美國知名大學教授柯曼席爾克的一生，他由於厭惡自己白人的外表下卻有著黑人的血統，對外自稱是猶太人以掩飾自己的身分。多年勤奮的工作，在教育界爭的一席之地，但是在他老年遇到了致命吸引力，與相差30歲的已婚少婦發展出一段「老少配」的地下不倫之戀，造成流言四起。兩人愛得越深，雙方內在的秘密也漸漸的被掀開，讓兩人無法招架而選擇遠離人群、遺世獨居，最後還是逃不過她那充滿忌妒丈夫的計畫殺害。

一個人在一生中做過了什麼，都會在世上留下某種痕跡，無論是出於憤怒、慾望、野心或意外，這個傷痕或污點將永遠難以磨滅．對故事男主角柯曼來說，他的人性污點就是他這一生所隱藏的秘密，作者菲利普羅斯寫這部小說的目的是，徹底顛覆美國社會一向崇尚的那種白手起家、自力更生的精神，他讓主人翁在年輕時就決定捏造自己的過去和背景，把自己重新塑造成另一個人，好讓自己在這社會出人頭地，但是最後他也付出慘痛代價。

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'.