Coleman Silk, a classics professor, is destroyed by two words taken out of context. Roth published this in 2000, during the Clinton scandal, but the novel goes deeper than its moment. Silk's secret (he is a light-skinned Black man who has passed as Jewish his entire career) turns a campus satire into a tragedy about race, reinvention, and the American self. The third and best of Roth's American Trilogy.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.