad that I wear night and day, slipped inside the crotch of my underwear the way a hot dog lies in a roll. Because of the heat that evening, and because I wasn't going out to a public place or a social gathering, I'd tried to get by with ordinary cotton briefs pulled on over the pad instead of the plastic ones, and the result was that the urine had seeped through to my khaki trousers. I discovered when I got home that the trousers were discolored at the front and that I smelled a little—the pads are treated, but there was, on this occasion, an odor. I'd been so engaged by Coleman and his story that I'd failed to monitor myself. All the while I was there, drinking a beer, dancing with him, attending to the clarity— the predictable rationality and descriptive clarity—with which he worked to make less unsettling to himself this turn that life had taken, I hadn't gone off to check myself, as ordinarily I do during my waking hours, and so, what from time to time now happens to me happened that night. No, a mishap like this one doesn't throw me as much as it used to when, in the months after the surgery, I was first experimenting with the ways of handling the problem—and when, of course, I was habituated to being a free and easy, dry and odorless adult possessing an adult's mastery of the body's elementary functions, someone who for some sixty years had gone about his everyday business unworried about the status of his underclothes. Yet I do suffer at least a pang of distress when I have to deal with something messier than the ordinary inconvenience that is now a part of my life, and I still despair to think that the contingency that virtually defines the infant state will never be alleviated.

I was also left impotent by the surgery. The drug therapy that was practically brand—new in the summer of 1998 and that had already, in its short time on the market, proved to be something like a miraculous elixir, restoring functional potency to many otherwise healthy, elderly men like Coleman, was of no use to me because of the extensive nerve damage done by the operation. For conditions like mine Viagra could do nothing, though even had it proved helpful, I don't believe I would have taken it.

I want to make clear that it wasn't impotence that led me into a reclusive existence. To the contrary. I'd already been living and writing for some eighteen months in my two-room cabin up here in the Berkshires when, following a routine physical exam, I received a preliminary diagnosis of prostate cancer and, a month later, after the follow-up tests, went to Boston for the prostatectomy. My point is that by moving here I had altered deliberately my relationship to the sexual caterwaul, and not because the exhortations or, for that matter, my erections had been effectively weakened by time, but because I couldn't meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience—or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism—to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings. As a result, I was able to lessen a little my postoperative shock at the prospect of permanent impotence by remembering that all the surgery had done was to make me hold to a renunciation to which I had already voluntarily submitted. The operation did no more than to enforce with finality a decision I'd come to on my own, under the pressure of a lifelong experience of entanglements but in a time of full, vigorous, and restless potency, when the venturesome masculine mania to repeat the act—repeat it and repeat it and repeat it—remained undeterred by physiological problems.

It wasn't until Coleman told me about himself and his Voluptas that all the comforting delusions about the serenity achieved through enlightened resignation vanished, and I completely lost my equilibrium. Well into the morning I lay awake, powerless as a lunatic to control my thinking, hypnotized by the other couple and comparing them to my own washed-out state. I lay awake not even trying to prevent myself from mentally reconstructing the "transgressive audacity" Coleman was refusing to relinquish. And my having danced around like a harmless eunuch with this still vital, potent participant in the frenzy struck me now as anything but charming self-satire.

How can one say, "No, this isn't a part of life," since it always is? The contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are.”

UPDATE: ...more "

progress:

(page 68 of 361)
— 5 hours, 14 min ago

5 hours, 14 min ago · see review

M is currently reading

The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

bookshelves: own, currently-reading

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progress:

(page 205 of 737)
— Sep 21, 2026 01:09PM

Aug 11, 2026 08:16PM

M is currently reading

Stranger in a Strange Land

by Robert A. Heinlein

bookshelves: currently-reading

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progress:

(50%)
"Jubil lectures everyone else so paternally, is only ever proven right by other characters to such a point that his conversations seem more so an extended explanation of events than legitimate back and forth dialogue, and is called boss by all his little harem who act so deferentially and are so revering of him that it’s hard to argue with those who call this book misogynistic. For me, it’s also getting annoying." — Sep 08, 2026 12:05PM

Aug 10, 2026 04:41PM

See all 7 books that M is reading…

M’s Quotes

“Being in love, they had agreed in bed one night, meant being in a state of interpretive hysteria. Every detail was significant, polysemous, charged. That was why lovers had to be especially careful with one another, so as not to arouse suspicions. No literary critic in the world, B had claimed, was more vigilant than a suspicious lover.”
― Bennett Sims, White Dialogues

1 likes

“So the problem with any dictatorship,” I said, following Simone’s argument, “is never really the dictator himself but the people who agree with him.” “Exactly,” Simone said. “There could potentially be a good dictatorship—I don’t see why the public could only be sheep for horrible leaders—but the problem is that good people never want to be dictators.” “That’s a bummer,” I said.”
― Camille Bordas, How to Behave in a Crowd

7 likes

“were.”
― Louis Sachar, Sideways Stories from Wayside School

5 likes

“Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it’s less vigorous, but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness, so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected with laughter.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

4 likes

“It is my destiny to live forever, though my survival will bring final destruction to the human race. However, it is possible for me to be killed, and whether I live or die makes no great difference. In truth, death may be the only absolute freedom there is.”
― Hideaki Anno, End of Evangelion

3 likes

More of M’s quotes…